PFF Layoffs – The Day America’s Most Passionate Football Company Lost Its Soul

A dusty MVP Belt is hanging on a wall somewhere in the former Pro Football Focus office. It was once given out annually as a small internal custom honoring the person who had contributed most to the company’s advancement. It was last updated in 2021. More information about what happened to PFF can be found in that detail, which was discovered by a former employee who paid the location one last visit before it permanently closed.

In a reported nine-figure deal, Teamworks formally announced on March 31, 2026, that it was purchasing PFF’s data and analytics platform. The social media posts had begun by Monday night. One of the company’s most well-known voices, Trevor Sikkema, who hosts PFF’s NFL Stock Exchange podcast, wrote that it was his last day.

Mike Kennedy, who had been managing PFF’s primary Instagram and Twitter accounts, which had a combined following of 2.3 million, on his own for more than a year, announced his departure. Jon Macri, Thomas Valentine, Max Chadwick, Seth Reese, John Owning, and Beckett Mesko. Names that PFF’s audience had grown to trust were announcing their status as free agents one by one, and many of them did so with a gracious dignity that their employers most likely didn’t deserve.

The deal’s mechanics are fairly simple. The enterprise portion of PFF, the proprietary data platform that NFL teams, front offices, and media companies pay hefty fees to access, was sold by Cris Collinsworth, the NBC Sports analyst who acquired a majority stake in the company back in 2014. The majority of the employees on that side switched to Teamworks.

The consumer-facing division, which included the content division that helped establish PFF’s public image over the course of two decades, continued to lag. Approximately 50% of the workforce was kept. After learning the news at an all-hands meeting on Monday morning, the other half wrote farewell posts for the remainder of the day.

As all of this is happening, there’s a sense that the sale was, in many respects, the end of a shift that had been taking place covertly for years. Something changed within the company in 2021 when Neil Hornsby, the founder who created PFF from the ground up, was fired. That same year, the MVP Belt ceased to be updated.

Soon after, Austin Gayle and Eric Eager, who had overseen PFF’s consumer and analytics products, respectively, departed. People who remembered PFF as “truly the most passionate football company in America,” as one former analyst put it, and who understood what the organization was supposed to be, gradually vanished. What was left was a media operation that had been gradually losing its purpose, encased in a valuable data asset.

Ironically, it was the content team—writers, podcast hosts, social producers, fantasy analysts, and video editors—that made PFF understandable to regular football fans. The information would have remained hidden in a spreadsheet somewhere, only accessible by front desk staff, if they hadn’t converted the grades into real stories.

For years, PFF’s player rankings appeared on Sunday Night Football broadcasts on NBC, in part due to a media infrastructure that was prepared to contextualize and publicize them. Now that the infrastructure has been largely dismantled, it is genuinely unclear what the business’s consumer side will look like in the future without the people who managed it.

Collinsworth, for his part, released a statement that framed the Teamworks agreement in terms of competitive football, discussing the integration of PFF’s data with Teamworks’ AI-driven operating system to provide football executives with a single planning tool. This is the kind of statement that, when considering team front offices, makes perfect sense. It says very little about the reporters, analysts, and content producers who worked for years to develop a sympathetic audience. There is a noticeable silence surrounding that section of the narrative.

For several years, sports media have been shrinking. Every major media outlet, including ESPN, Bleacher Report, and The Athletic, has undergone restructuring, frequently losing the precise type of knowledgeable, audience-connected staff that makes sports coverage compelling to read. PFF’s predicament is consistent with that pattern, but it is more poignant because the company was never merely a media outlet.

People manually graded every player on every snap, which began as a labor of pure football obsession and developed into something with true analytical credibility. Seeing it put its data asset ahead of those who conveyed that credibility to the public seems like a miniature version of a well-known error.

Seth Reese, the graphic designer who described PFF as his first design job and said he’d be taking a few weeks off to refresh, put it about as honestly as anything else posted that day. Max Chadwick, who had wanted to work there since high school, said it was better than he had anticipated and that he was incredibly excited about what lay ahead.

It is difficult not to respect that blend of forward momentum and loss, written by those who had recently been let go. It is far less certain whether the company they are leaving behind will be able to say the same thing about its next chapter.