Who doesn’t love some good, new-fashioned analytics? ESPN’s resident nerds have taken an early look at the upcoming NFL season and believe the San Francisco 49ers, who were not far from a Super Bowl berth last season, will be bottom feeders.
Per ESPN’s Football Power Index, the 49ers will be worse than… the Detroit Lions.
So, what does all this mean and why does this FPI index hate the 49ers so much?
ESPN’s Sports Analytics Writer Seth Walder explained in a follow-up piece explaining the rankings. In essence, the FPI rankings think Trey Lance is terrible because he did not play much last season.
The model assumes that Lance will start, with the thinking that even if he’s alright, he won’t be great.
Even with that logic, it’s a fairly rough range of quarterbacks he’s grouped with. Per Walder’s piece:
“Our quarterback rating docks QBs who don’t play, under the reasonable assumption that one way or another not playing is a bad sign (injury or just not being good enough). Our model acknowledges that Lance came in as a strong prospect, but after just 71 pass attempts during his rookie year, it views Lance in the same range as players like Matt Corral, Joe Flacco, Justin Fields, Zach Wilson, Andy Dalton and Nick Foles. There’s upside there, of course, and perhaps he stars in his first season as a starter. But the mean expectation for Lance can’t yet be great.”
Walder continues to say that despite superstars in Deebo Samuel, Nick Bosa, a great coach in Kyle Shanahan and strong run defense, “it’s hard to overcome a relative liability at quarterback. And that’s our best guess for Lance at this point.”
The FPI model currently gives the 49ers a 39 percent chance of making the playoffs.
That brings us to the obvious question of how the model would view them if Garoppolo was back. Per Walder, they’d rank 13th because “Garoppolo has posted decent QBRs throughout his career” which it doesn’t expect from Lance.