FO Mailbag: 2009 New Orleans Saints

A couple of weeks ago, FO did a big media push to promote Football Outsiders Almanac 2009 on the Sports Blog Nation websites. One site that didn't participate was Canal Street Chronicles, so Saints fan and FO reader Joseph posed his own series of Saints questions in the comments for that post [1]. I promised to answer those questions, and while it took me some time to get to them, I didn't want to leave our Saints fans hanging. Actually, I hope this gets posted around to some Saints blogs... As we often mention, we definitely need more NFC South readership. The current FO readership is heavily weighted towards the East and North divisions, plus the Seahawks and Colts. The more we spread to fans of all 32 teams, the better!

Anyway, here we go. A couple of Joseph's questions were fairly similar, so I combined them here.

1. Why so down on the Saints projection? In FOA, on page xiii, the last sentence of Pythagorean Projection section in Statistical Toolbox says that this suggests improvement, at least record-wise, from the Saints. If they have the fourth easiest schedule, why are they projected for only EIGHT wins? I see 4-2 in the division, + Det, Stl, Jets; split at Buf/Mia; split NE/NYG at home; and prob. Dallas at home. That equals 10-6. Am I missing something?

First of all, I'm not a big fan of going through the schedule and divvying up wins. There's just too much random chance involved in each individual game. Better to look at the season as a whole.

You are correct that Pythagoras suggests improvement from the Saints (they had 9.5 Pythag. Wins last year despite going 8-8). There's more to our projections than just last year's points scored and allowed, however. Obviously, the chapter in the book is a better, longer look at why our Saints projection says what it says. We generally don't see a reason to believe that the offense will improve much, considering it was already fourth in the league last year in DVOA, and we don't see a reason to believe that the defense will improve much, since the Saints' defensive additions seem to be a constant churn of mediocrity and reclamation projects. The result is a team that ends up pretty close to last year, when they were better than average (9.9% DVOA) but not good enough to reach the playoffs. Of course, given our expectations of decline for Atlanta and Carolina, it isn't ridiculous to suggest the Saints will win the division. Any of those three teams could win the thing at 10-6 or even 9-7 and I would not be shocked. As Tanier says at the end of the chapter, you don't have to strain your eyes to imagine the Saints as a 12-win team if things go right.

2. One of the best offenses in the league returns intact -- except Shockey, Colston, and Bush were injured last year. Shouldn't their offense be BETTER -- especially considering that Pierre Thomas [2], who ranked 11th in rushing DYAR, 4th in rushing DVOA, 6th in receiving DYAR, and 5th in receiving DVOA should have an increased role? By the way, any reason PT is expected to have SIX fumbles? (He had one in practically as many touches in 2007-2008.)

The Saints didn't have a particularly highly-injured offense last year -- their offensive Adjusted Games Lost from starters was about league-average. The line was fairly stable, making up for those injuries to skill players. The 2009 projection suffers from a bit of third-down rebound effect, since they were third in the NFL in offensive DVOA on third downs. Right now, I think their offensive DVOA projection is something like seventh or eighth, depending on what kind of fiddling with roster variables I were to do based on preseason changes throughout the league. Still pretty good.

KUBIAK's projection for Thomas isn't that great, actually... undrafted guys who excel early often regress when given larger roles. If he plays this well another year or two, the system will stop expecting that decline, but for now, he's still a young player and his track record is far from established. As far as Thomas' fumbles, the system is probably just projecting something close to the league average for fumbles given his usage, and it mostly ignores that he had a below-average number of fumbles in his first two seasons.

3. Robert Meachem [3] is expected to have a 32 percent catch rate. Please tell me that it is an error.

Yeah, sometimes with players who don't have a big track record, the system will spit out some weird results. Usually I catch them and manually change them to be reasonable, but occasionally something odd will slip through the cracks. In the KUBIAK spreadsheet, about a week ago, I upgraded Meachem's projection a little bit, and while doing that I also changed his catch rate to something more like 50 percent.

4. A little unhappy that there was no DVOA by week graph for the Saints. Have it for all teams or for none.

If we self-publish again next year, we may be able to go back to doing them for all teams. If we go with a standard publisher and have to go outside for layout rather than having Vince Verhei do it, including all 32 graphs would likely be cost-prohibitive.

5. Why the drop in completion percentage for Drew Brees [4]?

For those who don't feel like looking it up, the projected completion percentage for Drew Brees [4] is 62 percent, which would be his lowest since 2003. There are a lot of variables considered in the KUBIAK quarterback projections, and to be honest nothing really stands out as an explanation. Some part the drop is that quarterbacks who improve significantly in yards per completion tend to have drops in completion percentage the next year, but there are lot of other little things involved. Sorry I can't give a more substantial answer. His overall projection is still very good.