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Frank Gore
The San Francisco 49ers offense is supposed to be built around Gore. The ground game should put Alex Smith in good position so the team doesn't have to ask its limited quarterback to do more than he's really able to do. It seemed to work in 2011, except for one problem: Gore actually wasn't that good this year.
Gore averaged 4.29 yards per carry this season, slightly above the running back average of 4.23, but he was a very boom-and-bust running back. We use a metric called success rate to measure running back consistency (explained here), and Gore had a 42 percent success rate, which ranked 45th in the league. Gore didn't have a strong year as a receiver, either; our DVOA metric ranks him 45th out of 51 backs with at least 25 passes, and his catch rate of 55 percent was very low for a running back.
Gore also faded in the second half of the season. He hasn't had a 100-yard rushing game since Week 9, and he's averaged just 3.49 yards per carry over his last eight games.
Cedric Benson
Benson had a 1,000-yard season for a playoff team. He has to be pretty good, right? Not really. Benson had lots of yards because he had lots of carries, but on a per-play basis he was probably hurting his team. In that way, 2011 looked a lot like most other recent Benson years. Benson has been one of the worst starting running backs in the league for four of the past five years; the exception was 2009, when he was slightly above average. This year, Benson averaged just 3.90 yards per carry and ranked 45th in Football Outsiders' DVOA metric; he was 39th in 2010. He's also not a good receiver, gaining fewer than 4.0 yards per pass target.
Plaxico Burress
Nobody was quite sure what to expect from a 34-year-old receiver returning after more than two years away from the game. His numbers (612 yards and eight touchdowns) aren't half bad, but there are a couple reasons why Burress didn't quite have the value those numbers suggest. First of all, Burress had his usual low catch rate, nabbing just 47 percent of targeted passes. Only two receivers had a lower catch rate with at least 75 pass targets (Eric Decker and Devin Aromashodu). Burress and the Jets also played a fairly easy schedule of opposing pass defenses, and adjustments for strength of schedule knocked five percentage points off of Burress' DVOA rating, dropping him to 58th out of 92 receivers with at least 50 pass targets.
Marcedes Lewis
If you didn't have him on your fantasy team, you may not be quite aware of just how much Lewis fell off this year. Lewis broke out in 2010 with 700 yards and 10 touchdowns. This year, he apparently broke back in. He had just 460 yards and zero touchdowns. Lewis caught just 46 percent of intended passes, the lowest catch rate for any tight end with at least 10 pass targets. And yet the inexperienced Jaguars quarterbacks kept trying to depend on him, throwing him 85 passes in all. As a result, Lewis ends up dead last in Football Outsiders' DYAR (defense-adjusted yards above replacement) numbers for tight ends. In fact, Lewis had the sixth-worst DYAR season for a tight end since 1992, the year our play-by-play database begins. In the past 20 years, only one tight end was thrown at least 75 passes with a lower catch rate: Boo Williams, who caught 44 percent of passes in 2004. You can blame some of this on his quarterbacks, but the gap between Lewis and this year's next-worst tight end is pretty huge.
Pierre Garcon
The last two seasons, even with Peyton Manning making him look good, Garcon ranked just 43rd and 67th among wide receivers in our DVOA ratings. So what happened without Manning to make him look good? Well, on the surface, perhaps Garcon still looked like an above-average receiver. He had 70 catches for 947 yards and six touchdowns. But when you look a little closer, you see there were a number of holes in that performance.
A big chunk of Garcon's yardage came not just in one game but on just two plays -- 146 yards on two catches when he ran through huge spaces in the Tampa Bay defense. The rest of the year he averaged just 11.8 yards per catch. Garcon had 18 catches that didn't qualify as successful plays under Football Outsiders standards*, tied for second in the league behind Percy Harvin. He converted only nine of his 31 pass targets on third or fourth down for a new set of downs and he caught just 52 percent of intended passes. Add it all up, and Garcon ranked just 78th in Football Outsiders' DVOA ratings this season.
* Defined as gaining 45 percent of needed yards on first down, 60 percent on second down, or 100 percent on third or fourth down.
Aaron Schatz covers the NFL for ESPN Insider. He is the creator and president of Football Outsiders, which he launched in 2003. He contributes regularly to ESPN The Magazine, appears Wednesday and Thursday on "Numbers Never* Lie" on ESPN2, and his work has also appeared in such places as The New York Times, Slate and the Boston Globe. You can find his ESPN archives here, and follow him on Twitter here.
