When you go to the ESPN NFL stats page, your greeted by Defensive Leaders and a list of the players with the most total tackles.
Generally, when a player has a lot of tackles, that means the Defense is on the field a lot. Its like pitch count in baseball, Ideally, you want your pitcher to throw 3 pitches and get 3 outs. Ideally, for an NFL defense you would want to make 3 tackles and force a punt. Its a weird stat where you would think, lower the number, the better. But instead, Defensive leaders are often related to the Total Tackle leader. Which may not be a good thing …..
This may surprise you, but: No player has ever lead the league in Combined Tackles and won a Super Bowl in the same year (At least until 1979).
Going back to 1979, if you look at the number of games the leading tackler for each year won, it may be suprising to some.
The fewest regular season wins to win a Super Bowl is 9. As you can in the chart above, quite a lot of the league leading tacklers were parts of terrible teams.
I find it quite remarkable that you have a number of teams that won 10, 11, 12, and even 14 games and still none won a Super Bowl. If I told you that your team was guaranteed to win at least 10 games in the regular season for 12 straight years and you didn’t win one Super Bowl, you would probably be disappointed.
In reality, if you have the league leading tackler than your probably not on a very good team because your defense is stuck on the field. However, what this stat does tell you is that there is a really good player on a bad defense and that should still be celebrated.
How the hell do you win 14 games and not win the Super Bowl?
What if I told you that the New England Patriots won 14 games in the regular season and were defeated by ….. wait for it ….. the New York Jets in the Divisional Round. And that team was lead by …. wait for it …. Mark Sanchez
In case you didn’t know what Sanchez has been up to. Not good.
My personal Tackling DAWG
Jessie Tuggle lead the league 4 years in tackles. 3 of those were in a row from 1990-1992. The man amassed 1805 tackles in a 14 year carrier. Holy crap! That is a lot, a lot of contact. What makes him even more of a dog is that he went undrafted.
Recommend a watch if your like me and weren’t born yet.
Next ….
I compilled the Top 25 Tacklers for every season dating back to 2000. The data may be surprising ….
NumbersandLines.com 