Of all the things Arizona Cardinals head coach Jonathan Gannon emphasizes to his team consistently is the overall importance of explosive plays and turnovers/takeaways.
“I know they’re both important,” Gannon said Thursday. “On offense you’ve got to protect the ball and you need to try to generate explosives and on defense, it’s the opposite. You want to take it away and don’t give ‘em up.”
Very basic, obviously. But come up short in those categories, especially the ball security area, and the chance for success is reduced.
The subject for Gannon and defensive coordinator Nick Rallis this week was the paucity of takeaways for the defense. Following their fourth no-takeaway game of the season in last Sunday’s loss to the Panthers, the Cardinals enter Week 17 tied for 24th in the NFL with only 14 takeaways.
The only teams with fewer are the Jets and Dolphins with 13, the Browns, Giants and Patriots with 12, the Raiders with 11 and the Jaguars with eight. The common denominator among those teams is all have losing records. The one outlier is the Ravens, which is the team tied with the Cardinals at 14.
The Dolphins are 7-8 and no other team aside from Arizona has won more than four games.
Conversely, the top five teams in takeaways have clinched post-season spots: the Steelers (31), Vikings (30) and Bills, Packers, Texans (28).
Fifteen teams have a plus-turnover ratio (the Cardinals are minus-4) and 10 are playoff bound with four others still alive. Only the Bears (plus-8) have been eliminated. The other pluses are the Bills (20), Steelers (17), Texans (11), Packers, Chargers and Vikings (10), Lions (9), Broncos, Eagles (6), Rams (5), Chiefs, Bengals (4), Ravens (3) and Commanders (2).
When Gannon was asked what separates teams in that category, he provided a lengthy analysis.
He said, “You can either go with a mindset of nothing matters or everything matters. What I mean by that is there are two drastic mindsets. They just happen or they don’t. Yes, there’s some of that in a game — it’s a really good question because we’ve thought about this one a lot. If we preach it so much and we think about it as much as we do, I think there’s definitely an element of coaching it. A lot of what goes on is coached.
“The language, how you drill it, how you teach it. What you show ‘em, what you point out to them. Then there’s an element of in game, are those opportunities there. We point out that too. Sometimes they happen, sometimes they don’t, but they know it’s a winning stat. I feel like the better educated they are and the better they’re coached at the different ways of taking away the ball, when they come up you can uptick your opportunities for them. If you get them or not, you don’t know that. But I do feel like you’ve got to maximize your opportunities when they’re there throughout a game.”
Gannon said he’s often impressed by the teams that stand out.
“You watch across the league, it’s cool to see people that take the ball away,” he said. “Some guys just have a knack for it. But you can tell the teams that understand the value of the ball a little bit more. Everybody does, but you can tell the defenses to me that are coached and trained the way to really try to emphasize those opportunities. They haven’t come up for us a couple of times here in the last month; we haven’t taken it away as much and that’s a stat we need to improve.”
His attention then turned to the Rams and quarterback Matthew Stafford, who has eight interceptions this season. Only 10 qualifying passers have fewer and three have seven.
Gannon said, “And, oh by the way, you’re going against a guy that doesn’t give it away. The quarterback’s not going to put the ball in harm’s way for them. That’s what he’s shown consistently. You might get one or two opportunities but some quarterbacks you might get 10. This guy doesn’t do that. It’s important, it’s gotta be on our mind and we’ve got to maximize our opportunities because we know what that does to a game.”
For his part, Rallis spoke at length on Monday of how it is worked on in practice.
“There are a lot of different ways to take away the ball as far as taking it off ball carriers, stripping the football,” he said. “It’s something we work on. It’s something, you can ask the players, I harp on it every single day, probably to exhaustion. But I think that’s important to practice it and it’s got to show up in the game. So, it’s important that you point out when we had attempts at the football and we took them and it was almost there because you don’t know, like there is a little bit of, as long as you shoot your shot, you’re not going to be 100 percent with it. And so you got to say, ‘Hey, that’s a good job right there of the way to attack the football. I mean, he had good ball security but you got to keep going after it.’ You’ve got to reinforce that.
“And then when you miss those opportunities; I can think of this specific situation yesterday or last week in practice where I was like (snaps fingers) strip that, strip it out like that’s the situation we talk about right there. Boom, catch, turn, ball’s right there. Take your shot. And so you got to continue to practice that. I think another way that you generate them is you’ve got to get people behind the sticks and you’ve got to get after the passer and whether that’s taking the ball off the quarterback or forcing throws. Plus being in the right spots on the back end and capitalizing on them. So it’s a combination of all those things and you have to practice that.”
It is intriguing to note the number of explosive plays the Cardinals allow and wonder if chunk yardage limits the possibility of generating takeaways on other plays because there are fewer. Gannon doesn’t believe there’s a correlation.
However, the Cardinals have had 918 plays against them in 15 games, and there are only 12 teams that have had fewer plays this season and five are within 13: Browns and Bears 916, Giants 910, Packers 909 and Steelers 905.
Most notable is that the Cardinals rank 24th in the league in yards per play allowed at 5.6. So perhaps there is a correlation.
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