Pro Football Outsiders on defensive broken tackles

Broken Tackles 2014: Defenses

by Vincent Verhei

http://www.footballoutsiders.com/stat-analysis/2015/broken-tackles-2014-defenses

Earlier this week, we looked at broken tackles from the offense’s point of view. Today we’re going to turn things around and look at which defenses allowed the most runners to slip through their arms — and which put them on the ground right away.

First, we must explain how we came to these totals. The next few paragraphs are going to be repeated from our earlier piece, so if you already read about offenses and missed tackles, feel free to skip down to the next subhead.

Historically, we have defined a “broken tackle” as one of two events: either the ball carrier escapes from the grasp of the defender, or the defender is in good position for a tackle but the ball carrier jukes him out of his shoes. If the ball carrier sped by a slow defender who dived and missed, that didn’t count as a broken tackle. It also doesn’t count as a broken tackle if a defender gets a hand on the ball carrier but is effectively being blocked out of the play by another offensive player. We only measure broken tackles for standard plays; volunteers didn’t have the time to track them for all special teams plays.

This year, we added a third category, “dragged” broken tackles where defenders were able to bring the ball carrier to the ground, but only after the runner had gained at least 5 yards from the point where the tackle started. We seemed like a reasonable compromise to deal with plays we had struggled with in years past, where what looked like a broken tackle would end up with a defender getting marked with a tackle or assist by the NFL because he was the last player to make contact before a ballcarrier fell down ten yards later. There weren’t very many of those plays; no defender was dragged more than four times last year.

We recorded significantly more broken tackles in 2014 than in any previous season, but we want to make it clear: that jump has to do with our methods. We don’t want these numbers to encourage any “tackling in the NFL is getting worse” narratives. Between 2009 and 2013, league totals on broken tackles fell between 1,975 (2012) and 2,236 (2009). In 2014, we marked a total of 2,644 broken tackles.

The addition of “dragged” tackles was roughly half of the reason for the increase. The other reason was that any plays where ESPN Stats & Information marked a minimum of 5 yards after contact were specifically flagged to indicate to game charters that they should be particularly mindful of broken tackles. Unfortunately, it’s the nature of charting to be subjective. We believe that flagging these plays for charters actually resulted in more accurate numbers than in previous seasons. But obviously, when comparing 2013 and 2014 totals below, be aware that the average player should have a 20-25 percent increase in broken tackles per play simply because of the change in our charting methodology.

The natural variation that comes with subjectivity is tempered by the fact that there were over two dozen charters involved, so no team’s numbers could be overly slanted because of the bias of a single specific charter. (In addition, as we have done in past years, we spent time after the season reviewing plays from the charters with the highest and lowest rates of broken tackles marked.) We know that there are other groups on the Web who track broken tackles, and because of the subjectivity, their numbers won’t be exactly the same as ours. Given the mistakes that are easy to make when marking players off of television tape, a difference of one or two broken tackles isn’t a big deal. But looking at the players with the most and fewest broken tackles does a good job of showing us which defenders are stopping runners in their tracks, and which are getting trampled into the turf.

Broken Tackle ‘Leaderboards’

The following table lists all defenders who gave up at least 10 broken tackles. It is nearly twice as long as last year’s table, for all the reasons we listed above.

Your favorite team is probably represented in that table somewhere. Only five teams (Chicago, Denver, Minnesota, San Diego, and New England) made it through the season with no individual defender allowing ten or more broken tackles.

It’s not surprising that the table is dominated by defensive backs, especially at the very top. It’s also not surprising to see so much turnover here. Even though we counted more broken tackles this year than we had before, only eight players have missed ten or more tackles in each of the last two seasons, and only Thomas DeCoud (the patron saint of the missed tackle) has done it three years in a row.

Linebackers

The following table shows the linebackers with the highest and lowest rates of broken tackles (minimum 40 tackles):

There’s no real pattern on the left-hand side of that table, but take a second and let the right side sink in. For all of Tampa Bay’s faults (and they are many), their linebackers sure are taking care of business. Do you realize that Lavonte David has still never made it to the Pro Bowl? It’s ridiculous. Besides David, there were eight other linebackers last year with at least 100 tackles. All of them missed at least three times as many tackles as David did.

New England’s linebackers don’t miss a lot of tackles either. You’ll recall that New England’s own running backs were very poor at breaking tackles last season. We did our best to get multiple pairs of eyeballs on every team and double-check charters with high or low totals of broken tackles, so this shouldn’t be a case of charter bias. Perhaps it’s so cold in Foxborough that when another person wraps their arms around you, the last thing you want to do is break free.

All told, Tampa Bay’s linebackers had the fewest missed tackles with just eight, followed by New England and Chicago with 11 each. Philadelphia and Indianapolis tied for the league lead with 39 missed tackles by linebackers, followed by Cleveland (37).

