Broken Tackles 2012: Defense

by Aaron Schatz

Let's continue our series presenting various 2012 stats from the multitude of Football Outsiders spreadsheets. Last week, we looked at broken tackles from the offensive perspective. Today, we'll look at it from the defensive perspective.

First, let's once again define broken tackles for those who didn't read last week's article. Broken tackles are a stat from game charting, not from the standard play-by-play. We define 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 a 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 or faked out by a great lateral move.

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 2012:

Our list of players with over 10 broken tackles has a lot of turnover between 2011 and 2012. St. Louis safety Darian Stewart had 19 broken tackles to lead the league in 2011, but lost his job and had no broken tackles in limited time as a backup. Craig Dahl, the man who replaced him, makes our list instead with 11 broken tackles. Sean Jones, who had 17 broken tackles in 2011, was cut in the preseason by Detroit, while Tanard Jackson, who had 16 broken tackles in just 10 games in 2011, was suspended for the entire year.

Meanwhile, a number of players saw their broken tackles go way up in 2012. Ed Reed had problems all year, although his worst game was definitely Week 6 against Dallas. We counted him with four broken tackles in that game, including a play where the runner dragged Reed for an extra few yards and two plays where Reed and another defender collided trying to make a tackle and both failed. Thomas DeCoud of Atlanta had a surprisingly tough time cleaning up after long completions. Earl Thomas' rise in broken tackles was a bit surprising because his total of actual tackles dropped by one-third.

Other players, such as Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie and Dahl, saw their broken tackles increase because of more playing time. There are also a number of rookies on our list of the most broken tackles, plus Jasper Brinkley, who missed all of 2011 with injury.

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:

The surprising names here are really on the list of lowest broken tackle rates. Bruce Carter made a very strong entry into the Dallas starting lineup, with no broken tackles in 11 games before dislocating his elbow on Thanksgiving. Even more surprising is Kelvin Sheppard, because the Bills linebackers were generally dismal in 2012. Perhaps Sheppard had so few broken tackles because he couldn't get near enough to the ballcarrier to qualify. (He ranked 29th in tackles among middle/inside linebackers.) Notice that Sheppard's teammate Bryan Scott is also on our list of the lowest broken tackle rates.

Not surprising on our list of the best tackle rates: Patrick Willis, Jerod Mayo, and Michael Boley, who make tons of tackles every year with very few broken. Willis has only nine broken tackles over the last three seasons despite being near the league lead in overall tackles. Mayo has only eight broken tackles in that same period, and Boley has just four. The underrated Boley is still out there on the free-agent market, although when it comes to the decision to sign him, this story probably offsets his excellent tackling.

Now, let's look at the highest and lowest broken tackle rates for defensive backs, with a minimum of 40 tackles:

Yes, those are three of the four starting Philadelphia defensive backs on our list of the highest broken tackle rates. As we'll note in a few paragraphs, the Eagles led the league in broken tackles for the second straight season. I've slammed Cary Williams as an overrated player because you can complete curl patterns in front of him all day long, but perhaps he was the right addition for the Eagles. After the receiver catches the curl, at least Williams will tackle him. The 49ers defensive backfield was the opposite of Philadelphia's. The three main San Francisco corners combined for just five broken tackles, four of those by Chris Culliver. The two safeties had a bit more but still, six each for Dashon Goldson and Donte Whitner isn't bad.

We also see here some more evidence of Champ Bailey's 2012 rennaissance, dropping from eight broken tackles to just two.

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. Kevin Williams of the Vikings was the surprising leader with six broken tackles, followed by four defensive linemen with five apiece: John Abraham, Jason Babin, Jonathan Babineaux, and Brett Keisel. There were two linemen with zero broken tackles despite over 40 solo tackles: Justin Smith and Jurrell Casey.

Finally, here's the list of broken tackles by all 32 defenses. For the second straight year, two defenses were far ahead of the rest of the league when it came to broken tackles. In 2011, these two defenses were Philadelphia and Tampa Bay; in 2012, they were Philadelphia and Atlanta, although the gap between those two defenses and the rest of the league is a bit smaller than the similar gap in 2011.

Just like last season, we wanted to make sure that this wasn't an issue where the charters who did Philadelphia and Atlanta games subjectively marked more broken tackles than other charters. After all, the Eagles led the league in broken tackles on both sides of the ball, while the Falcons were fifth on offense and second on defense. So we went back and checked a lot of the Atlanta and Philadelphia broken tackles. Not only did we find that these broken tackles were pretty clear, we actually found ourselves adding more broken tackles for the Eagles, on both sides of the ball. Philadelphia just happens to combine a number of very shifty offensive players with a bunch of defenders who can't tackle.

When it comes to defenses that didn't have many broken tackles, the surprise might be Buffalo, with the lowest broken tackle rate in the league. As seen above, there are two Bills linebackers and two Bills defensive backs on the lists of the lowest broken tackle rates. This is a defense that couldn't really do much right. Their expensive defensive line couldn't pressure the quarterback and was easily pushed around in the running game. The cornerbacks struggled and the linebackers were nothing special. But the one thing this defense could do was tackle properly. The low number is definitely not a product of the specific people charting Bills games; the Bills' defense was near the bottom of the league in 2011 as well, and Bills charters marked plenty of broken tackles for C.J. Spiller and the Bills' offense last season (seventh in broken tackle rate).

Looking closer at the numbers, you also might notice that Bills had only one play all season with more than one broken tackle. San Francisco did them one better; the 49ers did not have a single play all year where we marked them with multiple broken tackles.