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Do Pre-Season Statistics Matter? Football
fanatics wait anxiously for the pre-season every year and fantasy football players often
watch pre-season games in order to find a sleeper for their fantasy football league.
However, looking at player statistics from last season there seems to be very little
evidence that players who surprise in the pre-season will continue to impress in the
regular season. Some of the top players in yards per carry average last pre-season were
Ahmad Bradshaw, Jesse Chatman, Reggie Bush and DeShaun Foster while the leaders in
receptions were Lance Moore, Troy Walters, Paris Warren and Chris Henry. After looking at
those it became pretty obvious to me that player statistics have very little meaning in
the pre-season since top players see little action and the level of their opponents vary.
After taking a look at team statistics, I noticed that there seemed to be some meaning to
them since the best teams were usually near the top. In the following article I will look
at pre-season team statistics to try and determine which ones can help improve player
projections for the upcoming season. The
two statistics that typically interest fantasy football players are yards and touchdowns.
Looking simply at those two statistics to try and predict regular season statistics would
however not be the best method. Yards are dependent on both the number of attempts and the
performance on each attempt. During pre-season, one thing that is consistent is the
coaching staff so a team that runs the ball more during pre-season should also run the
ball more in the regular season. I therefore thought that by separately predicting
attempts and yards per attempt I would obtain more accurate results. Here is the list of
pre-season statistics I looked at to try and predict regular season statistics: % of
rushing plays, plays per game, yards per carry, yards per pass attempt, % of rushing
touchdowns and touchdowns per game. The following table shows the formula that best
predicts each regular season statistics using data from the past four seasons:
Those
formulas mean that for example if a team averaged 55 offensive plays per game in the
pre-season, you can expect them to average 48.9 + 0.191 x 55 = 59.4 offensive plays per
game in the regular season. The coefficient by which the pre-season statistic is
multiplied gives an indication of how much meaning each statistic has. As initially
expected, the percentage of rushing plays has the most meaning since a coach will usually
use the same system during the pre-season and the regular season. Those numbers mean very
little without a point of comparison so I did the same thing but comparing regular season
statistics with the previous year’s regular season statistics:
As you can see the coefficients by which the previous year’s statistics are multiplied are all higher than for the pre-season statistics except for the percentage of rushing plays where they are very close. This means that the only pre-season statistic that has more meaning than the previous year’s statistic is the percentage of the time that a team will run or pass the ball. However, looking at all the data, I noticed that very often the team’s statistics for the upcoming season were between the pre-season statistics and the previous year’s regular season statistics. For example, San Diego ran the ball 53% of the time in 2006, only 45% of the time in the 2007 pre-season and 51% of the time in the 2007 regular season. This led me to believe that by combining both the pre-season statistics and the previous year’s regular season statistics I could improve the projections for the upcoming season. |
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