Using PFF’s season simulator to project Breece Hall’s 2023 stat line

What should we expect out of Breece Hall this year?

The other day I used the ProfootballFocus in-game simulator to run a one-game simulation for the New York Jets 2023 season. Upon examining the output, I decided a more fun way to use this tool might be to focus on the player stats, which are outputted for quarterbacks, wide receivers, tight ends, and running backs.

To do so, I decided to run many simulations and then to examine how the outputs vary across simulations. In an ideal world where I had dozens of hours of manpower to dole out, I would have run this hundreds of times to provide the best estimate possible… however, I am but one man with a laptop so I’m going to settle for 10 runs.

As a fourth foray into this task, I am going to focus on the output of New York Jets running back Breece Hall. Regarding running backs, the tool outputs receptions, receiving yards, receiving touchdowns, rush attempts, rush yards, rush touchdowns, and total yards; additionally, using these figures I went ahead and calculated yards per catch (receiving yards divided by receptions) and yards per carry (rush yards divided by carries).

While no simulation is perfect and 10 simulations is hardly representative, PFF’s simulator has some very favorable projections for Breece Hall, especially considering the injury that he is currently recovering from. Overall, every simulation had Breece Hall exceeding 1000 total yards, for a minimum average of 65 all purpose yards per game (assuming 17 games played). Beyond that, their average simulation had him at a respectable 4.38 yards per carry, which would have ranked around 20th among RBs with at least 6.5 carries per game last season. Notably, their projections on Breece’s impact on the passing game are a bit more varied. His receptions ranged from 32 to 58 with a standard deviation of ~9, showing a great deal of discrepancy across the simulations. This is likely because Breece struggled in the passing game last year catching only 19 of 31 targets, but the arrival of quarterback Aaron Rodgers and the potential for improvement on Breece’s part in the passing game could allow him to have a significant uptick in this area this season.

While the simulations did generally expect a decrease in Breece’s effectiveness (5.8 yards per carry last season compared to a maximum of 4.94 in the simulations), this is likely due to the recovery time on his ACL injury which does typically lead to diminished performance in the first season back. Despite that decreased performance, PFF still projects Breece to be a plus performer, which would be a great outcome all things considered.