Manny Diaz, who’s back at Mississippi State as its defensive coordinator, has an interesting theory about how to generate turnovers on defense – and he ought to have an inkling, as the defense he ran last season led the nation in takeaways:
“It’s always going to start with stopping the run. If you stop the run, you make them have to throw to beat you. If they have to throw to win, the ball is in harm’s way. No one turns the ball over more than the quarterback.
“There’s a bunch of things you can do to get after the quarterback to make him make mistakes. But if you can’t stop the run, then you have no chance of doing that. Our run defense will be the first thing we’ll pride ourselves on. Anything from that point on, that’s where the turnovers start to come.”
That kind of made me wonder how Georgia’s 2014 season fit into that. If you look at the defensive turnover and rushing game logs from last year, here’s what you’ll find:
- First seven regular season games: 2.43 turnovers per game; 3.04 yards per carry
- Last five regular season games: 1.80 turnovers per game; 5.33 yards per carry
- Bowl game: 3 turnovers; 2.30 yards per carry
There does seem to be some correlation there. Just something to keep in the back of your mind as Pruitt and Rocker figure out how to restructure a defensive line that will have plenty of new faces being counted on to do a better job of stopping the run than we saw in the second half of last season.
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Is it just my old fart ways, or is there a theme here; stop the run on defense and run RTDB on offense. Some people say, “oh Moe, you are old and outdated.” I reckon I’ll just keep drinking that old outdated PBR too; it ain’t in a pretty bottle, it’s cheap, and it works.
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Not to mention anytime tells you they want some other kind of beer you get to quote Dennis Hopper…..BULLSHIT! PABST BLUE RIBBON!
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Both fumbles on the goal against GT were by runners. I guess that could fall under “stopping the run”. .then the final turnover in overtime..an interception. I think Diaz is just stating the obvious.
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Gedouttaheyah! More turnovers in early games of the season? Well, yeah. Less turnovers as the O becomes more stable and Chubb is turned loose? Why, hell yeah. Does turnovers have anything to do with running the ball a lot? Meh. Not enough data to make the correlation.
Does getting turnovers have anything to do with winning? A resounding yeah has been heard from heyah before. So, what else is new?
Was it Devine or the OSU Coach who beat the Clemson player’s helmet into his taunting head who said,” When you put the ball in the air, three things can happen and two of them are bad.”? Hey, Manny reinvented an old adage! Wow!
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I appreciate the witty sarcasm, but what does Chubb running the ball have to do with the number of turnovers Georgia forced on defense?
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t changes the metric for the running yards gained vs the turnovers.
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That would certainly explain the Florida and Georgia Tech games.
Needless to say, I don’t have a clue what your point is here.
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His point is…..Cojones, gimme sum of that good stuff. I got the down to seeds and stems again blues. 😥🎈
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This is a very back of the envelope calculation but it’s kind of interesting. In 2014 in all of FCS teams passed the ball 52,777 times and threw 1,487 interceptions which is 2.8%.
In the same season they ran the ball 64,366 times and fumbled 1,211 times which is 3.7%.
I’m guessing the reason that data doesn’t conform to expectation is that a play that is designed to be a pass that ends in the quarterback fumbling is scored as a run and I don’t see an obvious way to segregate fumbles on designed passes from all fumbles. But I’d be really curious to see it, because on the face of it, it’s not all that clear to me that Diaz is right even though it seems like somehow he must be.
All numbers from CFBstats.com
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I’m also ignoring the amount of fumbles they lost rather than the times they fumbled and recovered it. That seems random.
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I got your D A T A. Dumb Accounting Technique Actuarially. 🎈👣
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I think that if you put all the data together (and thank you for that summary and mentioning the outliers), it shows ole Manny doesn’t have a statistical point to pee on.
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But it really seems like he should be right….pretty interesting if he’s not. Of course even if he’s wrong about the quarterbacks frequency of turnovers, stopping the run is still a thing that we should be doing.
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Your math is wrong. If they ran the ball 64,366 times and fumbled 1,211 times that is just 1.89%. Hope accounting isn’t your day job 🙂
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Doh! They LOST 1211 (or 1.8%) of the fumbles. They fumbled 2,407 (or 3.7%) times.
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What is troubling is what Diaz was saying about how it all starts with run defense. To me this is where we have struggled, look at the conf rankings in rush def:
2008- 6th
2009- 3rd (everybody threw on Willie)
2010- 7th
2011- 3rd
2012- 12th
2013- 6th
2014- 8th
Unfortunately, our coaches don’t get it. 2 top 3 finishes in 7 seasons sucks.
Another reason why the slump with sec championships will continue for us.
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He’s right of course but what he says isn’t novel. I have the honor to know a guy who coached championship defenses in Georgia high schools for three plus decades and he will tell you the first thing a great defense HAS to do is stop the run. Everything else builds off of that. I also hear a little Woody Hayes there: “three things can happen when you throw the football and two of them are bad.”
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Your coaching friend is wrong. Look at how 3 of the top 4 in the playoffs did in rush def:
FSU 73rd
Oregon 62nd
Ohio St 34th
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No wonder Alabama has dominated, look at their run defense since Saban took over. Must be nice. Florida’s was good too but they had no offense.
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Losing Taylor to DV expulsion critically impacted depth as the season went onwards. Depth is being addressed thank goodness.
Trenton will be a force combined with Mayes, now if a couple DE’s can develop some discipline and ‘set the edge’ we should be red clay hound run stoppahas,
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