Why is it that Nevada has been able to recover only 2 of it's 14 forced fumbles?
Well we think this actually isn't that difficult to answer. No it's not rotten luck, although often times it feels like it.
Nevada's defense in general this season has not "swarmed" to the football. There are a lot of times that the defensive front is penetrating up field past where the fumble may occur and the defensive secondary is spread out all over the field. Not a lot of gang tackling taking place this season. You have to have players (outside of the guy forcing the ball out) around the football in order for one of them to fall on it.
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3 comments:
I think the D has done a better job of swarming the ball this year than last, and that luck has played a part, but you did get me thinking about this a bit more. Nevada's fumbles are mostly out of the running game while other teams mostly pass against the Pack. Perhaps fewer fumbles are recovered by the offense when it's done by a QB or RB than a player acting as a receiver. Still, we've seen the Pack fight over and lose a QB fumble, fail to recover QB fumbles, fail to recover RB fumbles. I think the biggest factor is still luck and the small sample size, but that's hard to prove. I'm going to try though.
Well, I looked at the rest of the WAC, the Pac10 and the MWC and no teams have as bad a fumbles recovered ratio as Nevada. SDSU, UW and WSU are about as bad on one side of the ball or the other, but nobody is as bad on both sides of the ball. Wyoming is even worse at recovering their own fumbles than the Pack. Going back to '04 Nevada recovered about 50% of fumbles on both sides of the ball except for in '06 - the best year of defense we've had in ages. That year we lost 13 of 18 on offense but recovered 17 of 22 on defense. I still think it's mostly a statistical fluke, but I can't prove it.
Good info. If you can prove otherwise, we'll listen. And you are right about a couple of instances where players chose to try and pick up balls vs. fall on it.
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