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By Bob Sturm Dec 14, 2020
We spend every year looking for the latest trends in the evolution of a complex game. There are always new approaches and tactics that move the entire sport in a new direction — and if you don’t keep up, you get left behind. The NFL rarely arrives at its new destination overnight. Rather, constant evolution continues to turn the wheel a little at a time. Over the course of five to ten years, the sport becomes unrecognizable from what it once was.
A few football truisms, however — and the number is much lower than most broadcasters or even coaches seem to admit — seem to be eternally constant. The sport can change and evolve and update, but these few items will always land on their feet and serve as the goalposts of this generation just as it was for the one before it and, no doubt, after it.
However, anyone watching during Sunday’s game (or napping, which I would probably understand as well) will attest to an eternal truism: a game can be over very quickly if a team doesn’t take care of the football.
Those silly Bengals ended each of their first three drives with fumbles lost. None of them were because their star QB was injured.
The Bengals held on to the ball on Sunday with all of the certainty and sureness the Cowboys have in 2020 — which is to say it looked like it might be slathered in butter and vaseline. The Bengals couldn’t hold the ball on Sunday. Consequently, they had no chance. It was like looking in some sort of sick Cowboys mirror. We could see the symptoms much more easily when, for once, they didn’t hit so close to home.
The Cowboys’ turnover problems have crippled their chances in 2020. Now that they are essentially playing out the string, let’s just call it for what it was. Injuries will be blamed in the obituary of this season, and they played a starring role. But I bet the absences of Tyron Smith, La’el Collins and especially Dak Prescott would be remembered differently if the Cowboys weren’t coughing the ball up left and right in September like they had no care in the world.
Turnovers and ball security are the lifeblood of winning teams. They aren’t everything, but can often be enough to be considered the most important factors in games and seasons.
I would say the Cowboys’ 2020 campaign will reinforce that. Dallas has lost the season because they could not take care of the football in the slightest. No team has fumbled more balls in 2020. People will want to blame injuries and coaching because they are popular and usual suspects, but we all know what derailed the train. It was giveaways. It almost always is.
In the first five weeks of the season, Dallas gave the ball away 11 times, with seven of them being fumbles. Only the Eagles had anything close, but in their case, they were an interception machine. Dallas featured a fumble here and a fumble there. Star running back Ezekiel Elliott currently leads the NFL in fumbles by non-QBs. Prescott and Elliott fumbled repeatedly in those first couple months, and the team was buried.
Even with a clean day yesterday from the Cowboys, they still sit near the top in giveaways.
And takeaways? Well, that is a fairly interesting story, too. At the bye week, Dallas was dead last in takeaways. They had played 28 quarters of football and had a measly three takeaways to show for it. This, of course, was part of the case against the defense and not knowing which end is up. We concluded Mike Nolan must not have a clue and neither must his players (let’s be honest — that case is not off the table in either regard). Not only were there holes in the scheme you could drive a truck through, but the defenders also couldn’t even cause one important turnover when they need it.
So, seven weeks in — as Prescott was lost for the season and Andy Dalton suffered a concussion — Dallas had a turnover differential of negative-13, which was not only the worst in the NFL but the worst by a very unhealthy margin. Denver was second-worst at negative-8, which is still brutal, but not close to as poor as Dallas.
Seven weeks and six games have passed since that humiliation at Washington. While there is much broken about this team, I am starting to wonder if the team has at least turned the corner on this most cancerous issue that made everything else resemble wallpaper selections inside the cabins in the Titanic. It probably doesn’t matter if we go floral print or solid color, ma’am; there is a hole the size of a small planet in the side of the ship. We are sinking. Let’s skip the wallpaper.
Since the start of the eighth game (at Philadelphia), Dallas went from way in the red to a team operating at a turnover differential in the black. I know that seems hard to believe and it certainly does employ my arbitrary sample sizes, but I think it is notable. Playing six games with nothing but backup QBs — three different ones, in fact — Dallas is below the league average in giving the ball away. Instead of ranking 32nd, they are now 12th. You can win in 12th.
What about takeaways, though? Is the defense actually able to do something reasonably productive? The jury remains out, but the early returns are not bad.
Since the start of the eighth game, Dallas now gets takeaways at a reasonable level. They have taken the ball away 11 times during those six games, which not only is above average (8.8) but vaults them to ninth in the NFL. They’ve gone from 32nd to ninth during this stretch of time.
Now, the big one. If you put the two together, you see the encouraging evidence of what Mike McCarthy was simply saying was the first thing they must do back in October. He said four weeks was a pattern, and the team simply could not play or win with these turnover problems. The turnover differential after seven weeks was minus-13. Since then it is plus-three.
