NBC’s Sunday Night Football Drops PFF Rankings in Season Opener, Drawing Praise from J.J. Watt

NBC’s Sunday Night Football quietly made a notable change to its broadcast presentation during the 2026 NFL season opener between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots, and the adjustment quickly caught the attention of one of Pro Football Focus’s most prominent critics.

During the game’s traditional player introductions — in which athletes typically shout out their college, high school, or hometown — the broadcast has long supplemented the spots with PFF position rankings intended to contextualize each player’s standing among his peers. This time, those rankings were nowhere to be found, replaced instead by each player’s hometown.

The change drew a swift response from J.J. Watt, the former defensive star who now serves as CBS’s lead NFL analyst. Watt, who has repeatedly clashed with PFF over its grading methodology, celebrated the removal on social media, calling it “a fantastic development.”

Watt has been blunt about his objections in the past. Speaking on The Pat McAfee Show in October 2025, he argued that PFF’s positional rankings — displayed on nationally televised broadcasts as statements of fact, such as a player ranked 91st out of 97 at his position — were “a completely made-up number,” and identified the grading system as the company’s biggest flaw.

The timing of the broadcast switch may be tied to broader changes at PFF itself. Cris Collinsworth, the longtime NBC analyst who became PFF’s majority owner in 2014, sold the company’s enterprise data business to Teamworks earlier this year in a deal reportedly valued at $100 million. The transaction included layoffs across PFF’s content team, though Collinsworth retained the platform’s public-facing elements, and the company continues to publish grades and rankings.

NBC has not explained why Sunday Night Football discontinued the on-air rankings, and it remains unconfirmed whether the Teamworks deal played a role. PFF is a private company, but the broadcast’s parent network sits under Comcast (CMCSA), whose shares closed at $25.19, up 2.17% on the day, with a market capitalization of roughly $92.5 billion.

Whatever prompted the decision, the removal spares Watt and like-minded viewers from seeing PFF grades presented alongside player introductions on football’s biggest weekly stage.

Source: original release

What to watch

• Whether NBC keeps the new hometown-based introductions for the remainder of the Sunday Night Football season.
• Any official comment from NBC or PFF on the reasons behind the change.
• Further integration changes at PFF following the Teamworks enterprise data sale.
• Comcast’s next quarterly earnings report for updates on NBC’s sports broadcasting strategy.