All About the Solo: Week One
One of the more frustrating things in IDP leagues is seeing your stud linebacker fly all over the field on game days only to see the home score keeper dilute his performance by divvying up his tackles as an assist. Not everybody knows this, but the NFL does not recognize a tackle as an official statistic. Tackles are scored by the home team’s official score keeper and those are the stats you see on news and stats sites. The league made an effort to standardize what is and isn’t a solo tackle back in 2007 when they sent a video to all NFL teams, but it still the discretion of the score keeper and there is a large disparity from team to team and week-to-week. I will be tracking this throughout the season to give you a better idea of what to expect when choosing your IDPs each week. The chart below shows the results from week one.
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Historically, the Kansas City Chiefs have been one of the least likely teams to award an overwhelming amount of assisted tackles and this trend appears to continue as they were the league low with a combined 7.14% tackles awarded as assists. They also show no preferential treatment to the hometown Chiefs or visiting opponents, there was less than a 3% difference between the two teams. Seattle and Baltimore both awarded an astonishing 38.8% of total tackles as assists. At least Seattle was kind enough to treat both teams equally. There was less than a 1% difference between the Seahawks and Packers assist percentage. Baltimore on the other hand was not. The Browns were given an assisted tackle on 30.56% of their tackles while nearly half of Baltimore’s tackles were assists, 47.76% to be exact, a league high. The largest discrepancy between home and away team was clearly by the Detroit Lions’ score keeper. He deemed only 17% of all Lions tackles were assists but 37.5% of the tackles by the Giants were assists, a difference of 20%. It will be interesting to see if this is a trend which continues or just a one week incident.
So how can we use this to help us in IDP leagues?
These tendencies shouldn’t scare you away from playing a stud like Patrick Willis just because he’s playing the Seattle Seahawks and they scored 39% of the visiting team’s tackles as assists in week one. What it can do is help you break a tie between two similar talents.
How much of a difference does this really make in IDP scoring?
Quite simply, a lot. There were two players who totaled 15 tackles in week one but in two very different ways. Eric Berry had an incredible 14 solo tackles and just one assist. Paul Worrilow finished with seven solo tackles and eight assists. They both finished with the same amount of total tackles but had two very different types of day in the fantasy football world. In my experience most IDP leagues score a solo to assist at 2:1. For the sake of comparison we will simply say a solo is worth two points and an assist is worth one point. In the case of Berry vs. Worrilow, Berry finished with 29 points, a difference making rock star performance. Worrilow on the other hand finished with 22 points. A great day and one you’ll gladly take every week but one which could have been much different had he been playing in Kansas City or St. Louis that day.
This week the Baltimore Ravens will host the Pittsburgh Steelers. It will put Ryan Shazier and Lawrence Timmons in the crosshairs of the Ravens’ score keeper. Last week the duo each tallied six total tackles at home against the Browns with only three assists between them. Seattle’s very generous score keeper will be given the week off as the team travels to San Diego to take on the Chargers. Even though we don’t have week one data since they were on the road, both San Diego and Indianapolis have historically been two of the most generous teams to award assists. Something to keep in mind when penciling in Bobby Wagner and Mychal Kendricks on the road this week. The same can be said for D’Qwell Jackson, Jerrell Freeman, Manti Te’o and Donald Butler at home. Like I said earlier though, in no way am I telling you to bench anyone simply because they could have a diluted stat line.
Check back next week for the updated tracking and trends.
Follow me on Twitter @OlingerIDP.
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- Dynasty IDP Waiver Wire: Week Seven - October 24, 2018
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- Dynasty IDP Waiver Wire: Week Five - October 10, 2018
