Buzz Williams happy with low turnover rate by Texas A&M offense

Texas A&M is 3-1 in its last four games, picking up big wins over Kentucky and LSU while losing in a one-point heartbreaker at Arkansas following their 0-2 start to league play.

While there is still much progress to be made if A&M even wants to make the NCAA Tournament field, the Aggies are showing some encouraging signs of development during their recent stretch of good results. Particularly, head coach Buzz Williams is thrilled that his club is taking much better care of the ball on offense nowadays.

“I love that we’re playing with the low turnover rate,” Williams said after the latest win over Missouri, noting the team’s low TO count in the last three performances.

“We had two turnovers at Arkansas, is that right? Pretty good. We had a low turnover rate at LSU. I think we had six, we had nine today.”

Even nine turnovers isn’t a terribly high number in a college hoops game, and that’s the most for A&M in a couple of weeks. Looking deeper into the numbers, in their last four games, starting with the home win over Kentucky, the Aggies are turning the ball over on just 9.2% of their possessions, good for No. 4 in the country during that span and No. 1 by far in the SEC.

Once again, Williams emphasized: “I love that we’re playing with a low turnover rate.” Although, there has been a tradeoff for one of A&M’s other strengths.

“Our offensive rebounding percentage was low relative to our standard. That was not good for us and I think our free throw rate continues to increase, and so, considering we played against the zone and every sort of type of defense in the front-court, I thought we handled all of that fairly well.”

Despite some slightly lower rebounding counts, Texas A&M is still far and away No. 1 in the entire country in offensive rebounding rate for the season, grabbing north of 43% of their own missed shot attempts. If the Aggies continue to take care of the ball and not waste possessions, while also generating so many extra possessions on the offensive glass, they’ll have one of the better offenses in the nation from an efficiency standpoint, even if they rank as a bottom-50 team in the country in shooting statistics.

That’s the power generating, and not wasting, extra shots on goal.