South Carolina football, disappearing turnovers and the close-win conundrum
At the start of each spring, South Carolina football coach Will Muschamp lays out the key pillars of his program and philosophy. When his defensive coordinator, Travaris Robinson, spoke this spring, one topic of concern took center stage for him.
The Gamecocks’ ability to force turnovers, and to a degree prevent them, has been a roller coaster, and it bears some responsibility for the inconsistent fortunes of the Gamecocks program.
“We need to do a better job of turnovers,” Robinson said. “You look at our first couple years, it was 28, 27. And then you look at the drop-off over the next two years, it was 17, 16, something like that. You’re talking about 10 turnovers, that’s 10 extra possessions for our offense.”
In football, those takeaways can be a powerful salve to cover for other issues, but they loom as an inconsistent factor. Some years, they might save a so-so defense and boost up an offense on the other side.
But their presence is often finicky. Teams that force them in great numbers don’t often do so every season. Turnover outlier years are often seen as a good sign a team is living off something it can’t rely on the next season.
In Columbia, forcing turnovers gave a big boost to Muschamp’s first defense, which managed to hold up despite a range of ailments, and then they helped the team’s second defense under him deliver a solid season on most fronts.
But the past two years, the turnovers have dipped, and those get-out-of-jail free cards that flip field position and leave opponents frustrated at a lost scoring chance haven’t bailed the Gamecocks out on offense.
Here’s where South Carolina’s defense has ranked in terms of the percent of non-garbage time or clock-killing drives against FBS competition that ended in turnovers.
▪ 2016: 3rd
▪ 2017: 47th
▪ 2018: 100th
▪ 2019: 89th
Note: The oft-maligned Jon Hoke “bend-don’t-break” defense in 2015 actually ranked ninth.
“We’ve got to do a better job of creating opportunities for our football team,” Muschamp said. “It’s the number one stat in ball to be successful. You look at last year, we won the turnover margin in five games, we won four of ‘em. We tied or lost the turnover margin in seven games, we lost all seven games.”
On offense, the team fell from 57th to 67th to 100th in Jake Bentley’s three years before jumping up to 24th last season.
USC’s offense was helped a little last season by some of what one might call bounces. Usually defenses pick off about 22 percent of the balls defenders get their hands on. Gamecocks opponents were at 11 percent.
And where this comes into most vivid contrast is in close games.
There’s some debate about how much control a team has over close games. On one hand, doing all the little things right matters. On the other, the ball is still oblong and something getting batted in a different way that no one can control can turn a ball landing harmlessly on the ground into a, you guessed it, turnover.
In fact, those turnovers, which might make a scoring chance come up empty or set up an offense in a great spot, become even more important in those tight games (ESPN’s Bill Connelly estimated turnovers are worth about five points apiece).
Count Muschamp as a believer that a team controls its close-game destiny, something that only makes sense for a coach in charge or preparing for almost every situation.
“We’ve been a good situational team up till last year,” Muschamp said. “We’re 13-5 in one-score games in the first three years, which is really good. That means you’re making good decisions as coaches, good decisions as players, in critical situations when the games coming down to the line.”
His team has found itself in a lot of close games, and they have had an impact on the bottom line that is the final record. Muschamp at points talked up his team’s success in that arena, saying opposing coaches called his staff to asked what they did to prep for those situations.
USC’s record in one-score games, by year:
▪ 2016: 4-2
▪ 2017: 5-1 (with another win by 8)
▪ 2018: 3-2
▪ 2019: 1-2
Muschamp pointed to that last year, noting some of those games were close until late, when offensive turnovers or missed fourth downs pushed the lead out more. For his team to get those close games in line, the turnovers likely have to revert to what they were. That’s something the staff has an eye on going toward the 2020 season.
“We’re 1-2 in one-score games last year,” Muschamp said. “But we didn’t give ourselves the opportunity in a lot of those situations when we should’ve been in a one-score game at least to have an opportunity to win the game. So those are things we’ve looked at.”
This story was originally published June 1, 2020 at 5:34 AM.
