" Hey, 49ers fans, don't buy those Super Bowl tickets just yet. Even though the 49ers went 13-3 last season and came perhaps within two muffed punt returns of the Super Bowl, a group called the Football Outsiders figures they will win just seven games this season. Aaron Schatz, editor of Football Outsiders, part of YouTube's Sabermetrics Network, says on his video that the 49ers simply cannot live up to last season's surprising success. In the video, Schatz calls it "our most controversial prediction for the upcoming year" and says the 49ers "will fall back to the pack in the NFC West." Schatz cites the 49ers' lack of injuries last season, especially on defense, and the superb play by special teams; he says the odds are neither can be repeated. "Regression toward the mean says every team is dragged toward .500 from year to year," Schatz explains in the video. "And the Bill James (the baseball stats guru) plexiglass principle says that teams which take a huge increase in their performance from one year to the next tend to decrease in the third year." In Schatz's best-case scenario, the 49ers will mirror the Eagles, who went from 5-11 in 1999 to 11-5 in 2000, then repeated 11-5 the following season. In his worst-case scenario, the 49ers will be like the 2002 Bears, who were hit by injuries and went 4-12 after going 13-3 in 2001." Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/07/21/4646715/leading-off-are-49ers-headed-for.html
