San Francisco 49ers Statistical Analysis Mailbag: The Maiden Voyage

OK, it's the offseason. And even more so than the offseasons of the past 20 years, this offseason is shaping up to be unbelievably boring; well, that is, unbelievably boring to everyone except avid followers of labor law (I'm talking about you, Fooch). So, to help you pass the time between now and whenever the next game of professional football is played, I'm starting up a mailbag post for NN.

The concept should be pretty familiar to anyone who's ever been on the internet. Given that you're reading this via the internet at the moment, that means you. If, somehow, you've been on the internet for any length of time, and still have never seen a mailbag post, you must have missed the past 3 years of Golden Nuggets, wherein Ninjames has repeatedly linked to Matt Maiocco's Niner-specific mailbag post and Mike Sando's NFC-West-specific mailbag post among others. The basic idea, of course, is that the readers submit questions, and the blogger answers a select few.

The nerdy little twist of our mailbag feature is that we're going to be limiting the questions to Niner-related statistics. So, if you you've been dying to know how many times Joe Montana threw for 300 yards in a game, but just don't have the time to look up yourself, ask me, and I'll try to tell you. If you think the 49ers should draft a Cat a C at #7, and want to know how good Cs drafted that high have been during their NFL careers, ask me. If you and your friends argue about whether Jerry Rice and John Taylor were a better WR duo than Lynn Swann and John Stallworth, ask me, and I'll try to settle the debate as best I can. Basically, if there's anything you want to know that stats can possibly provide an answer to, I'm game for trying to figure it out for you -- provided it relates in some way to the San Francisco 49ers.

For right now, you'll be able to submit questions to me (1) in the comments section of this mailbag post, (2) via NN's Twitter account, or (3) via NN's Facebook profile. At some point, when I feel like my opinions matter to people other than myself, I'll join Twitter. When that happens, I'll let you know, and you can also submit mailbag questions there.

So, fire away!

p.s. It should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway. I won't be able to get to all of your questions. The ones I answer will be those that (a) don't require Master's thesis-level amounts of research/data collection, and (b) are especially interesting, timely, etc.