Turnovers

Along with the 4 primary measures of a team's performance and ability (offensive and defensive running and passing), it appears obvious that teams that are able to gain a turnover advantage are more likely to win games.

Running the numbers confirms the importance of turnovers in winning. The correlation between team wins and net turnovers (takeaways minus giveaways) was 0.80. This is very high--and significantly higher than the next most important dimension, offensive passing. We can go deeper and study the importance of fumbles vs. interceptions or takeaways vs. giveaways, but for now we'll just use net turnovers because it's simple and easy to measure.

So it seems on its face that we have the beginning of a model to understand why teams consistently win. We've boiled down the stats to isolate the distinct performance of each phase of the game. We have:

Off Pass Yds/Att
Off Run Yds/Att
Def Pass Yds/Att
Def Run Yds/Att
Net Turnovers