Whenever I watch a game with friends and/or at the local watering hole, whenever the favorite team has two, three, or God forbid four turnovers someone, usually someone who has had two, three, or perhaps four beers, says that this is the result of poor coaching. Why?
Should the coach have told the running back to hold on to the football instead of fumbling it on the ground?
Depends. Nothing I hate more than watching a player struggle to add meaningless yards to a play only to get held up by the defense and have the ball stripped. A well coached defense looks for those types of opportunities, when the ball carrier is preoccupied with the guys tackling him, to force a turnover.
Some guys tend to run holding the ball out wide from their bodies. That’s a strip waiting to happen.
Some guys are showboats who pull a Desean Jackson, or who try and stretch the ball over the 1st down line or the goalline when it isn’t necessary and get the ball knocked out.
With QBs, a young QB who doesn’t have an internal timer counting down in their head that tells them to either find a receiver or throw the ball away can leave himself prone to sacks and strips.
Interestingly, there are now a lot of football stat geeks casting a skeptical eye on stats once thought important, just as there have been for quite some time in baseball.
And one thing most of them now agree on is that fumbles are pretty much a random occurrence, which means there’s no point in stressing that your defenders should work on “stripping” the ball, nor does it help much to order your running backs to change the way they hold the ball.
A team that leads the NFL in fumbles taken away this year will likely fall back to the middle of the pack next year. Defensive coordinators CAN’T increase their takeaways significantly and offensive coordinators can’t do much to prevent fumbles per se.
Interceptions, on the other hand, are critical. Quarterbacks HAVE to reduce their INTs if they ever hope to win, and defenses MUST increae their interception rates.
That’s ridiculous. The Packers got a TD on Monday night when Clay Matthews stripped Peterson and took it back, and there was nothing random about it; Matthews came from behind and took the ball away. There’s a reason why certain players become known as being fumble prone, and it’s not because they’re the unlucky victims of chance.
One type of fumble- the helmet-hits-ball-which-pops-out type- is essentially random. The deliberate strip is most certainly not random - the Clay Matthews strip on MNF that MOID just cited is a concrete example of that.
ETA: Most turnovers, however, are not necessarily a result of poor coaching in any case. Most turnovers come from interceptions, which are generally split four ways: bad play call (downfield pass against deep coverage), bad pass, bad decision/miscommunication between wideout and passer, and ball tipped by receiver.
Two of the four are the result of poor coaching. The miscommunication/missed option read by wideout is the result of not practicing, and the tipped ball may be the result of poor coaching but is more often just bad luck.
Of course it’s “ridiculous.” EVERYBODY KNOWS that fumbles are crucial, just as EVERYBODY KNOWS that runs batted in is the most important stat for baseball players, and wins are the only stat that matters for pitchers.
But what EVERYBODY KNOWS ain’t necessarily so.
Mind you, it’s NOT that a game can’t or won’t hinge on a fumble at a key moment. But there’s almost nothing to be done about fumbles per se.
IF you create a dominant defensive line, one that can put a lot of heat on the quarterback, there’s a very good chance you’ll create extra fumbles. But if you have a mediocre or bad defensive line, there’s no magic coaching technique that will enable them to take away more fumbles.
IF you create a strong offensive line that gives the quarterback time to throw, or that lets running backs get through the defensive line untouched, you can reduce fumbles… but there’s no technique the coaches can teach to prevent fumbles if the offensive line is weak.
Actually, forcing fumbles isn’t random at all and is something that can be influenced. It’s recovering them that happens randomly. Fumbles are meaningful; fumbles actually lost, not so much.
That’s not true at all. Obviously, if you instruct your players to strip the ball, sometimes they will strip the ball. The downside is that strip-first tackling often leads to missed tackles.
