Last week, I promised to evaluate how my mathematically-generated cheatsheets were faring versus the official footballguys cheatsheets, compiled by footballguys numero uno and dos: Bryant and Dodds. I'm going to put that off til next week. For this week, I'm going to first take a look at how weather might affect your starting lineup decisions. After that, I'll attempt to win the prize for being the 10 bazillionth person to spout a meaningless opinion on Emmitt Smith's shiny new record. I doubt it's possible at this point to say something that hasn't already been said, so I'll be brief.

Weathering the weather

For reasons that I won't go into here (and aren't important anyway), the data set I'll be using was obtained from this source a year ago. It contains the 1994-2000 stats for all players who were active in 2001. So it's a year old, but we're just looking for general trends here, and that shouldn't interfere with are ability to do so.

Here's the plan. Let's start with QBs in the rain as an example. I rounded up all QBs who had played at least 3 games in the rain during the period 1994-2000 and I compared their fantasy points per game average in rain versus their average when it wasn't raining. For instance, Vinny Testaverde played 10 games in rainy conditions during that time period. In those rainy games, he averaged 14.1 fantasy points per game. In non-rainy games during the same stretch, he averaged 16.5 points per game. So he was about 2.4 points per game better in the rain. Now, 10 games is a pretty small sample, and Vinny's performance in those 10 games was influenced by many, many factors other than the rain. It is by no means a stone cold fact that rain affects Vinny's performance by exactly 2.4 points. But it's our best guess based on the data we have.

Vinny has been bad in the rain, but Brett Favre has been good: 22.2 per game in the rain, 19.8 when it's dry. In the sample I looked at, some QBs were better when it was dry and some were better in soggy conditions. So what was the overall tendency? There were 22 QBs who met the criteria listed above. Here are their numbers in rain and otherwise:

                           RAIN           DRY
Name                      G  FPT/G       G  FPT/G        DIFF
------------------------------------+--------------+----------
Jeff Garcia               3  12.2   |   26  20.2   |     -8.0
Kerry Collins             4   6.1   |   74  12.2   |     -6.2
Rich Gannon               5  11.2   |   54  17.2   |     -6.0
Elvis Grbac               4   6.7   |   76  12.0   |     -5.3
Neil O'Donnell            6   8.9   |   68  12.7   |     -3.8
Kordell Stewart           9   6.8   |   78  10.1   |     -3.3
Jon Kitna                 6  10.4   |   33  13.4   |     -3.0
Vinny Testaverde         10  14.1   |   77  16.5   |     -2.4
Steve Young               3  20.3   |   69  22.3   |     -2.0
Drew Bledsoe              3  13.9   |  106  15.3   |     -1.3
BillyJoe Tolliver         3   8.8   |   31  10.0   |     -1.2
Randall Cunningham        4  14.9   |   48  16.0   |     -1.1
John Friesz               3   8.5   |   25   9.5   |     -1.0
Jake Plummer              3  11.7   |   49  12.5   |     -0.8
Mark Brunell             11  15.9   |   78  16.5   |     -0.6
Steve McNair              6  15.9   |   66  15.2   |      0.7
Steve Beuerlein           3  16.0   |   71  14.0   |      2.0
Troy Aikman               4  14.4   |   93  12.2   |      2.2
Brett Favre              10  22.2   |  102  19.8   |      2.3
Ty Detmer                 7  14.2   |   29   9.0   |      5.2
Doug Flutie               3  21.9   |   36  14.9   |      7.0
Jeff Blake                3  28.0   |   83  15.2   |     12.7

So the majority (15 of the 22) were worse in the rain. The "average" QB in this set was a little more than half a point per game worse in the rain. So what we have here is some evidence that rain has a small but nonnegligible negative impact on QBs in general.

You can see for yourself that some of the sample sizes are just tiny, and all the usual caveats apply. Another question here is whether some QBs are better at dealing with the rain than others. Obviously, McNair has handled rain better than Rich Gannon in the past. The question is whether that's a real skill that McNair has and Gannon doesn't, or whether it's just a sample-size fluke. I feel comfortable using this data to answer the general question (does rain tend to hurt QBs?), but I personally would not use it to make any inferences about particular QBs.

My take: if there's rain in the forecast, downgrade your QB by about half a point to a point. In other words, it's one of your many tie-breakers, but I wouldn't give it much more weight than that.

Let's take a look at other situations. To get your bearings, take a look at the first line of the table, which is a summary of what we just went through above.

Pos    Situation    better     worse     Average diff
------------------------------------------------------
QB     rain           7          15         -.6 
QB     windy         20          34         -.9
QB     cold (< 40)   14          19        -1.3

RB     rain          11          20         -.1
RB     windy         27          32         -.2
RB     cold          21          26         -.1

WR     rain          22          22         +.4
WR     windy         31          51         -.3
WR     cold          35          26         +.5

TE     rain           6          10         -.6
TE     windy         10          17         -.4
TE     cold           9          14         -.6  

Complete data set

Some interesting facts there, which I'll let you sift through on your own. One thing that has me scratching my head a little is that rain and cold seem to hurt QBs, TEs and RBs, but not WRs. Why would that be? Another interesting observation is that windy weather seems to hamper the passing game (including WRs) a little more than rain or cold weather does. In any event, what I'll take from this is: in most cases, weather seems to have the expected effect, but in general, the effect isn't huge. Don't overreact to a forecast of rain.

Emmitt's record

This seems like an obvious point to make, but somehow it's getting missed by a lot of people. If it weren't, then there wouldn't be so many people claiming that Emmitt is now officially the greatest. And there also wouldn't be as many venomous diatribes about how Emmitt is a selfish has-been who doesn't deserve the record. The bottom line is this: if Emmitt wasn't greater than Payton a week ago, then he's not greater than Payton now. On the other hand, there was nothing keeping you from concluding that Emmitt Smith was already the best rusher in NFL history before last Sunday. In other words, the fact that the record changed hands does absolutely nothing to change my opinion of who was/is the greater rusher.

To me, Emmitt's record, like all other records, is trivia. In a perfect world, I'd have picked up a newpaper on Monday morning and learned about the record from a tiny blurb at the end of the article summarizing the Cowboy game. I wouldn't have spent any time thinking about it, and I certainly wouldn't have been offended by it. I'd have simply said to myself, "Emmitt has gained more yards than anyone else. Huh" and moved on to the next article.

Unless otherwise noted, all stats come from football-reference.com and the disclaimer applies