That may not sound like much, but do you know where plus- three ranks since that bye week? Sixth in the NFL. 32nd up to sixth is a recovery worth noting. It doesn’t mean that they are destined to have an amazing 2021, but it does say that they may have a foundation in place that can both take care of the ball and attack it. Of course, it could just be simple statistical regression. Perhaps it’s a random set of numbers for which we wish to apply meaning (welcome to my career).
But, as I have stated all season, I have spent a fair amount of this journey of Mike McCarthy’s first year at the helm remembering the trip of the 2006 Green Bay Packers (which might also be a unique experience almost no readers can recall or would want to recall).
McCarthy’s first squad was a very forgettable Packers team. The clock was ticking on the end of Brett Favre’s career and nobody had a sense of humor anymore. After Mike Sherman’s failed run, it sort of appeared they took the easy way out and hired a new guy that nobody hardly knew of unless they took special note of the positional coaches of the last decade. McCarthy did not appear to be the “next big thing” at the time. He definitely seemed like the fourth or fifth choice.
Green Bay was 4-8 when the calendar turned to December that year. It seemed like McCarthy might be on a short leash already. Maybe the Packers had hired the wrong guy. Now, I want to say right now that I do not really believe in any run late in the year automatically means anything heading into the next season. But I do believe a coach needs time to get everyone in the room and in the organization to recognize and accept that the coach is here for a long time. It won’t magically elevate a team to the Super Bowl in Year One, but it can happen fast if we can turn the page and make the adjustments. That 2006 team was noticeably different at the end than they were at the beginning. And they had Favre the entire 16 games. After a 1-4 start and a 4-8 record, they went 4-0. A 13-3 follow-up 2007 ended with the Packers hosting the NFC Championship Game.
We do know how that ended, but three years later, they won the Super Bowl in North Texas with a different QB altogether.
History doesn’t promise anything. As many have pointed out, history may mean that a coach has never won big in the Super Bowl with two franchises. So let’s go back to ranking sixth during this run with a backup QB and a defense that everyone already gave up on (including me). Isn’t it worth seeing who is above them in that top five?
Pittsburgh is plus-nine and sits in the playoffs at 11-2 overall.
Miami is plus-eight and in a playoff spot, which certainly was seen as farfetched when the year began.
Indianapolis is plus-seven and also in the playoffs at the moment, right above Miami.
New Orleans is plus-six and staying afloat at 10-3 without Drew Brees for a month.
And the New York Giants are plus-four. They have won four of five and have a chance to win the division when literally nobody thought that a possibility.
Bottom five in this only stat that matters since Week 8?
Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Cincinnati and Denver.
It is really simple. Yes, the pass is more efficient than the run. Yes, play-action makes everything easier on the offense. Yes, there are more schemes installed in this league now that take much of the decision-making back from the QB, which has allowed teams to win in different ways. Yes, you will probably regret paying a running back big money for a myriad of reasons.
These trends are all important to understand and to update frequently.
But at the simple heart of the matter, this sport comes down to one stat every year from World War II until yesterday. Turnovers are the easiest way to win and the easiest way to lose.
Daryl Reaugh has an informative and illuminating cliche that he applies to his beloved sport of hockey, but I think it fits here with football: “Turnovers are like ex-wives. The more you have, the more it is going to cost you.”
The Bengals never had a chance after they started fumble, fumble, fumble unless Andy Dalton would have obliged them with his own mistakes. He did not, and looked the part of a very competent QB during a second-quarter drive when he made several big-time throws to move the ball on third downs before finding Amari Cooper for a touchdown. It was an important homecoming for him and the game was over by halftime.
The Bengals are a poor team, and the Cowboys have acted like one for a while. But the turnover trends reveal the real story of 2020. They fumbled away the margin for error in those first several games and never took the ball back until the season was already over at 2-5. By then, the injuries prevented any prayer of a miraculous rally to pull the season from the fire. It happens all across the league.
But if they have grown from that enough to emphasize the details in 2021, we won’t have to collectively nap through pointless games next December, too.
Maybe the first season of Mike McCarthy’s tenure in both cities will serve a similar big-picture purpose that only becomes clear a few years later. We can only hope for now. But know this: The decade doesn’t matter in this great and evolving sport; whether it is Tom Landry, Jimmy Johnson, Bill Parcells or Mike McCarthy, nobody wins anything in this league — especially a Super Bowl — without protecting the ball and the turnover differentials.
