Blogging The Boys
In Tuesday’s press conference, Cowboys head coach Brian Schottenheimer touched on the topic of turnovers when Brad Sham of 105.3 The Fan asked him the following question:
Sham: “When you’re talking ab0ut the turnover margin, are you – don’t say “both” – are you more concerned about improving the way …“
Schottenheimer: “Both!”
Sham: “You cannot say “both”! Are you more concerned with the way you protect the ball or improving the rate at which you took it away.“
Schottenheimer: “Well, if you’re not going to let me say what I want to say …. I’m going to start with: If you don’t give it up, then you’re not going to lose the turnover battle. So if we don’t turn the ball over it’s going to be zero.”
“We proved it last year, Brad, that we could go four straight games [Weeks 4-7] without a turnover. There were too many multiple-turnover games [6] on offense. We were sloppy, we were careless with the ball. Mostly as ball carriers.”
“A couple of them were on third-and-long, like situations where we were checking the ball down, we were probably going to punt, and we ended up losing possession of the ball.”
Earlier in the press conference, Schottenheimer had already addressed what the Cowboys are doing to limit turnovers on offense.
Schottenheimer: “You’ll see a big emphasis on ball security for us. I say it, I think every time I’m up here and because it disgusts me: minus 9 [turnover differential]. It’s awful. We’ve got to protect the ball better on offense, we’ve got to take it away on defense, but that’s an area where we need to make a big jump.”
“Last year we didn’t really spend a lot of time doing ball-security circuits, so are you going to repeat history? No, you’re going to do something about it.”
So Klayton [Adams], Derrick Foster, the offensive staff, LW [Luna Wells], they’ve done a great job of coming up with different ball-security circuits where we’re teaching guys not only how to protect the football […] it’s basic fundamentals […] so there’s things like that where we’re doing a deep dive to get it fixed.“
It’s not exactly a secret that turnover differential is highly correlated with winning in the NFL. It’s great that the Cowboys are aggressively looking at ways in which they can reduce their turnovers on offense, and though Schottenheimer wasn’t allowed to say it, we can assume they are looking for a lot more takeaways from their defense as well.
Because the bigger the turnover differential in your favor, the bigger the chance you’ll win the game. Heck, we even have the numbers to prove it: Last season, teams that won the turnover battle won 79% of the time (164-54-1 record in games in which one team had more turnovers than the other). Here’s a breakdown of winning percentages by turnover differential:
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