FanPost

Should we worry about the pre-season? A Statistical Analysis

Cary Edmondson-USA TODAY Sports

After yet another humiliating defeat, I know there are quite a few among you Niner faithful who have been....worried, to say the least. I know there are definite concerns about our backup QB position and the fact that we have yet to score a TD in pre-season. There have been concerns over just about everything and some wondering if this is a sign of bad things to come. Because of this, I decided to see if there are...realistically...any reason to be concerned. That is, is there a correlation between a team's pre-season record and that of the regular season? I first plotted the 49ers pre-season and regular season records, all of which I got from the NFL official website, of which you can see in my Excell spreadsheet or Google Doc.

The first thing I analyzed was the how the 49ers fared. The NFL website only goes to pre-season up to 2006, so there isn't a ton of information, but it's still useful. I plotted the amount of wins the 49ers obtained in the pre-season as the x-axis and the amount of wins they obtained in the regular season as the y-axis. As our R-squared value shows, there is very little statistical correlation between pre-season performance and regular season performance.

Image and video hosting by TinyPic Note: Shout out to 49ersbaby for providing additional pre-season and regular season records.

I then decided to plot the entire 2013 NFL season using the exact same criteria. The correlation is weaker than the 49ers one. (I didn't want to plot every single NFL season, but the results are practically the same no matter which season you plug in).

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

To go even further, I wanted to analyze a team that has been consistently good since 2006, so I decided to look at the Patriots.

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What we find is that the Patriots perform well regardless of their pre-season record.

In fact, that's something we find in the NFL. Pre-season performance practically has no correlation with regular performance. There are of course famous examples (the 0-16 Lions went 4-0 in pre-season as did the 6-10 49ers in 2010) but I wanted to use this as a sort of tranquil moment for those who seem so quick to hit the panic button. This isn't to say there shouldn't be worries (it seems a fan's job is to always worry and expect the worst) but they really shouldn't be placed at pre-season games.

If all fails, here's a cat GIF to remind you that not over-react over pre-season games.

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This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of Niners Nation's writers or editors. It does reflect the views of this particular fan though, which is as important as the views of Niners Nation's writers or editors.