The PFF Scouting Assistant is designed to make scouting NFL draft prospects an easy process for any NFL fan. It enables you to create your own rankings, using your own grading criteria.
The sortable players list gives you a starting point to determine which draft prospects you want to spend time evaluating. The tool includes the vast PFF college football database to help you in your scouting process. Additionally, it gives you a place to keep track of your work and can serve as your scouting hub.
THE PROCESS
Let’s go step by step.
The first thing we see at the top of the screen is the dropdown menu that says “all players,” where we can create a big board of all players or select one of the 32 teams and create a team-specific big board.
Next are options to export a CSV of your big board or to export an image of your big board, and then a full-screen or minimize size selector that you can use later.
Think of the “My Big Board” area, which is currently empty, as your canvas and the 2026 NFL Draft prospects database/search area as your paints.
In the search bar, you can find players by name, school or position. There are dropdowns to search for prospects based on their school and one to search for prospects based on their position.
You can sort your players list by PFF Rank, PFF Grade and PFF WAA. I choose to primarily keep it on PFF Rank when building my board, but I sorted by PFF Grade at times when looking for players who stand out.
Decide if you want to start at the top and build out your own top 25-50 players or if you want to build your board by scouting a position group at a time.
This is a choose-your-own-adventure tool.
For this series of articles, I am going to focus on one position at a time, starting with the cornerbacks, to take full advantage of the “scouting mode” feature.
Scouting mode allows you to build and use your own grading system.
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Slide the “PFF Scouting Mode” toggle to the “on” position.
Now you can use scouting mode to create your own position-specific grading system with as few as five categories or as many as 15.
The most important function of the scouting assistant is the ability to create a customizable grading system that puts full control of the evaluation process in your hands.
You can use autofill to automatically give you grading categories, or you can create custom categories.
Hitting the autofill position button for cornerbacks provides the following five categories to evaluate cornerbacks:
- Man Coverage Skills
- Zone Awareness/IQ
- Ball Skills
- Speed & Recovery
- Press Technique
This is a great foundation to begin your positional grading of prospects, but there's room to add more.
We have seen over the past two seasons the importance of cornerbacks who can tackle and play the run, so I’m going to add a category for “Run Support/Tackling.” If positional versatility is important to you, then maybe you can add a grade category for “Versatility.” Maybe you want to add a grading category for “Size” or “Athleticism”. This could also help if you are scouting for a particular team with size and speed thresholds (provided you have an assumption of what they are).
After you’ve decided on your categories, you need to assign weights based on importance. The categories are initially weighted the same, but you can vary them based on what is important to you in a cornerback. Perhaps you think that man coverage ability is the most important trait for a cornerback and deserves to be 30% of the grade instead of 20%.
Establish your grading system (categories and weight) before you begin your analysis of the individual players.
Once you’ve finished, hit the “Save Configuration” button.
SCOUTING A CORNERBACK
Return to the “2026 NFL Draft prospects” area, click on the “Position” dropdown menu and select “CB” to sort the cornerbacks from the master player list.
Clicking on the analysis dropdown in a player card will give you PFF lead draft analyst Trevor Sikkema’s player write-up, and clicking on the player profile button/player's name provides a ton of production data, such as PFF overall grade, PFF coverage grade, PFF run-defense grade, highest-graded games and lowest-graded games. Also included are statistics such as solo tackles, interceptions, total pressures and receptions allowed.
In this article, I am evaluating LSU cornerback Mansoor Delane as an example.
CB Mansoor Delane, LSU
Man Coverage Skills: 8/10
Delane’s overall level of play improved quite a bit from his junior season at Virginia Tech to his very strong senior season at LSU. Delane turned in one of the best season-long coverage performances in the country in 2025 en route to an elite 90.7 PFF coverage grade, which ranks fourth in the draft class. Delane was asked to play man coverage on 42.3% of his coverage snaps in 2025, and he performed at a very high level, posting an 89.1 PFF man coverage grade — the top mark in the draft class.
Zone Awareness/IQ: 8/10
Delane is a disciplined zone defender who looks to deny the most dangerous route before clamping down on his zone assignment. He plays with a good understanding of route concepts and possesses the necessary football lQ and athleticism to successfully cheat in zone coverage. In 2025, LSU’s preferred zone scheme was Cover 3. Delane played 90 snaps in a deep-third zone role and finished the season with a 76.8 PFF zone coverage grade.
Ball Skills: 7/10
Delane is competitive at the catch point. He broke up seven passes in 2025 while allowing only 14 completions. He also nabbed two interceptions. He has good timing to flash his hands and break up passes. He didn't drop any interceptions in the past two seasons.
Speed & Recovery: 7/10
There aren’t testing numbers for Delane’s speed yet, but on film, it looks like he has easy deep speed. He has the ability to quickly turn and run when in off-coverage and has good recovery speed to prevent deep completions.
Press Technique: 7.5/10
Delane’s press coverage improved quite a bit from his junior to senior seasons. He was in a press alignment 21.6% of the time in 2025 and proved to be patient in those situations. While Delane isn’t necessarily a long prospect from a height/arm length standpoint, he has the necessary length to play press coverage and, more importantly, the foot quickness to mirror the man in front of him. Delane does well in press man to sense when a receiver is sinking his hips.
Run Support/Tackling: 7.5/10
Delane is a willing hitter in run support and looked physically stronger as a senior. He doesn’t miss many tackles and appears to be an above-average tackling cornerback. In 2025, Delane earned a 74.4 PFF run-defense grade. He missed five tackles and finished the season with a 76.4 PFF tackling grade. He also posted a 79.4 PFF tackling grade in 2024 while at Virginia Tech. Delane can also play gunner on the punt-coverage team.
Final Grade: 7.50 — Solid Starter