Turner says Gibson’s fumbles are unacceptable, but Gibson is continuing to work

Second-year running back Antonio Gibson has had a rough two weeks on the field. Gibson, who has fumbled four times on the season, has fumbled twice in the last two weeks. Naturally, this has raised alarms in some of the fan base and local media; however, growing pains should be assumed for a college player who spent the majority of his time at the wide receiver position but now is a primary running back in the NFL. Fortunately for Gibson, who honestly should be in the “doghouse,” his offensive coordinator Scott Turner has been understanding and lenient in his approach to Gibson’s development. 

“Ball security is obviously very important. The unfortunate thing in this league, when you put the ball on the ground, it’s like you put a target on your chest and defenders know that. They even, they always try to knock it out, but it’s even more so once things like that start to happen. It’s just the discipline of consistent, quality ball security. There’s a lot of things we talk about as far as what that looks like, The points of pressure and the vertical ball and tight to your chest and you cannot relax on those things because obviously you see what happened and it’s something that, it’s obviously not acceptable and he’s working on it. He’s got it. He’s got to improve that. We can’t put the ball on the ground because possessions are valuable and opportunity to score points are valuable. We can’t give them away.” – Turner on Antonio Gibson and his fumbles.

The “points of pressure” and “tight to your chest” items stand out in this quote because Gibson’s issues stem from his sometimes lax approach to maneuvering in traffic, which in turn exposes the football to defenders. Those two specific issues are something that, in my opinion, stems from his inexperience and transition to a full-time running back. However, Turner isn’t so sure and believes Gibson has had plenty of repetitions. 

“Maybe. He still carried the ball, carrying the ball in traffic. That’s a little bit different. He’s had a lot of reps though. Even over the past these past couple of years. He knows better, he’s shown good examples of it. So like he’s fully capable and strong enough and everything like that. He just can’t relax. You can’t relax in this situation.” – Turner on if Gibson’s fumbles are because he wasn’t a natural running back coming into the league. 

So, with his situation, it would be a reasonable thought to believe that Gibson should be held accountable for his lack of ball security. However, Turner isn’t to the point of giving Gibson “a break.”

“No, I mean, yeah, there’s, there’s times that you give a guy a little bit of break. You come back to it but I have never personally been in that situation. I’ve seen it happen, you’ve seen it happen. In other cases, you all heard about it.” – Turner on what you do with a guy after he fumbles. 

The apparent hope is that Gibson will turn things around – his job as a primary running back depends on it, and he cannot afford more turnovers this year to add on to the three he already has.