Turnovers Are Football October 29, 2012
I have the best readers ever. I’m all “we have to be the worst team EVAR at turnover margin” and some commenter who goes by “vg” is all “hey, I’ll use the magic of mathmatics to find out just how bad we are”.
I’d like to think he (she?) took hours and hours in a dark room, slaving away at the numbers, attaching photos to the walls and running red strings between the connected statistics, John Nash style. But he probably just found a place where he could cut and paste the statistics into a spreadsheet. Which I could have done. If I wasn’t lazy.
Anyway, here is the list he put together. This takes the final Turnover Margin ranking for each team over the last 10 years and ranks each FBS team from best to worst. The shocker – we’re not the worst! We’re THIRD worst. Eat our dust, New Mexico State and Idaho.
Remember, that list is just turnover margin. It reads like a list of “best teams over the last 10 years”, but it’s really not. It’s simply the best teams at taking care of the ball/forcing turnovers. But since turnovers are football, yes, it’s a list of the best teams over the last 10 years.
His list includes the three teams who have reclassified to FBS this year – Texas State, UT-San Antonio, and UMass. Because their statistics are simply from one year, I’ll toss them out and just list the top-12 and bottom-12 out of the 120 FBS programs before this season. Here’s our brethren at the bottom:
109: Army
110: Baylor
111: Washington
112: Western Kentucky
113: Hawaii
114: Tulane
115: SMU
116: Fresno State
117: Marshall
118: Illinois
119: Idaho
120: New Mexico State
I could write about this 1,500 times and still get angry. My heart rate is easily up 35 bmp over normal right now. Three different coaches over 10 years and we’re third from last in all of football at Turnover Margin.
Turnovers are football. Force ‘em, prevent ‘em, and you’ll win and win and win some more. Don’t believe me? Here’s the top 12 teams on vg’s list. Remember, this has nothing to do with passing yards. Or rushing defense. Or third down conversion percentages. This is simply a list of the teams over the last 10 years that force turnovers and don’t give the ball away.
1: Boise State
2: Alabama
3: USC
4: Oklahoma
5: Florida
6: Utah
7: West Virginia
8: Wake Forest
9: TCU
10: Virginia Tech
11: LSU
12: Missouri
When I’m named head coach of Illinois in 2021, here are my opening remarks at the press conference:
“Turnovers. Turnovers turnovers turnovers. We’re going to force turnovers, we’re going to obsess over hanging onto the ball, and we will win football games because of it. By the third year of my Champaign reign, you will see a team in the top 10 nationally in Turnover Margin. Quite honestly, I’m probably going to under-practice on offense and defense. We might look like crap for a while in our schemes. But you have to trust me – we look like crap because every practice is geared towards two things: field position and turnovers.
That’s honestly all we’re going to care about. We’re going to spend hours and hours on special teams, because the field position the special teams provide is vital to college football success. And then we’re going to spend more hours and hours on taking care of the ball and forcing fumbles. If we have time left to practice some bubble screens, we might try to fit that in. But for the most part, all this coaching staff will care about is field position + turnovers.
I looked up the stats, and this team probably lost 35 games the last 20 years simply because no coach seemed to ever care about turnovers and field position. The coaches who obsess over it – the Chris Petersons, the Nick Sabans, the Bob Stoopseses – are all beloved by their fanbases. I want to be beloved here. So I’m going to emphasize turnovers and field position over everything else.
Especially turnovers. Because turnovers are football.”
Robert – When you are coach in 2021, can we tie your compensation to turnover margin?
Robert, as always, a treat to read.
But while you are no doubt correct in your analysis, maybe the reason all those top teams have fewer TOs is be/se they have better players and better players don’t fumble, throw INTs and drop punts, while crummy players do.
And we have those by the jillions.
Robert,
Good point. I’m gonna have a couple of ‘turnovers’ for breakfast.
I’m not a big fan of Lovie Smith but his philosophy for winning is primarily to win the turnover battle. Da Bears lead the NFL in that department and are six and one.
Maybe Illinois could ask Peanut Tillman to talk to and demostrate the importance of turnovers. There is no better way to turn momentum in a game than to recover a turnover. We’ve certainly witnessed that in most of our games.
What is amazing to me is that we have this atrocious turnover record in spite of having Mikel LeShoure in the backfield for more than 400 carries without a single fumble !! That is almost an entire year of carries for the entire team without a fumble. Imagine where we would rank without #5. (shudders)
I hope I’m not reading a similar article toward the end of the hoops season. “You feel me,” BP3?
Tommy Davis has been removed from punt returns. So his goofball play will not have to be tolerated anymore.
Turnovers are football, no doubt…but Illinois just made some dumb decisions saturday. Hopkins diving for a fair catch was beyond stupid….Don Young’s fumble you can almost forgive since he was just trying to get more yards after contact. Staples play were the actions of an undisciplined idiot…but Indiana made the exact same mistake the next drive except Illinois didnt capitalize.
This is just a flat out awful football team. I think Robert needs a state of the union address and what he thinks needs to be done. Basically, I want NAMES…coaching names.
Cool! Happy to help.
He, and would you take “bored Saturday morning before the game so I hacked together a simple program to grab the data, and rank the teams?” It was totally in a dark room, though.
The interesting part to me, though, is that if we rank by giveaways, we’re only 101st. I guess our Koenning defenses that did a good job of creating turnovers weren’t enough to overcome our other defenses.
After the last game, I also ran some numbers for penalties. The results are, simply put, very surprising.
- Penalties per game – 20th
- Penalty yards per game – 21st
- Penalty first downs per game – 21st
- Penalties per play – 18th
- Penalty yards per penalty – 65th
So, we’re actually pretty good when it comes to penalties, except for the fact that we don’t give up too many small penalties. What I’d love to find is a stat for “shooting ourselves in the foot with a penalty,” where I guarantee we’d be towards the bottom.
“I looked up the stats, and this team probably lost 35 games the last 20 years simply because no coach seemed to ever care about turnovers and field position.”
.
I think Tepper cared about field position. His quote was something like “the punt is the most important play in football”: or perhaps it was the punter who was the most important player…. either way, Lou T placed great emphasis on Special Teams.
Turnovers are a great stat, but some of that has to be chicken/egg. In other words, good teams make turnovers, rather than turnovers make good teams.
Not saying that a turnover-obsessed coach isn’t an awesome thing. But that can’t be it, or else we’d see some crap football teams going to bowls simply because they play the safest offense ever conceived. Alabama probably gets a bunch of turnovers because they get tremendous pressure with the front four, and they also guarantee their QB 6 seconds to throw every pass.
So yes, turnovers are football, but football is also turnovers.