Former Ohio State Players Feature Prominently in the Pro Football Focus Top 50 Players for 2017

By Johnny Ginter on June 11, 2017 at 9:20 pm
Former Ohio State defensive end Joey Bosa
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Pro Football Focus has emerged as one of the best NFL analysis sites out there, using advanced statistical review to evaluate and grade players based on a whole variety of possible metrics, but especially how that individual player performs relative to others at their own position.

Unsurprisingly, three recent Ohio State players made some noise in their rankings of the best for this coming year, with two of them, Ezekiel Elliott and Joey Bosa, ranking in the top 50 overall. Mike Thomas is considered to be the second best player on the Saints, but the surprise here might be Bosa, who PFF has tabbed as the 13th best player in the entire NFL (and this after missing a huge chunk of the start of the season):

Bosa was utterly dominant in two seasons of PFF college grading, so nobody was less surprised than we were when he hit the ground running in the NFL in exactly the same way. No player has amassed more total pressures than the 59 Bosa collected over his first 12 games in the league since PFF has been tracking it (2006 onwards). Bosa played both defensive end and outside linebacker for the Chargers, on both the left and right side of the defense, and was a one-man wrecking machine, notching a grade of 89.7 despite missing the first four games of the season. Bosa is already one of the league’s most dominant defenders.

That's high praise, and Bosa is the highest-ranked rookie on their list by far. Zeke is no slouch either, breaking into the top 50 at number 45 after a monster rookie year that ranks among one of the best of all time. Here's what PFF had to say about him:

The first rookie in the countdown, Elliott hit the ground running (literally and figuratively) in his first NFL season, aided by one of the game’s best blocking units. Elliott was the league’s rushing champion at the first time of asking, gaining 1,631 yards, more than 300 more than any other back, and generating 938 of those yards after first contact. Elliott’s 2.9 yards per carry after contact average was the same as Doug Martin managed to average total over the season.

It's important to note that PFF is much more statistically driven than a lot of the other analyses that you'll find via ESPN or Fox Sports or so on; Joey Bosa can achieve a such a high ranking not just through sacks, but how he performs situationally against certain players and offenses.

In any event, it's clear that the Ohio State rookies of 2016 made a huge impact both in terms of their growing fanbases, but also their value to the teams that they play on, and it'll be fascinating to see if that trend continues.

Check out the entire list here, and see how your favorite team fared in their rankings.

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