That truth was made abundantly clear yet again this season.
We spend every year looking for the latest trends in the evolution of a complex game. There are always new approaches and tactics that move the entire sport in a new direction — and if you don’t keep up, you get left behind. The NFL rarely arrives at its new destination overnight. Rather, constant evolution continues to turn the wheel a little at a time. Over the course of five to ten years, the sport becomes unrecognizable from what it once was.
A few football truisms, however — and the number is much lower than most broadcasters or even coaches seem to admit — seem to be eternally constant. The sport can change and evolve and update, but these few items will always land on their feet and serve as the goalposts of this generation just as it was for the one before it and, no doubt, after it.
However, anyone watching during Sunday’s game (or napping, which I would probably understand as well) will attest to an eternal truism: a game can be over very quickly if a team doesn’t take care of the football.
Those silly Bengals ended each of their first three drives with fumbles lost. None of them were because their star QB was injured.
The Bengals held on to the ball on Sunday with all of the certainty and sureness the Cowboys have in 2020 — which is to say it looked like it might be slathered in butter and vaseline. The Bengals couldn’t hold the ball on Sunday. Consequently, they had no chance. It was like looking in some sort of sick Cowboys mirror. We could see the symptoms much more easily when, for once, they didn’t hit so close to home.
The Cowboys’ turnover problems have crippled their chances in 2020. Now that they are essentially playing out the string, let’s just call it for what it was. Injuries will be blamed in the obituary of this season, and they played a starring role. But I bet the absences of Tyron Smith, La’el Collins and especially Dak Prescott would be remembered differently if the Cowboys weren’t coughing the ball up left and right in September like they had no care in the world.
Turnovers and ball security are the lifeblood of winning teams. They aren’t everything, but can often be enough to be considered the most important factors in games and seasons.
I would say the Cowboys’ 2020 campaign will reinforce that. Dallas has lost the season because they could not take care of the football in the slightest. No team has fumbled more balls in 2020. People will want to blame injuries and coaching because they are popular and usual suspects, but we all know what derailed the train. It was giveaways. It almost always is.
In the first five weeks of the season, Dallas gave the ball away 11 times, with seven of them being fumbles. Only the Eagles had anything close, but in their case, they were an interception machine. Dallas featured a fumble here and a fumble there. Star running back Ezekiel Elliott currently leads the NFL in fumbles by non-QBs. Prescott and Elliott fumbled repeatedly in those first couple months, and the team was buried.
Even with a clean day yesterday from the Cowboys, they still sit near the top in giveaways.
And takeaways? Well, that is a fairly interesting story, too. At the bye week, Dallas was dead last in takeaways. They had played 28 quarters of football and had a measly three takeaways to show for it. This, of course, was part of the case against the defense and not knowing which end is up. We concluded Mike Nolan must not have a clue and neither must his players (let’s be honest — that case is not off the table in either regard). Not only were there holes in the scheme you could drive a truck through, but the defenders also couldn’t even cause one important turnover when they need it.
So, seven weeks in — as Prescott was lost for the season and Andy Dalton suffered a concussion — Dallas had a turnover differential of negative-13, which was not only the worst in the NFL but the worst by a very unhealthy margin. Denver was second-worst at negative-8, which is still brutal, but not close to as poor as Dallas.
Seven weeks and six games have passed since that humiliation at Washington. While there is much broken about this team, I am starting to wonder if the team has at least turned the corner on this most cancerous issue that made everything else resemble wallpaper selections inside the cabins in the Titanic. It probably doesn’t matter if we go floral print or solid color, ma’am; there is a hole the size of a small planet in the side of the ship. We are sinking. Let’s skip the wallpaper.
Since the start of the eighth game (at Philadelphia), Dallas went from way in the red to a team operating at a turnover differential in the black. I know that seems hard to believe and it certainly does employ my arbitrary sample sizes, but I think it is notable. Playing six games with nothing but backup QBs — three different ones, in fact — Dallas is below the league average in giving the ball away. Instead of ranking 32nd, they are now 12th. You can win in 12th.
What about takeaways, though? Is the defense actually able to do something reasonably productive? The jury remains out, but the early returns are not bad.
Since the start of the eighth game, Dallas now gets takeaways at a reasonable level. They have taken the ball away 11 times during those six games, which not only is above average (8.8) but vaults them to ninth in the NFL. They’ve gone from 32nd to ninth during this stretch of time.
Now, the big one. If you put the two together, you see the encouraging evidence of what Mike McCarthy was simply saying was the first thing they must do back in October. He said four weeks was a pattern, and the team simply could not play or win with these turnover problems. The turnover differential after seven weeks was minus-13. Since then it is plus-three.
