Reviewing Preseason Projections: Running backs

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.

Today, I'll be looking at how they did with the running backs. With Ronnie Brown going down with an injury once again, the numbers will have to be scaled to reflect that.

But first, here are the original KUBIAK projections:

	Runs	Yds	Yd/R	TD	FUM	DVOA	Rec	Pass	Yds	Yd/C	TD	DVOA
R. Brown	238	1131	4.8	7	4	1.6%	38	46	260	6.8	1	12.4%
Williams	125	524	4.2	2	3	2.1%	15	23	151	10.1	0	22.1%
Cobbs	32	151	4.7	1	2	18.0%	11	20	109	9.9	0	12.3%

Patrick Cobbs only played in 5 games so his numbers can be thrown out.

Ronnie only played in 9 games, so let's scale his projected numbers to fit a 9 game season:

	Runs	Yds	Yd/R	TD	FUM	DVOA	Rec	Pass	Yds	Yd/C	TD	DVOA
R. Brown	134	636	4.8	4	2	1.6%	21	26	146	6.8	1	12.4%

And here are his actual numbers (along with Ricky's):

	Runs	Yds	Yd/R	TD	FUM	DVOA	Rec	Pass	Yds	Yd/C	TD	DVOA
R. Brown	147	648	4.4	8	1	14.4%	14	20	98	7.0	0	-2.1%
Williams	241	1121	4.7	11	5	9.0%	35	53	264	7.5	2	-10.3%

For Ronnie, whose role was known heading into the season, KUBIAK predicted his usage in the running game almost perfectly. However, it expected a better yards per carry average and fewer TDs. It also expected a much lower DVOA, which means Ronnie outplayed his prediction when it comes to rushing.

On the receiving end, however, Ronnie underperformed. He was thrown to less than expected, and he had a negative DVOA, when the system thought he would be pretty good in the receiving game. It did get his yards per catch right though.

So for a guy who missed almost half the season, I'd say KUBIAK did a pretty good job of predicting how Ronnie would be used in this offense.

Ricky, on the other hand, really couldn't be accurately predicted since he started (and received a majority of the carries) for all seven of the games that Ronnie missed. The KUBIAK projections were done with the assumption that both backs would play a full season together.

So his counting stats were way off. He more than doubled his projected yardage, almost doubled his projected carries, and scored five times as many projected TDs. But he also had much better rate stats (4.7 Y/C compared to 4.2 and 9.0% DVOA compared to 2.1%). He also caught the ball much more than expected, although he performed much worse catching the ball than predicted, finishing with a -10.3%.

Essentially, Ricky greatly outperformed his rushing projection but underperformed his receiving projection.