Quote:
Originally Posted by Buehler445
It can be an indicator of efficiency. That’s it. At best. It’s not even that highly correlated.
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Yeah, it's not a good
indicator of anything really other than a team being able to string plays together, as I said earlier.
But TOP can be a
factor in how a team plays the game, which is a different thing. You can literally scare a team into changing their gameplan by holding onto the ball for 10 minutes at a time.
It's kind of like yards/carry average. Don't want to get real involved in this, but let's just use a quick hypothetical example.
Let's say you have a RB that runs 10 times in the first half, and the first 9 carries he averages 2 yards/carry, so he's got 18 yards or so. Then for his last carry of the half he breaks out and somehow runs for 82 yards. So at the half this guy has 100 yards rushing, which most people would say he averaged 10 yards/carry.
No DC would look at it like that. A guy that just ran for 10 yards/carry on your defense is scary as hell, and any DC would be twisting his brain into a pretzel trying to figure out how to stop that guy. He'd change his scheme, move guys around, sub in guys he normally might not even play, but do whatever it took to slow that guy down.
But any real DC would look at those stats and say to himself, "well we held him to half the NFL average for 9 carries and then he got a little lucky and broke off a big run. Tighten up whatever allowed him to get loose like that and we got this guy."
It's kind of the same with TOP. If you have a team that grinds down the field 10 minutes at a time but either doesn't score or only kicks FGs, that's not very scary. If they bulldoze your D for 10 minutes at a time and always score, and half the time it's TDs, now you have something to worry about.