The Impact of Ball Control on Football Defenses

For a long time, I’ve believed that a team’s offense can have a significant impact on the performance of a team’s defense. Specifically, better ball control of a team’s offense–which involves running a lot of time and plays, as well as protecting the football–will lead to better performance by the team’s defense–or at least least better ball control would create better conditions to play good defense, while bad ball control would do the opposite.

To examine these claims, I’ve turned to stats like time of possession (TOP), totals and averages, and the number of snaps by a team’s offense and defense. There might be other metrics, but those are the ones I recently looked at. This will be a thread to discuss and analyze this topic.