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.
Football Outsiders is the Internet's #1 home for intelligent NFL analysis. Our NFL articles for FOX include Quick Reads, DVOA ratings, Too Deep Zone, the Wednesday rundown, and many others.
