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The return game - why ball security is paramount

Turnovers often lead to lost games. The play in any football game that has the greatest chance of leading to a turnover is a punt return. There were 842 turnovers in the regular season last year on 33965 plays from scrimmage (2.47% of all plays resulted in a turnover). There were 2429 punts last season, 1138 of which were fielded by the returner. On those 1138 fielded punts, 87 fumbles occurred (7.64%). So fumbles on fielded punts happened more than three times as often as fumbles on all other plays.

PR% = % of punts returned, FC% = % of punts fair caught, DBPT% = % downed by punt team including punts OOB, TB% = % of punts ending in touchback, PR20+% = % of punt returns gaining 20 or more yards

I’m not sure why fumbles were up and long punt returns down last season.