Defensive Backs

The following table shows the defensive backs with the highest and lowest rates of broken tackles (minimum 40 tackles):

Most of the NFL’s worst-tackling defensive backs last year played in the AFC South, which is not a surprise for those of us who watched a lot of AFC South football. Josh Evans has missed at least ten tackles in each of his two NFL seasons. Gus Bradley was hired in Jacksonville to replicate the success he had in Seattle, but suffice to say that Evans is not an ideal substitute for Earl Thomas.

Most of the defensive backs who are good at tackling are good at playing football, period, especially All-Pros Darrelle Revisand Eric Weddle. We must also tip our hat to the Buffalo secondary. Their overall numbers were hurt by Nickell Robey and Aaron Williams, but Da’Norris Searcy and Stephon Gilmore both made the top ten, while Corey Graham and Leodis McKelvin were in the top 20.

New England’s defensive backs missed only 23 tackles, the fewest in the league, followed by their Super Bowl opponents in Seattle (24), then Minnesota (26). No secondary missed more tackles than Jacksonville (70), followed by Green Bay (63), Arizona (62), and Kansas City (62).

Defensive Linemen

Defensive linemen make so few tackles that there’s not much point in leading rate leaders, so here’s a look at all defensive linemen with at least four missed tackles. I’ve highlighted players from a specific team, for reasons I shall explain shortly:

(Yes, J.J. Watt missed “a lot” of tackles, relative to his position, but note that broken tackle rate. He made six more tackles than any other lineman.)

So, let’s talk about the New York Giants. In addition to Robert Ayers’ NFL-leading eight missed tackles, and the contributions of Jason Pierre-Paul and Cullen Jenkins, Mathias Kiwanuka and Damontre Moore just missed the table with three missed tackles each. All told, Giants linemen missed 31 tackles, a dozen more than any other team. (Jacksonville and Miami had 19 each.) This is definitely not a charter bias issue, as the Giants are one of the teams where we don’t have a specific charter who tended to always do one Giants half every week.

Not surprisingly, the teams whose defensive linemen missed the fewest tackles were all 3-4 clubs: Washington’s linemen missed four tackles, while the big uglies on Houston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Baltimore missed five tackles per team.

Team Totals

While broken tackles for offenses seem to be a pretty clear indicator of a team’s win-loss record, there’s no clear pattern for defense. While the Super Bowl champion Patriots were the league’s best tackling team (in hindsight, that championship game was a perfect matchup of a tackle-breaking offense and a very physical defense), only three of the eight defenses with the lowest rates of broken tackles per play made the playoffs, while three of the five teams with the highest rates qualified for the postseason.

Comparing 2013 numbers and 2014 numbers, two defenses had significantly fewer broken tackles in 2014 than the year before despite the change in our methodology: Chicago and Washington. Kansas City had the biggest jump in broken tackles on defense, going from broken tackles on 3.9 percent of plays in 2013 to 8.5 percent of plays in 2014. Other defenses with large rises in broken tackles: Jacksonville, Indianapolis, Green Bay, and New Orleans.

The Giants would be seventh on that list of “biggest rises” and are interesting for all kinds of reasons. Remember all those missed tackles their linemen had? Well, as you can guess, a lot of them turned into missed quarterback sacks. The Giants defense missed 20 tackles on sacks, nine more than any other defense. And it’s not because they played Russell Wilson or Colin Kaepernick or Cam Newton. No, the quarterback who gave them the most trouble was Ryan Fitzpatrick, of all people. In fact, the Giants missed six tackles on Fitzpatrick in a single quarter. That’s more missed sacks in one quarter than 18 teams missed all season. Let’s take a second to sit back and enjoy Fitzpatrick making the Giants look silly:

By the way, Fitzpatrick plays the Giants again December 6, now that he’s with the Jets.

Now, if we’re being honest, those plays were fun to watch, but none of them really hurt New York too badly. After all, even missed sacks are still pressure plays. Do different kinds of broken tackle plays hurt a defense more than others? The following table shows how many yards per play each defense surrendered in 2014 when they missed a tackle, as well as whether that missed tackle came against a receiver, a runner, or a quarterback trying to pass:

There’s a lot to take in there, but for now we’ll just note that bottom column. Yes, broken tackles are bad for a defense, generally yielding an extra 5 to 7 yards per play depending on where the tackle occurred.

Once that table was done, it occurred to me that I never ran the same numbers on the offensive side of the ball, and when I did, I stumbled on something truly amazing.

Look over there in the left-hand side of the table, the very last row in the top half. See those dashes for the Giants where numbers should be? Yeah. The Giants did not have an average yards per play for that column, because Eli Manning and company had no plays that qualified.

That disparity for Big Blue is the most shocking thing I’ve learned putting these pieces together. While their defense missed nearly twice as many tackles on sacks as any other team in the league, their own quarterback failed to avoid a sack even one time. I don’t know if there’s any meaningful information there, or if it’s just random trivia, but it’s an astounding dichotomy either way.