Warren Margolies:I read your article about the 370
Carry Theory with great interest, since I had been assuming that LJ was
going to be my fantasy football keeper for years to come. Since I read
the article, I've been debating doing the seemingly unthinkable and
keeping Reggie Bush instead of LJ... is this too reactionary?
I normally trust Scott Engel from ESPN.com, who pointed out that
LJ didn't become a full-time back until the second half of '05. What is
your opinion on Bush vs. LJ for the next few years?
Aaron Schatz: The fact that LJ was not a full time back until the middle of 2005 doesn't matter. Jamal Lewis got cut down by overuse after a single season. What does matter is that fantasy and reality are not the same thing. There is a good chance of LJ having a catastrophic injury, or nagging injuries that cost him games. But there's also a good chance of him slowing down, but still keeping a starting job at 4 yards per carry, with 1,200 yards and a dozen touchdowns. That player would come out as average in the FO stats, a big step down for Larry, but that's still an every-week starting fantasy running back.
And I'm not sure what Bush's future holds, fantasywise. Despite his awesome second half, it's still hard to figure out how Sean Payton will use him going forward. Obviously, he has more value if you play in a points per reception league.
I think I would try to deal LJ for a more standard RB than Bush, but one who has less risk than LJ. Rudi Johnson, perhaps, or Frank Gore. If you think LJ's perceived value is higher than his real value, don't ditch him, flip him.
By the way, the hidden fact in the Patriots win over the Chargers: It prevented LaDainian Tomlinson from entering the danger zone of 390 carries in the playoffs + postseason.
The continuing saga of the Arizona quarterback position reminds me of something that I meant to put in Pro Football Prospectus 2006, but forgot as we were finishing up the book. The KUBIAK fantasy football projection system that we use is very tentative when it comes to predicting the stats of rookies, because there's so little information to go on. As a result, the rookie projections end up being significantly tied to the overall offensive projection for each player's new team.
We tried to project the top two quarterbacks on each team for 16 games, so people could see how they would do in case they had playing time. These were the projections for Jay Cutler and Matt Leinart:
Jay Cutler, DEN:
260-for-464 (55.9%)
2,590 yards
20 TD / 16 INT
Matt Leinart, ARI:
302-for-543 (55.6%)
3,299 yards
15 TD / 22 INT
But here's what happens if you simply switch the teams for these two players.
Jay Cutler if he was on ARI:
299-for-543 (55.1%)
2,637 yards
16 TD / 20 INT
Matt Leinart if he was on DEN:
266-for-464 (57.3%)
3,130 yards
19 TD / 16 INT
A lesson both in how hard it is to project the performance of rookies, and how dependent that performance is on how good the team is around each player.
Aaron, regarding Alexander being pushed out of bounds, shouldn't you also account for td's scored untouched? Shaun had 28 td's in 2005 and 20 in 2004. I know from watching the games last year a good percentage of those were 'untouched' td's.
This is a good point. Now, we can't tell from the play-by-play what was an "untouched" touchdown, but think about it -- a touchdown is really no different from going out of bounds, because you don't get smacked and tackled at the end of it. There are exceptions, of course: goal-line plunges. So let's re-run the numbers on which players had the most "untackled" runs. This represents all runs listed as ending out of bounds, plus touchdowns, minus touchdowns from the one- or two-yard line. Again, this is carries only, not catches.
Now we're really starting to see a difference between Alexander/Tomlinson and everybody else. Alexander scored 15 of his 27 touchdowns from more than two yards out. Edgerrin James, on the other hand, scored only four of his 13 touchdowns from more than two yards out. The percentages are stronger also. Alexander finished 11.4% of his runs "untackled." LT was untackled on 10.0%, Steven Jackson on 9.8%. Every other back with over 200 carries last year was under 7%.
To look at this a little differently, here's the list of the top 10 running backs in carries that ended with tackles (estimated off the PBP, of course), along with their actual number of carries:
Based on a search for OB in the PBP, which I'm assuming is complete,
Reggie Bush ran out of bounds 9 times on Sunday. That's out of 25 touches.
The next highest OB for a player (not counting MNF) was 5 (Coles, Holt & Westbrook).
Only two TEAMS ran out of bounds more than Reggie Bush.
Just thought that was interesting....Looks like he's trying to avoid the big hits.
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