North Carolina State University Athletics
Behind The Scenes With Tony Haynes: One Stat That Matters
8/28/2001 12:00:00 AM | Pack Athletics
Aug. 28, 2001
By Tony Haynes
You know football season has officially arrived when you hear coaches start saying things like:
"The most important thing to me is that we play hard and give 100 percent."
And...
"This team we're facing this week is capable of winning on any given Saturday."
And...
"We're not good enough to beat anybody if we don't play our best."
And finally...
"You can't win football games if you turn the ball over."
The last quote is the one I like the most because it is absolutely, positively and unequivocally correct. Sure, football coaches dish out a vast array of platitudes and clich?s over the course of a long season, but when they beat the obligatory dead horse with their lectures on turnovers, they're hammering away for a good reason.
We need to look no further than what happened to North Carolina and Virginia last weekend.
Facing Oklahoma's defending national champions in Norman, the Tar Heels and their generous handouts made even the federal government look frugal. But instead of throwing money away, UNC spent itself into a scoreboard deficit by giving the ball up five times in the first half. The Sooners, who didn't exactly look like a well-oiled machine on offense either, took advantage by building a 41-14 halftime lead.
Virginia encountered a similar fate at Wisconsin. In a 26-17 loss to the Badgers, the Cavaliers couldn't get out of their own way as they turned the ball over three times in the first half. It's no accident that the winning team owned a 3-1 advantage in the turnover battle.
While we often spend an inordinate amount of time studying things like total yards, yards rushing, time of possession and completion percentage, the one statistic that most often tells the story of a game or even a season is the statistical category we've all come to know as turnover margin.
The bottom line is this: teams that have more takeaways than giveaways over the course of an 11 or 12 game season will usually win more games than they lose.
Last season, the four winningest teams in the Atlantic Coast Conference also had the best turnover margins in the league. And North Carolina (6-5) was the only club to finish with a winning record after having more giveaways than takeaways (-1.09 per game).
Duke, which finished up with a winless 0-11 mark, was also dead last in turnover margin (-1.18).
When it posted a 6-6 record in 1999, NC State's takeaway/giveaway ratio ranked seventh in the ACC. In improving to 8-4 last season, the Wolfpack was fourth in the league (+0.36).
No wonder coaches look for quarterbacks who make good decisions, skill players who hang on to the ball like its their most prized possession and athletic defensive players who apply attacking pressure for 60 minutes.
And no wonder they keep telling us, "you can't win football games if you turn the ball over."
Turnover margin: it's one stat that really matters.
