Stat Boy Saturday: How Should You Deal With Questionable Players?

Another week with our honorary stat boy, Zach Fein of Fein Sports. A contributor with as much stat muscle as anyone in the business. You may not understand what he's says and use it for you fantasy leagues, but if you're in the mood to be baffled and confused, then boy does he have you covered. Because life is one big spreadsheet. This week he tackles the mystery novel that is the NFL injury report. You know the feeling: Half-hour before gametime, and you have three players listed as questionable in your starting lineup, frantically hoping all three play. The best thing to do is to wait until the inactives list comes out, and go from there. But what if you aren’t by a computer with Internet access, and can’t edit your lineup at all on Sunday? We know that some players—Brian Westbrook, Plaxico Burress, and Tom Brady up until this week—are always on the injury report and play 95% of their games. And we know that some teams—check that, a team—don’t like to release truthful injury information (*coughPatriotscough*). So can we figure out the percentage of players on a team’s injury report that play every week? Why yes, yes we can. The following table shows the amount of players listed as questionable last year that played and didn’t play for each team (with coaches and their changes if appropriate). All positions except for the offensive line were included. (Sorry for the big space; apparently blogger has a problem posting tables.)

Team	HC Last	HC Now	%Play
ARI	Whisenhunt	same	70.0
ATL	Petrino	M.Smith/JAX	52.9
BAL	Billick	Harbaugh/PHI	53.4
BUF	Jauron	same	60.0
CAR	Fox	same	44.4
CHI	L.Smith	same	53.3
CIN	Lewis	same	30.0
CLE	Crennel	same	61.9
DAL	Phillips	same	53.8
DEN	Shanahan	same	28.9
DET	Marinelli	same	36.8
GBP	McCarthy	same	33.3
HOU	Kubiak	same	26.7
IND	Dungy	same	24.2
JAX	Del Rio	same	45.8
KC	Edwards	same	37.5
MIA	Cameron	Sparano/DAL	63.3
MIN	Childress	same	34.2
NE	Belichick	same	50.9
NO	Payton	same	25.0
NYG	Coughlin	same	72.7
NYJ	Mangini	same	85.9
OAK	Kiffin	same	35.0
PHI	Reid	same	60.0
PIT	Tomlin	same	16.7
SD	Turner	same	70.6
SEA	Holmgren	same	40.0
SF	Nolan	same	53.3
STL	Linehan	same	21.1
TAM	Gruden	same	63.8
TEN	Fisher	same	46.2
WAS	Gibbs	Zorn/SEA	35.7

• The Jets had by far the most players listed as questionable, and by far the highest percentage of those players who played. The other New York team, the Giants, also had a high playing-percentage.

• On the other end, the Colts had the second-most questionable players, and had more than three-quarters who didn’t play.

• Want to know the percentages for the whole league? Almost half: 49.9%. There were 899 players listed as questionable last year; 449 played, and 450 didn’t. Among individual teams, 17 had less-than-half of their questionable players play, and 15 had more-than-half play.