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Pete Shrager is excited about our prospects this year..
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Pick a player whose responsibility is to rush the passer, who does a poor job of it.
Dude, I'm not playing stupid games to entertain your flawed argument. Do your own homework and get back to me.
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And they may not, but they understand how the league functions when it all plays out on the field, at least in terms of turnover differential in this instance. In other words, they can tell you how much the coaching and drills with regard to turnovers actually affect the game, in terms of making some teams better than others in that regard.
In this particular case the coaching and drills appear to be relatively meaningless, as turnovers fluctuate randomly and not systematically. That doesn't mean coaching and drills are meaningless in all cases, of course.
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Aaron Rodgers's passer rating, for example, which means it's a function of his own talent and not luck. There are many other things as well. The New England Patriots' record since Brady and Bellichick started working together, which is a reflection of their talent and not luck.
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Matthew Stafford's average-level performance for example is just as systematic. The Cleveland Browns' poor record the past few years is just as systematic. Not just exceptionally good variables vary systematically.
The point is that there are lots of things that vary systematically in the league, and turnover differential isn't one of them.
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If you watch much football you'll quickly see that certain coaches do well with the turnover margins. Guys like Marty Schottenheimer and Bill Belichick are famous for always having a positive turnover margin. They may not win that every game, but almost every season they are positive. They devote a lot of training time and play calling (both on offense and defense) to minimizing turnovers and maximizing opportunities for takeaways.
Now, obviously, you did not do as I asked and look at those statistics from game 6 onward. If you had, you would quickly see a dramatic change in our turnovers. Particularly, the QB position became a lot better at not turning over the ball as the QB and receivers learned the offense better. Those are most assuredly not luck. Those are attributable to growing pains. Those first 5 games we racked up the negative turnover margin with lots of give-aways and few take-aways. The fact that this metric changed is, obviously, not luck. If you want to call that difference smoke and mirrors ... well then we disagree on that point.
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I would recommend you read the following information about how changes in turnover margin from one part of a season to another is completely expected within teams throughout the league:
http://blog.minitab.com/blog/the-st...look-at-how-turnovers-impacted-the-nfl-season
As for Belichick for example, when he was with the Browns from 1991 to 1995, his teams' overall turnover margin during those seasons was -5.
Belichick indeed stands out from the crowd with New England, however, as his +171 turnover margin during his tenure there dwarfs the league average during that period. But even then, New England's turnover margin during those seasons has varied all the way from -6 to +28. In seven of those seasons their turnover margin was at least +10, and in 10 of those seasons it was less than +10.
Why all that variation, if the explanation is simply that Belichick is so good at coaching with regard to turnovers? Why don't the Patriots simply enjoy a turnover margin between let's say +15 and +20, every year? If coaching were the only cause of their success in that area, one would expect that sort of very stable and predictable performance, rather than loads of variation from year to year.
I'll tell you why: because per the link above, the only component of turnover margin that varies even somewhat systematically is interceptions thrown, and the Patriots have led the league in that area during Belichick's tenure. Now is that a function of Belichick, or Brady?
Even if we were to attribute Belichick's overall turnover margin in New England completely to coaching, we certainly can't attribute the Dolphins' change in turnovers during 2016 to a similar stable coaching trait of Adam Gase's, when we have nowhere near the sample size for Gase, and turnovers vary greatly from one part of a season to another throughout the league, even within teams, per the link above.
See if you can find someone here who's willing to bet for example that the 2017 Dolphins will have a turnover margin of at least +10, or even +5. Anyone would be a fool to make such a bet. They'd be similarly foolish to bet that the turnover margin will be worse than -5, or worse than -10. We simply don't know what's going to happen with any precision.
And why is that? Because turnovers vary largely randomly and not systematically, which makes it very difficult to predict with any precision what any one team is going to do in that area in any one year.
