2020: A Penn State Turnover Odyssey (& Anomaly?)  

Of All the Things That Made Zero Sense Last Season, the Nittany Lions’ Historically Pitiful Turnover Luck Was One of Them 

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HOPE might be the foulest, most dangerous four-letter word in the English language, but even so, there’s an air of optimism wafting over the 2021 Penn State football season for a couple reasons.

I’d waste 300-400 words waxing poetic about those reasons but A) by now, you already know what they are, and B) I really wanna cut corners and crank this blog post out because a pool float with a highly-caloric fruity adult beverage in the cup holder awaits. But, for our seven-month coma patient readership, here’s a quick list:

 Yurcich hire. 

Dotson/Walker/Brisker return. 

Normal-ish spring practice. 

Normal-ish fall practice (no jinx). 

James Franklin’s full Transfer Portal cart.

Home-field advantage is back.

One factor, though, that doesn’t get as much play as those just listed – and one we’ll explore for as long as I can stand being cooped up indoors on this postcard-perfect afternoon — is Penn State’s historically wretched 2020 Turnover Luck and the unlikelihood of lightning striking twice in 2021.

So what is Turnover Luck exactly? Well, the abacus enthusiasts at footballstudyhall.com determined that at the FBS level, on average, college defenses recover 51.3 percent of total fumbles and intercept roughly 21 percent of total “Passes Defensed” which is the combination of interceptions and official Pass Breakups (PBUs). Any ratio way above or way below that mark constitutes really good or bad Turnover Luck, respectively.

College Football analyst Phil Steele, whose preseason publication many consider the gold standard, leans heavily on Turnover Luck when determining teams he predicts will take a major step back from last season’s unexpected success or substantially rebound from a disappointing/disastrous campaign. Not surprisingly, because of the Nittany Lions’ out-of-whack 2020 turnover situation, Penn State tops Steele’s Comeback Team list for 2021.

In 2020, Penn State finished the forgettable, often called “fake,” season ranked 112th in turnover margin per game. On average, the Nittany Lions lost the turnover battle by 0.8 turnovers per contest last season – the largest differential in the post-Paterno era by a mile. 

 The site we used for this info – www.teamrankings.com — only posted data dating back to 2004, Paterno’s final Dark Ages campaign, and even in that dreadful sub-.500 season Penn State’s Turnover Margin per game was just -0.5. That’s how bad 2020 was from a turnover perspective.

But why?

The main culprit – and the biggest historical statistical outlier – was Penn State’s inability to recover its own fumbles on offense. Again, according to the numbers, whether the offense or defense recovers a fumble is pretty much a 50-50 proposition once the ball hits the turf. 

We got this data from Penn State Athletics and wondered whether any other football season topped last year’s 80 percent Fumble-Loss Rate. Unfortunately, the hamster powering the servers at www.gopsusports.com must have fallen off the wheel when we clicked shat sheets from 2006 and 2004-to-Mother Dunn because we got this error message each time.

It would have been interesting to see if the offenses during the bleak, start-of-the-century Paterno years were as cursed as the 2020 squad at recovering the football, and we probably could have ‘efforted’ answers from the University Archives, but the ice cubes were melting in our drink so we passed on searching through digital Pattee. Sorry. The point is, as evidenced in the above chart, recovered fumbles are fairly random. So just because Penn State lost an insane amount of fumbles last season doesn’t mean it’s a problem or likely to become a trend, hence 2021 optimism.  

Finally, in the recent past, Penn State quarterbacks have done well in the Interception Probability metric – again, the total number of Interceptions divided by Passes Defensed (national average, 21 percent) – but last season wasn’t great. Now, it wasn’t grotesque (some terrible offensive teams score close to 40 percent in this stat) but it was the second-worst performance of the Franklin Era. Of the throws the two-headed Sean Clifford-Will Levis Orthrus (google it) tossed last season, 40 qualified as Passes Defensed and 9 were intercepted – 22.5 percent, or just a sliver worse than the FBS average.  

Again, Penn State has fared fantastically in this category recently, which is pleasantly surprising when you consider the number of deep balls thrown in 2016 and 2017.