The San Francisco 49ers offense is supposed to be built around Gore. The ground game should put Alex Smith in good position so the team doesn't have to ask its limited quarterback to do more than he's really able to do. It seemed to work in 2011, except for one problem: Gore actually wasn't that good this year.
Gore averaged 4.29 yards per carry this season, slightly above the running back average of 4.23, but he was a very boom-and-bust running back. We use a metric called success rate to measure running back consistency (explained here), and Gore had a 42 percent success rate, which ranked 45th in the league. Gore didn't have a strong year as a receiver, either; our DVOA metric ranks him 45th out of 51 backs with at least 25 passes, and his catch rate of 55 percent was very low for a running back.
Gore also faded in the second half of the season. He hasn't had a 100-yard rushing game since Week 9, and he's averaged just 3.49 yards per carry over his last eight games.
Cedric Benson
Benson had a 1,000-yard season for a playoff team. He has to be pretty good, right? Not really. Benson had lots of yards because he had lots of carries, but on a per-play basis he was probably hurting his team. In that way, 2011 looked a lot like most other recent Benson years. Benson has been one of the worst starting running backs in the league for four of the past five years; the exception was 2009, when he was slightly above average. This year, Benson averaged just 3.90 yards per carry and ranked 45th in Football Outsiders' DVOA metric; he was 39th in 2010. He's also not a good receiver, gaining fewer than 4.0 yards per pass target.
Plaxico Burress
Nobody was quite sure what to expect from a 34-year-old receiver returning after more than two years away from the game. His numbers (612 yards and eight touchdowns) aren't half bad, but there are a couple reasons why Burress didn't quite have the value those numbers suggest. First of all, Burress had his usual low catch rate, nabbing just 47 percent of targeted passes. Only two receivers had a lower catch rate with at least 75 pass targets (Eric Decker and Devin Aromashodu). Burress and the Jets also played a fairly easy schedule of opposing pass defenses, and adjustments for strength of schedule knocked five percentage points off of Burress' DVOA rating, dropping him to 58th out of 92 receivers with at least 50 pass targets.
Marcedes Lewis
If you didn't have him on your fantasy team, you may not be quite aware of just how much Lewis fell off this year. Lewis broke out in 2010 with 700 yards and 10 touchdowns. This year, he apparently broke back in. He had just 460 yards and zero touchdowns. Lewis caught just 46 percent of intended passes, the lowest catch rate for any tight end with at least 10 pass targets. And yet the inexperienced Jaguars quarterbacks kept trying to depend on him, throwing him 85 passes in all. As a result, Lewis ends up dead last in Football Outsiders' DYAR (defense-adjusted yards above replacement) numbers for tight ends. In fact, Lewis had the sixth-worst DYAR season for a tight end since 1992, the year our play-by-play database begins. In the past 20 years, only one tight end was thrown at least 75 passes with a lower catch rate: Boo Williams, who caught 44 percent of passes in 2004. You can blame some of this on his quarterbacks, but the gap between Lewis and this year's next-worst tight end is pretty huge.
Pierre Garcon
The last two seasons, even with Peyton Manning making him look good, Garcon ranked just 43rd and 67th among wide receivers in our DVOA ratings. So what happened without Manning to make him look good? Well, on the surface, perhaps Garcon still looked like an above-average receiver. He had 70 catches for 947 yards and six touchdowns. But when you look a little closer, you see there were a number of holes in that performance.
A big chunk of Garcon's yardage came not just in one game but on just two plays -- 146 yards on two catches when he ran through huge spaces in the Tampa Bay defense. The rest of the year he averaged just 11.8 yards per catch. Garcon had 18 catches that didn't qualify as successful plays under Football Outsiders standards*, tied for second in the league behind Percy Harvin. He converted only nine of his 31 pass targets on third or fourth down for a new set of downs and he caught just 52 percent of intended passes. Add it all up, and Garcon ranked just 78th in Football Outsiders' DVOA ratings this season.
* Defined as gaining 45 percent of needed yards on first down, 60 percent on second down, or 100 percent on third or fourth down.
Aaron Schatz covers the NFL for ESPN Insider. He is the creator and president of Football Outsiders, which he launched in 2003. He contributes regularly to ESPN The Magazine, appears Wednesday and Thursday on "Numbers Never* Lie" on ESPN2, and his work has also appeared in such places as The New York Times, Slate and the Boston Globe. You can find his ESPN archives here, and follow him on Twitter here.
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