But Seriously, Hold On to the Ball

by SCM on Aug 31, 2010 6:31 AM CDT in Michigan Football

When writing about certain things in football, well let's be honest here: when writing about nearly anything in football, you usually are encroaching upon the territory of well-worn and timeless clichés. This is absolutely the case when discussing turnovers. Even the most plebian follower of the game can tell you that more often than not if you hold on to the damn ball (HOTTDB), you win. Duh. But because our beloved charges have not HOTTDB very well the past several campaigns, I figured it might be worthwhile to make a visual representation of this concept. This will hopefully be somewhat more straightforward than the recent show I saw on the Discovery Channel that featured Leonard Susskind attempting to explain how he theoretically proved, using string theory, that black holes do not violate a fundamental law of physics as originally suggested by Stephen Hawking. That law of course being conservation of information. Needless to say, it didn't exactly result in a "lightbulb" moment for this viewer. Anyways, without further ado, the graph:

So since it's so close to the season, we'll just deal with the reality that most in-depth analysis has begun to morph into platitudes, and offer our own: I don't think it's particularly unreasonable to assert that this haphazard team with the worst defense OF ALL TIME (statistically) would've been no worse than 7-5 last season had they simply managed to do one thing: take care of the football. Just how bad has it been the past two years? Well let's compare them against the other 8 seasons of the past decade...

Yeesh those last three years... How about 85 turnovers lost against 65 gained? Down a cool twenty spot since that run in 2006... double arg. So listen, I understand this isn't earth shattering, but in all of the worry and over-analysis regarding the depth chart and the secondary, one of the major problems this team has had over the past several seasons has faded to the background: turnovers. If Michigan can right the ship in this category alone, then that alone would certainly go a long way towards getting this team over the hump record-wise. So for everyone's sake, including inanimate objects everywhere, let's hope that they've really focused on holding on to the football.

Tweet Comment 2 comments | 0 recs |

Do you like this story?

Comments

That ball is a prolate spheroid

It is the same shape object for Michigan as it is for the Wolverines’ opponents.

To me this comes down to coaching, stressing the importance of ball control, and drilling ball protection tactics. I’m sure they’ve worked on it extensively, and it’s hard to have freshman “get it” when they’ve got a lot of bad high school habits to realize and overcome.

Go Blue!

by markusr2007 on Aug 31, 2010 1:48 PM CDT reply actions

Rodriguez harped on this all off season

The first thing out of his mouth all off season was ball security. We may have to go all “The Program” and make the players carry footballs around under threat of death for fumbling.

Maize n Brew
Because Football is Better with Beer

by Maize n Brew Dave on Aug 31, 2010 2:55 PM CDT up reply actions