A strip is a good football move.
Watch Leon Hall strip the ball from the Cleveland RB as he’s stacked up by the defense while the ball pops right into Robert Geather’s hands for a TD.
Tell me that isn’t a convincing argument for a well-timed strip of the ball.
Interesting question. I suppose it depends on what we mean by “random.” Certainly fumble recoveries are *functionally *random.
I’m pretty sure **Taber **is right that recovery is “random” mostly because all the NFL teams are equally good at it (or close enough to equal that the differences are undetectable). There’s not, to my knowledge, any research about the randomness of NCAA recoveries, and it could well be that the overall discrepancy in football skills between Oklahoma and Baylor means that the Sooners have a slightly better than average chance at coming up with loose balls this weekend. Or maybe not – perhaps you’d have to get a matchup like the Atlanta Falcons vs. my old high school’s football team before you’d see a noticeable difference.
However, I do actually think that the shape of the football contributes here. I mean, it could be that a team starting Leon Washington would have better recovery skills at RB than a team starting Brandon Jacobs, but the fact that the ball is squirting this way and that, along with the fact that there are half a dozen players banging into each other trying to get it, would mean that 99% of the time, the RB in question will recover the ball or not based on circumstance and luck (and, yes, on hard work, but everyone on the field is working equally hard on the recovery, so that cancels out for our purposes). There just isn’t enough opportunity for the *slight *skill difference to make itself visible.
I was involved in plenty of fumble drills in high school, and I’d say that.
Not to my old head coaches’ face, of course, as he was a 6’6" 300 pound black man who had played O-line at the 1-A level and whose mere memory still intimidates me … but I’d have no problem presenting data to one of the more cerebral head coach types.
It’s safe to say that anyone playing in the NFL has been through a few hundred fumble drills in their lives. Everyone does them. If we could field a team of players with NFL skills who had never had a fumble drill in their lives, it might be an interesting experiment, but no such players exist.
But frankly, I suspect that if you put those coaches under truth serum, they’d admit that fumble drills are more about 1) instilling team toughness 2) teaching players not to fumble in the first place. I’d also bet that if you secretly polled the players, way more than half would call fumble drills BS.
Interesting blog post on why the fumble rate has gone down over the years:
furt: heh. Now that you mention it, I seem to remember an ex-player saying pretty much the same thing. Can’t remember if it was on ESPN, SNY or WFAN, though. As best I recall, the drill was described as both pointless and unpleasant.
VarlosZ: Yeah, makes sense.
EDIT: Consider two tennis pros who have an even record against each other. When they play each other, is the winner random?