Tiki Barber carried the ball low, fumbled frequently. Tiki was coached to carry the ball high and tight, fumbles went down. Nothing random about it. Stats represent the past, they don’t do anything for a running back with James Harrison karate chopping his arm, “no cause for alarm, I only have random chance of fumbling the ball. To the endzone, tally-ho. Eat my dust Harrison!”
Yeah, something tells me his rate of random fumbling would go up.
That is as bad as announcers saying a player is always near the ball when he picks up a fumble. It is random. if someone else knocks the ball loose ,and you pick it up, you are not responsible in any way for the play.
No, this is not true at all. Unless you are referencing research I am unfamilar with, this is NOT what statistical research has shown. As Jimmy Chitwood points out, it’s **recovering **fumbles that is random.
Causing and avoiding fumbles are measurable (though not precisely) skills that can be tracked over a period of time. Some players can learn the skill of holding onto the ball better (cf. Tiki Barber), and some can learn the knack of ripping it loose.
Exactly who I was thinking of. From '97 to '03 Tiki averaged one fumble for every 44 carries. From '04 to '06 he averaged one fumble for every 112 carries. The only thing that had changed was the coaching he had received. The coaching was publicly acknowledged by both Tiki and Coughlin, as the reason for the change.
And the change was that sharp and immediate. His fumbles per carry literally dropped in half from '03 to '04.
I’m not being snarky, but you have a cite for this assertion? Teams who actively try to strip the ball certainly seem to create more fumbles this way, but also seem to sometimes give up a few more yards than they would have without the strip attempt.
I think one of the key things coaches can instill in their players is focus, and I also think that focus plays a role in recovering fumbles. It’s not the only thing by a long shot; physically being close to where the ball hits the ground is most of it. But IMO, focus does play a role. And that can be coached.
I believe there are even loose ball drills that get run. I’d love to see a stat geek try to convince an NFL coach that the loose ball drill is pointless because fumble recoveries are random. (Or am I thinking of basketball? If so, are basketball “fumble” recoveries random? Why or why not?)
It’s ridiculous because it is, in fact, ridiculous. You misunderstood FO’s point by a country mile.
I’m still not convinced that fumble recoveries are random. Unpredictable, sure; I’m all on board with that. But does that necessarily prove that they are random? Is everything unpredictable by definition random?
You have to understand stat geeks (I’ve seen them often enough in baseball). The main goal is to “prove” that some particular well-established statistic is not really very good and to propose something in its place. Thus they run mathematical analyses that prove this, but the basic assumptions are often biased.
Fumbles aren’t random, though recoveries probably are. There are techniques to reduce fumbles or to create more of them, and it boils down to how successful you are at practicing those techniques.
I can not believe that a player can get to the pro level without encountering a coach or 2. There is nothing esoteric or arcane about football fundamentals. Every coach teaches a runner how to protect the ball from pee wee to the pros.
Coaches also teach how to strip the ball . Put a helmet on it and it pops out. Claw at the ball when you get a chance. Pull on the runners arm. It is not new.
I think most have them have learned it but were always stronger and faster than everyone else at the lower levels and could get away with holding the ball low. At the pro level they encounter multiple guys who can take a swipe at the ball while tackling well. At lower levels many players could do one or the other but rarely both and not with as much power as they face now.
As common as this is, I’m sure you can provide some examples. Since you brought it up.
A hypothetical answer to my own hypothetical question occurred to me: Basketballs are round, and thus bounce predictably. Footballs bounce randomly.
I think the fumble recovery being random is based on everyone being about equally good at it. If I coached my players to just ignore loose footballs, I’m sure that the other teams would recover more footballs than my team. A team’s fumble recoveries from one year can’t be used to predict their fumble recoveries next year, even if it is all the same players and coaches, which is why we say they are random. But it isn’t like there’s nothing that anyone can do to improve or decrease their chances of recovering a fumble, it is just that everyone is doing the same things to increase their chances. If coaches could just tell all their quarterbacks “Throw like Tom Brady,” then passing yards would be random too (ignoring the rest of the team).