The Enigma Of Turnovers – Reprised

As you can see, if you win the turnover battle by one, you will win about two-thirds of the time. Since your chances of winning jump from 50% to only around 67%, it’s hardly an all-important factor. I can tell you that preventing any rushing touchdowns has a bigger effect on winning probability, so lets make sure now to over state that change.

Where it does begin to matter is once the turnover margin gets to 2 or more. At that point, the probability of winning becomes about 83%, that’s significant. But what we don’t know is where the causation begins. Do turnovers lead to losing, or does losing lead to turnovers?

What I mean by this is that, late in games, the team that is behind tends to take more chances and play more aggressively than they normally would. This aggressive play leads to higher probability of turning the ball over, and thus more turnovers. Conversely, the team in the lead tends to play very conservatively and takes very few chances that might lead to turning the ball over. This conservative play decreases the probability of turning the ball over, and thus actually leads to having less turnovers than that team might have had if that team wasn’t ahead.

The idea isn’t far fetched if you think about. How often do we see games in which a team “seals the win” with a last minute interception? It actually happens pretty often. QBs do tend to throw more picks when they are behind and the clock is running out.

I’m not meaning to say that this is the only explanation for the data above. The data just tells us correlation, and not causation.

I honestly believe that losing and turnovers are interrelated causal variables. What that means is that turning the ball over leads to being behind in games, and that being behind in  games leads to more turnovers late in the game. I think this is why turnovers tend to happen in bunches. I should state that, at least at this point in the analysis, that this explanation is just conjecture.

So there you have it. In what is probably the longest article I’ll ever publish here on 12th Man Rising (or at least it feels like it) I’ve laid out mathematically and logically that turnovers aren’t nearly as important as we’ve been lead to believe. Do they matter? yes. Winning the turnover battle does increase your chance of winning.

Are the the all-important stat that the sports world’s talking heads would have you believe they are? absolutely not.