Training Camp Roster Breakdown 2009: Quarterbacks

With a fresh new site re-design (not drastically different, but a bit cleaner and bigger; I hope you like it!) it's time to start delving into my annual complete position-by-position roster breakdown.

I do these positional previews because they're a great way to see where the strengths and weaknesses of the team lie heading into camp and to get an idea of who might make the final roster and who might get squeezed.

Miami still needs to cut two players to account for the signings of Pat White and Chris Clemons, but for the most part, the 80-man roster is set.

I'll start my positional breakdowns with the most important position on the team - the quarterbacks. For many of these write-ups, I'll be including the Football Outsiders' KUBIAK statistical projections (published in Football Outsiders Almanac 2009 - a must read), which have proven to be quite accurate predictors in the past. They are definitely more accurate than listening to what a biased group of Dolphins fans thinks a player will do.

Anyways, let's begin.

Chad Pennington
Last season's miraculous turnaround simply doesn't happen without Chad Pennington falling out of New York and into Miami's hands (well, that and Miami's cupcake schedule and injury/fumble luck). Pennington is the ultimate class-act team player, and from the moment he stepped into the Dolphins' facilities he was considered a leader. His confidence was contagious, especially to the multitudes of youngsters who surrounded him. Seemingly rejuvenated in Miami, Pennington put up the second-best year of his career (bested only by his superb 2002 season), finishing with 1172 DYAR and a 25.7% DVOA.

Despite the presence of two promising youngsters below him on the depth chart, Pennington is unquestionably Miami's starter heading into 2009. But that is certainly not guaranteed to be the case all season long. Perhaps most unsettling about Pennington's prospects for 2009 is that he has never had consecutive healthy or productive seasons in his career. To wit, here are Pennington's games started totals throughout his career along with his corresponding DVOA metrics:

	08	07	06	05	04	03	02	01	00
GS	16	9	16	3	13	10	15	2	1
DVOA	25.7	-3.6	10.4	-29.0	25.9	-0.7	40.5	-	-

Whew! That's a roller-coaster ride right there. Even with Miami's greatly improved medical staff, it's hard to believe that Pennington will completely buck his own history. It's also hard to believe that Pennington has anywhere to go but down after a season like last year. After all, how many quarterbacks put together back to back career years in their 32 and 33 year old seasons. It's not impossible, but it should fairly be expected that we will see some regression to the mean in Pennington's case.

Chad Henne
Despite the addition of Pat White in this year's draft, it still seems pretty clear that the team believes Henne is its future QB. The only question is when that future will begin. Given Chad Pennington's year-to-year flip flop in health and production, Henne's future may begin sooner than 2010. Miami shouldn't necessarily pull the switch at the slightest sign of trouble from Pennington, but if Pennington is struggling at midseason, it's probably in the best interests of the team to get Henne some meaningful experience this year.

In the short action he saw last year in the Arizona game, Henne played pretty well, even though it was in garbage time. His problems don't concern his tools, but rather his consistency. That was his major issue coming out of college, and it remained his biggest issue in minicamps. Having Pennington as a mentor should surely help Henne in this aspect of his game, and another training camp should be enough time to get Henne ready to step in for Pennington whenever he should be needed.

Pat White
One of the most controversial picks in this year's draft was Pat White. Is he a QB? A WR? A punt returner? Well, according to the coaching staff, he's a QB and that's all at this point. Of course, he's not just a regular QB, but rather one that will learn how to run both the conventional offensive sets as well as the Wildcat packages, adding a new level of aerial depth that was lacking with Ronnie Brown running the scheme last year.

While I thought White was drafted too highly, it's obvious that pick #44 was Miami's only chance to get him without trading up in round 2 to jump ahead of the Patriots, who also clearly were in love with him. The fact of the matter is White has a chance to help the Dolphins fundamentally change the landscape of the league for a second year in a row by drastically upgrading the potential of the Wildcat. If that requires drafting above value, then so be it.

As a conventional QB, the Lewin Career Forecast looks lovingly upon White. The LCF is a projection system for first and second round college QBs based solely on games started in college and completion percentage. It's been found that those two stats alone correlate highly with future NFL success. White's 49 career college games and completion percentage of 64.8% are about as good as you can get. Of course, we all know White isn't going to be used like a regular QB, at least to begin with, so using traditional forecasting tools on him may be moot.

This year, White will be a Wildcat specialist. But there are several questions that must be answered in that regard. First of all, White will not be able to be listed as the emergency third QB on games days if the coaches want him to run the Wildcat. Therefore, he will have to be active on game days and that might force the Dolphins to make Henne the emergency QB even though he will be second on the depth chart. Second of all, and I'm still amazed that I've not seen this addressed anywhere in the media, is that if White is solely going to be a Wildcat QB that means the opposing team will know what Miami is running every time he checks into the game. A big part of the Wildcat's surprise last year was that Pennington always remained in the game and simply split out wide when Ronnie took the snaps. No substitutions were required, so the defense did not have an opportunity to make their own substitutions. If White is being checked in and out, the opposing defense has the opportunity to make its own substitutions to neutralize the formation, much like the Ravens did in both their matchups with Miami last year. To counter this problem, White may need to learn how to play a little receiver or conventional QB so that he can be left in the game for stretches at a time, including when normal plays are being run.

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Here are the KUBIAK projections for these three players. It should be noted that both Henne's and Pennington's projections are given as if they were to start a full 16 game season. This is done in order to generate meaningful stats.

	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

The projections for White also include 17 receptions for 201 yards and a touchdown.

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Here's my predicted depth chart:
1. Chad Pennington
2. Chad Henne
3. Pat White