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At some point in the 8 o’clock hour Sunday night, the Ravens will jog onto the M&T Bank Stadium field against the New England Patriots and a series of disembodied heads will fill a corner of NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” telecast.

The heads, belonging to members of the Ravens’ starting offense and defense, will state their names and alma maters, real or imagined. On an accompanying chyron, below the player’s position, jersey number and name, will be a string of words and numbers in smaller type.

The first two are the same for every starter: “PFF RANK.” This is how a player’s value is introduced to an audience of tens of millions: distilled to a ranking by Pro Football Focus graders, then shared as if it’s another line in his bio.

Meet Isaiah Likely, one of the worst tight ends in the NFL.

Meet Kyle Hamilton, one of the best safeties in the NFL.

Meet Daniel Faalele, one of the most average guards in the NFL.

Are the rankings accurate? Players and coaches have their issues. But they are undoubtedly unavoidable. Grades are often cited as gospel in league discourse, and the rankings are a staple of “Sunday Night Football” telecasts, with analyst Cris Collinsworth serving as PFF’s chairman.

“I think it’s easy to criticize if you haven’t seen how the potato chips are made, but open invitation to all those guys,” Collinsworth said in October during an interview on “Up & Adams Show with Kay Adams.” “Anybody that wants to come in and take a look, debate, argue, sit down, pound the table, we’ve had a lot of people do it in the past, and we’ll have a lot of people that’ll do it in the future.”

Ravens players try not to lose sleep over PFF’s game grades, which are usually published less than 24 hours after kickoff, the culmination of the site’s analysts breaking down hours of broadcast footage and All-22 film.

After all, the Ravens have their own in-house grades to worry over.

“I tell them, ‘We watch the film. We go off the film. We judge you off the film, not off of a ranking,’” defensive coordinator Zach Orr said Thursday. “I think the rankings are good for some reasons, but truth be told, the coaches and the players only know what defense we’re actually running, who’s responsible for what. So it’s tough to kind of rank somebody when you don’t fully understand the responsibility of what that person is doing.”

CBS analyst J.J. Watt, a former All-Pro defensive lineman who in his heyday was consistently one of PFF’s highest-rated players, said in October on “The Pat McAfee Show” that the site’s player grades were a “completely made-up number.” He questioned the value in assessing a player’s film without knowing “their exact assignment.”

Hamilton said he had “no opinion” about PFF but raised similar concerns. “No discredit to what they got going on, but obviously, being in the meeting rooms and understanding assignments, it’s hard to put blame on one or another thing if you’re not in the rooms,” Hamilton said Thursday. “I think more analytical stuff is probably a good thing, but probably pluses and minuses on plays is probably not as reliable.”

Some positions are perhaps harder to evaluate than others. Ravens right tackle Roger Rosengarten acknowledged that any grader would ding an offensive lineman for allowing a sack or tackle for loss. “Can’t have those,” he said, “no matter if they know the play or not.”

Roquan Smith, whose PFF grades have suffered even during Pro Bowl seasons, said inside linebackers have their own set of obvious pass-fail tests: Did they make a tackle? Did they win their rep in man-to-man coverage? But, without a deep knowledge of the Ravens’ defensive scheme, an information gap would leave graders “in limbo,” Smith said.

“As a linebacker, you’re in the middle of a lot,” he said Friday. “You can be making up for somebody else, but then you can be caught in that area — then it seems like, ‘Oh, that’s totally him,’ when the other guy’s nowhere to be found, so you won’t even know that. So little things like that, you just see that all the time. But [only] the coaching staff truly knows things like that.”

Of course, the Ravens’ grades are private. PFF’s are behind a paywall but widely disseminated on “Sunday Night Football” and social media. Even Ravens players with an allergy to the grades — “When it comes to PFF,” center Corey Bullock said Thursday, “I really don’t look into it” — know they will be branded with them eventually.

The hope, then, is for more pluses than minuses. Good players make good plays. Good plays get good grades. Or at least they should.

“It’s obviously better when ... a tweet is good about you,” Rosengarten said. “You want to be like, ‘Oh, that’s awesome.’ But when it’s not so good you’ve got to also take that on the chin, too, because it’s the world we kind of live in now. With social media nowadays, when you have a bad performance, you’re going to hear about it. And, when you have a good performance, you’re going to hear about it. So I think you’ve got to take the best of both worlds.”