in search of the perfect game

One of the hidden gems in our book is a little statement that you generally need three errors to make a turnover. (Of course, one monumental error by itself will do it just as well.) One cutter starts his long cut from too deep, then the fill breaks in too late, and the thrower just puts it up instead of calling a timeout or looking sooner to the dump. People tend to assign the blame to the thrower in this case, but he never would have been in that situation had not two teammates made mistakes before that, mistakes that will never show up in their personal stats.

I'm grumpy on the field sometimes after I make a mistake like this, even if no one else notices because we scored anyway. I'm always in search of the perfect game. It's easy enough to have a turnover-free game occasionally, but the truly perfect game is much harder, if not impossible.

I don't think a stat sheet would ever capture this, unfortunately. It would show up in other people's stats or the team's stats, since that stall 9 desperation turnover now appears as a simple 10 yard completion, but no one would have any idea why it happened.

I sent off an article about this titled "Team errors" to Chasing Plastic, but they've apparently had some publication problems. As I say at the end of that article, it's the mistakes you don't make that win games.