Kirby Smart breaks down key stat more important than turnover margin

No. 1 Georgia has won 29 of its last 30 games and coach Kirby Smart sure seems to have things figured out at this point. So it’s fascinating to hear him talk about why his team has had so much success, particularly because he believes there’s a statistic that’s been far more important than turnover margin.

Smart isn’t denying the importance of creating takeaways and avoiding turnovers, but he tracks something else that he believes has a higher correlation to winning and losing.

“We’ve delved and dug a lot into a different stat, which is explosive plays,” Smart explained on Tuesday. “And it’s explosive-play differential. We think that the greater indicator of wins and losses is the explosive-play differential. And when you add our runs and passes and you combine it against what our defense is given up, we haven’t had a game that we weren’t less than four positive (+4).

“And that indicator actually, in the SEC, is a greater indicator of what’s won games. Now I don’t know why that is, but Ole Miss, ourselves, Tennessee, Alabama are the four greatest differential teams in terms of explosive plays over their opponent.”

Strike fast offensively, while defensively making sure your opponent has to work for it.

Seems simple enough. Particularly when you have a team that can control games at the line of scrimmage. Layer explosive plays on top of that and Georgia has ways to answer in crunch time, while being good enough across the board to keep every game close almost based on talent alone.

Turnover margin doesn’t quite offer the same degree of correlation.

“Turnovers are hard to control. I’d love to say we’d control them, but for whatever reason, seven years I’ve been here we’ve never really been great,” Smart said. “I think one year we had pretty good turnover margin, either the first or second year. But outside of that we’ve never; and we never really have turned the ball over a lot offensively. So the margin becomes the defense’s problem when you don’t turn it over a lot.”

Explosives more important than turnover margin, emphasized at UGA

How much of the program’s philosophy has been built on the idea that explosive plays are more important than turnover margin?

Enough that there’s a dedicated staffer tracking explosive plays at all times. Not just at Georgia, but across the league.

So what exactly makes a play explosive? What are the objective yardage measurements used in creating the calculation?

“I think it’s 12 and 15. Twelve run and 15 pass. Might be 17 pass,” Smart said. “We’ve got an analyst in here that does it and we do a chart for it for every game, every team in the SEC, and it shows how many wins and losses they have based on explosive-play differential. And I want to say it’s like 45-4 if you win the explosive-play differential, where the turnover margin is not 45-4. We’ve proven that because we’ve lost the turnover margin several times and still won.”

The emphasis is pretty straightforward.

It isn’t that turnovers aren’t important. It’s just that Georgia needs to make sure it’s hitting on big plays on the offensive end while limiting them on the defensive end.

“So we dig hard at that. That does not lessen the value of a turnover, because turnovers are critical and the greatest equalizer there is in sport,” Smart said. “And really you think about how did Georgia Tech beat Pitt on the road, turnover margin was a critical factor in that game. So it’s something we’ve got to continue to improve.

“But we keep selling to our players that if we’re a lot more explosive than the opponent and we don’t give up explosives, and we get positive four over what they get — so if we get 10 of them and we get six of them — then we’re going to have a great chance of winning the game.”