The Most Important Statistics In Football
17 May
Northwestern’s Pat Fitzgerald: “The tell-tale one for me is turnover ratio. If you take care of the football and take the ball away from people, you have a chance to be pretty good as a football team. Some would say rush offense or rush defense, red-zone scoring, third downs — there are a lot of different things to look at. But the first thing that jumps out to me is the turnover ratio. We coach the heck out of it on both sides of the ball.”
Penn State’s Tom Bradley: “For us, it’s missed tackles and big plays. If we look back to the year before at how many explosion plays — runs and passes over 15 yards — when that is low, you would know exactly what kind of year you had. Forget yards, points, anything. You just look at those two things; that’s it for us. You look at missed tackles because of how much time the game is played on the perimeter now as compared to before. It is much more one-on-one tackles now because the ball is thrown on the perimeter a lot more, even in the pros with more bubble screens. They don’t see as many rocket screens because their quarterbacks don’t run the ball. You can get even in the box and still play zone in the pros against a lot of that empty stuff. In college, if you want to get even in the box, you have to play straight man. If you are playing straight man out there, they can get out quick if you miss a tackle.”
Nebraska’s Carl Pelini: “Lost-yardage plays are huge. These are the things we look at, in addition to points allowed. You have to be great on third downs, so we will look at our defense’s third-down success rate, too. Anything under 30 is pretty good. When you start getting 25, 26 percent, you’re a damn good defense. No matter how long a drive is, no matter how much success an offense is having, you are going to have two or three opportunities during the course of a drive to get off the field. If you are hitting those 66, 70 percent of the time, you have a great shot of getting the ball back even though you are giving up some yards. We also look at explosive plays vs. lost-yardage plays. We want to have two lost-yardage plays for every explosive play we allow. For us, explosive plays are runs over 12 yards and passes over 17. And turnovers. There was a study years ago in the NFL that I have bought into: If you win the turnover battle, you have more lost-yardage plays than the other team’s defense and good starting field position, if you can win two out of three, you win something like 95 percent of your games.“
Interesting discussion, and I’d like to see that NFL study for myself.
The most important statistic in football is… heart.[/Vermeil]
BUT YOU CAN’T MEASURE THE HEART OF A CHAMPION.
DO YOU HAVE ANY PRIDE, DANNY?
HUH?
DO YOU?
Bravo Mr Keith Jones…Bravo!
LET’S GET OUT THERE AND TAKE IT TO HEMPFIELD AND MAKE ‘EM PAY FOR THE EMBARRASMENT WE SUFFERED….LAST WEEK.
—–
IS THAT WILSON FOOTBALL?
IS THAT WHAT WE PFFSACRIFIE OUR LIFE FOR?
Do you have any pride?
DANNY….DO YOU HAVE PRIDE, DANNY? DO YOU, DANNY? HUH?
LET’S GET OUT THERE AND TAKE IT TO HEMPFIELD AND MAKE ‘EM PAY FOR THE EMBARRASMENT WE SUFFERED….LAST WEEK.
Does Nebraska play an aggressive style of defense? I haven’t really watched them.
Something like that. I mean, that guy screams too much to just let his players be all boring and zone-y all of the time.
You’uns read Rittenberg yet? Fitzy’s new favorite stat is the number of times he can hug Tressel in a month.