Time to continue our series presenting various 2010 stats from the multitude of Football Outsiders spreadsheets. Today, let's look at broken tackles. Broken tackles are a stat from game charting, not from the standard play-by-play. We defined a "broken tackle" as one of two events: either the ballcarrier escapes from the grasp of the defender, or the defender is in good position for a tackle but the ballcarrier jukes him out of his shoes. If the ballcarrier sped by a slow defender who dived and missed, that didn't count as a broken tackle. We only measured broken tackles for standard plays; volunteers didn't have the time to track them for all special teams plays.
The resulting numbers are subjective, obviously, but 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. 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 were able to wrap up and which ones got run over.
We can also look at broken tackle rate. For each defender we compared broken tackles to the total of broken tackles and solo tackles. We decided not to include assists, because a missed assist is not usually something we would mark as a missed tackle opportunity -- after all, another defender is getting a successful tackle at the exact same time. However, we did remove special teams tackles so we were only looking at defensive plays.
Here are all the players that our game charters recorded with 10 or more broken tackles in 2010:
There are a couple of surprise names near the top of this list. We only recorded Adrian Wilson with two broken tackles in 2009, so to see him near the top of the list for 2010 is a shock. Michael Griffin was also much lower in 2009, with only five broken tackles. Less of a surprise is Ronde Barber. For all the run tackles that Barber makes, he also misses quite a few. He had 15 broken tackles in 2009, which was second that year behind Sabby Piscitelli.
Now let's look at the highest and lowest broken tackle rates. First, here are the best and worst rates for linebackers, with a minimum of 50 tackles:
Don't make too much out of the fact that our game charters did not record Clay Matthews with a single broken tackle. There's a good chance we missed one at some point. What's important is that he had very few broken tackles, possibly zero.
I find Paul Posluszny's appearance on this list to be interesting, especially in conjunction with the poor run Stop Rate we reported last week. Posluszny was making his tackles farther away from the line of scrimmage than is usual for a linebacker, but at least he wasn't missing them. This is the second straight year that Posluszny had only three broken tackles. Most of these linebackers who were low in broken tackles last year were also low in broken tackles the year before. Takeo Spikes and Jerod Mayo had only four apiece in 2009, Clay Matthews had three, and Keith Brooking had two.
Now, let's look at the highest and lowest broken tackle rates for defensive backs, with a minimum of 40 tackles:
One big surprise that doesn't quite make our list: Cincinnati's Reggie Nelson, often thought to be an awful tackler when he was with Jacksonville, had zero broken tackles with 37 solo tackles last year. Oddly enough, Sabby Piscitelli, our broken tackle champion from 2009, also wasn't recorded with a single broken tackle in 2010. Of course, he didn't play very much, but it's still surprising. Perhaps broken tackle numbers are inherently less consistent for defensive backs than they are for linebackers. For example, Antoine Bethea had eight broken tackles in 2009, only three last year. Brandon Flowers had seven in 2009. On the other hand, Bradley Fletcher had just one broken tackle in both seasons, and Ronde Barber was very high both seasons. We'll need a couple more years of data before we can say for sure whether broken tackles are more meaningful for linebackers than for defensive backs.
Defensive linemen don't make anywhere near as many plays as linebackers and defensive backs, so there aren't a lot of linemen with more than two or three broken tackles. Only two defensive linemen had six broken tackles: Chris Long of St. Louis and Lamarr Houston of Oakland. Justin Smith of San Francisco had zero broken tackles with 62 tackles, and four other linemen had zero broken tackles with more than 40 tackles: Jared Allen, Antonio Garay, Sione Pouha, and Vince Wilfork.
Full broken tackle numbers will be found in Football Outsiders Almanac 2011. They aren't available yet on the player pages, but we'll work on getting that done.
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