That may not sound like much, but do you know where plus- three ranks since that bye week? Sixth in the NFL. 32nd up to sixth is a recovery worth noting. It doesn’t mean that they are destined to have an amazing 2021, but it does say that they may have a foundation in place that can both take care of the ball and attack it. Of course, it could just be simple statistical regression. Perhaps it’s a random set of numbers for which we wish to apply meaning (welcome to my career).
But, as I have stated all season, I have spent a fair amount of this journey of Mike McCarthy’s first year at the helm remembering the trip of the 2006 Green Bay Packers (which might also be a unique experience almost no readers can recall or would want to recall).
McCarthy’s first squad was a very forgettable Packers team. The clock was ticking on the end of Brett Favre’s career and nobody had a sense of humor anymore. After Mike Sherman’s failed run, it sort of appeared they took the easy way out and hired a new guy that nobody hardly knew of unless they took special note of the positional coaches of the last decade. McCarthy did not appear to be the “next big thing” at the time. He definitely seemed like the fourth or fifth choice.
Green Bay was 4-8 when the calendar turned to December that year. It seemed like McCarthy might be on a short leash already. Maybe the Packers had hired the wrong guy. Now, I want to say right now that I do not really believe in any run late in the year automatically means anything heading into the next season. But I do believe a coach needs time to get everyone in the room and in the organization to recognize and accept that the coach is here for a long time. It won’t magically elevate a team to the Super Bowl in Year One, but it can happen fast if we can turn the page and make the adjustments. That 2006 team was noticeably different at the end than they were at the beginning. And they had Favre the entire 16 games. After a 1-4 start and a 4-8 record, they went 4-0. A 13-3 follow-up 2007 ended with the Packers hosting the NFC Championship Game.
We do know how that ended, but three years later, they won the Super Bowl in North Texas with a different QB altogether.
History doesn’t promise anything. As many have pointed out, history may mean that a coach has never won big in the Super Bowl with two franchises. So let’s go back to ranking sixth during this run with a backup QB and a defense that everyone already gave up on (including me). Isn’t it worth seeing who is above them in that top five?
Pittsburgh is plus-nine and sits in the playoffs at 11-2 overall.
Miami is plus-eight and in a playoff spot, which certainly was seen as farfetched when the year began.
Indianapolis is plus-seven and also in the playoffs at the moment, right above Miami.
New Orleans is plus-six and staying afloat at 10-3 without Drew Brees for a month.
And the New York Giants are plus-four. They have won four of five and have a chance to win the division when literally nobody thought that a possibility.
Bottom five in this only stat that matters since Week 8?
Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Cincinnati and Denver.
It is really simple. Yes, the pass is more efficient than the run. Yes, play-action makes everything easier on the offense. Yes, there are more schemes installed in this league now that take much of the decision-making back from the QB, which has allowed teams to win in different ways. Yes, you will probably regret paying a running back big money for a myriad of reasons.
These trends are all important to understand and to update frequently.
But at the simple heart of the matter, this sport comes down to one stat every year from World War II until yesterday. Turnovers are the easiest way to win and the easiest way to lose.
Daryl Reaugh has an informative and illuminating cliche that he applies to his beloved sport of hockey, but I think it fits here with football: “Turnovers are like ex-wives. The more you have, the more it is going to cost you.”
The Bengals never had a chance after they started fumble, fumble, fumble unless Andy Dalton would have obliged them with his own mistakes. He did not, and looked the part of a very competent QB during a second-quarter drive when he made several big-time throws to move the ball on third downs before finding Amari Cooper for a touchdown. It was an important homecoming for him and the game was over by halftime.
The Bengals are a poor team, and the Cowboys have acted like one for a while. But the turnover trends reveal the real story of 2020. They fumbled away the margin for error in those first several games and never took the ball back until the season was already over at 2-5. By then, the injuries prevented any prayer of a miraculous rally to pull the season from the fire. It happens all across the league.
But if they have grown from that enough to emphasize the details in 2021, we won’t have to collectively nap through pointless games next December, too.
Maybe the first season of Mike McCarthy’s tenure in both cities will serve a similar big-picture purpose that only becomes clear a few years later. We can only hope for now. But know this: The decade doesn’t matter in this great and evolving sport; whether it is Tom Landry, Jimmy Johnson, Bill Parcells or Mike McCarthy, nobody wins anything in this league — especially a Super Bowl — without protecting the ball and the turnover differentials.
That truth was made abundantly clear yet again this season.