A quick gander at the NFL Drive Stats shows the Redskins as having the 2nd most yards/drive in the NFL. The Skins rank way ahead of teams that are being regarded as the ‘unstoppable’ offenses in the NFL. The Colts, Chargers, Bengals and Giants all rank below the Skins in yards per drive. Of course all these teams have scored many more points than the Skins. They are 2 main reasons for this: 1) Lack of Defensive Turnovers 2) Lack of big special team returns.
Today I’m going to focus on the turnover issue, and why I’m optimistic on this front. It is well known that the Skins have 2 takeaways on the season. Both of those takeaways came in week 1 vs. The Bears. Every single week this year the Skins have lost the turnover battle (the Bears game was started by Ramsey who had 2 turnovers in his limited time). Normally this isn’t the path to being a winning team, but except for the Dallas game, the Redskins have clearly been the better team in all of their games. So since we aren’t playing the Bears anytime soon, what possible reason could there be for optimism?
There are two types of takeaways, the fumble recovery and the interception. Interceptions can be summed by looking at the QBs the Skins are facing in the upcoming weeks. The last 4 weeks they’ve gone up against experienced veteran QBs (Bledsoe, Hasselback, Plummer, Green). Now some of those guys aren’t exactly Bernie Kosar in terms of holding onto the ball, but they are veterans who aren’t going to be surprised by our defensive sets. Three of the next 4 games the Skins will go against young QBs, so I’d expect a few picks. Alex Smith, Eli Manning and Chris Simms will all be getting their 1st or 2nd glimpse at a Gregg Williams defense, and I’d expect some miscues.
In terms of forcing fumbles we are actually a middle of the pack team. We’ve forced 9 fumbles through 5 games, that ranks as tied for 13th in the NFL in fumbles forced per game (I’m using the per game basis, since we’ve had many teams have yet to have a bye). We’ve recovered 1 of the 9 fumbles we’ve forced. That 11% recovery rate ranks ahead of only Houston (0 for 4), and well below the league average of 51% recovery. Recovering fumbles isn’t a skill, its mainly luck. Regression to the mean will mean that will start to have some of those fumbles bounce our way.
So the number say, the turnovers will come. Now if only the on the field product can follow suit.