Reviewing Preseason Projections: Quarterbacks

In my annual preseason roster breakdown, I included all of Football Outsiders' KUBIAK individual player projections.

It's always interesting to see how the system fares.

For the QBs, it's tough, because the system projects them (Pennington and Henne) as if they each played all 16 games. Of course, neither did, so we will have to approach them accordingly.

Here are the preseason KUBIAK projections:

	Att	Comp	C%	Yds	TD	INT	FUM	NY/P	DVOA	Runs	Yds	TD
Pennington	492	321	65.2%	3576	22	14	7	6.6	15.3%	29	105	1
Henne	455	280	61.5%	3360	17	13	8	6.2	5.5%	15	61	0
White	25	17	69.5%	212	1	1	2	7.5	4.9%	40	208	3

Pennington's numbers can pretty much be thrown out since he played less than three games. And let's scale Henne's numbers to fit a 14 game season since that's about what he ended up playing (he got significant action against the Chargers after Pennington went down).

Using that scale, Henne's projection would have looked like this:

	Att	Comp	C%	Yds	TD	INT	FUM	NY/P	DVOA	Runs	Yds	TD
Henne	398	245	61.5%	2940	15	11	7	6.2	5.5%	13	53	0

And here are his actual numbers:

	Att	Comp	C%	Yds	TD	INT	FUM	NY/P	DVOA	Runs	Yds	TD
Henne	451	274	60.8%	2878	12	14	4	5.7	7.8%	16	32	1

The KUBIAK system has the most trouble projecting young players who have yet to really play yet, but it did a pretty good job with Henne.

While the system thought that Henne would throw the ball a lot less than he did, it actually projected him to accrue more yardage. That's mainly because it projected him to have a slightly higher completion percentage to go along with a much higher net yards per pass number. And that NY/P number is key. He has to get that up from a disappointing 5.7.

KUBIAK also thought that Henne would have a positive TD/INT ratio which he did not. But the system was still only three off his actual number of TDs and INTs. Perhaps most impressively, the system pretty much nailed his DVOA.

I'd chalk this one up as another success for the KUBIAK system and statistical projections in general.

Of course, Pat White is a whole other story. It's clear KUBIAK (like the rest of us) had no idea what role White was going to have. It saw him attempting 25 passes and instead he threw a mere 5, completing none. It also saw him getting 40 rushing attempts when he really only got 21. Interestingly, the projection system also had White seeing time at receiver, with 17 catches, but he obviously was not used in that manner.