This time around, I decided to play around with some of the figures on turnover margins in the Big Ten, and to keep it a little manageable, I only went back to 2004 with each team.  For this analysis, I actually did not put Maryland and Rutgers in here.

You can spot a few general trends, I have found, among the many anomalies. What sort of anomalies? Well, for example, in the period I looked at here, the team with the best overall numbers for turnover margin belong to a 2006 Minnesota team that went 6-7 on the year, but managed an per game ratio of 1.385 and was +18 for turnovers that year.

I went into this thinking about turnovers as more of an “in the moment” sort of stat, but as I said, you can see a few things arise when you look at a team’s relative success over time.  Here are the nine-year averages:

Generally speaking, teams that have had sustained success with recovering more turnovers than they lose do better. You knew that already, but here it is in chart form. I sorted this table by win percentage over that period. You see where Michigan sits here – 5^thoverall in win percentage but with a slightly negative turnover margin in that space. How does that happen, you wonder?

Compare that with Ohio State in the same timeframe:

There is some correlation between sustained success with turnovers and general team success, although when calculated the coefficient comes out to only 0.522.

There is enough here to guess at what sort of season you can expect to have based simply on the choice of having a positive or negative margin, if there were such a choice to be made in advance. Here is how the individual season record would break down then:

I found this rather interesting actually. It definitely confirms the dynamic nature of football and how you can overcome problems with turnovers, but the split is stark all the same. There are successful teams that had bad years in this regard – 2005 Ohio State went 10-2 with a -0.750 ratio and -9 for an overall margin, for example. Again, this is one of those many anomalies that turned up as I went through the data.

So you have an idea of what the spreads actually were when it came to teams and margins, I offer this table which shows various overall margin categories and the average wins and losses associated with them, but also the maximum and minimum number of wins in the grouping.

There is something going on here – performance does gradually decline as your margins get worse, but not necessarily. What it said to me is that you can be a very good team when it comes to recovering turnovers and still suck, or you can be awful in this metric and still win often, which is something that you also knew. The best performers who were also the winningest and the worst who were also the worst in general are here:

To see overall totals versus averages for per game and total margin in completely arbitrary groupings, there is this table:

TL;DR CONCLUSION:

This is another diary where I think the idea is to really draw your own conclusion. I could tell you what I believe that this confirms, which is that winning and turnover margin do have some manner of relationship, but it obviously doesn’t always relate to a team’s success overall, at least in a given season or even game really. You can goof repeatedly and still win if you have other things going for you or if the turnovers amount to nothing in the way of scoring for the other team. I think that might be the key to the many instances where teams were overall bad in this department but still managed, say, a 9-3 or 10-2 record – they found ways to not get hurt by their mistakes, or they were playing teams less than capable of capitalizing on them. Opportunities indeed.

OBLIGATORY: