It’s all about the Solo: Updated Tackle Data

Eric Olinger

If you play in IDP leagues like I do, you know there is nothing more frustrating that seeing your star linebacker get ten or more tackles, only to see seven were scored as assists and just three were solo. What if I told you that tackles are not an official NFL stat? Tackles for both teams are recorded by the home team’s official scorekeeper and submitted to the league. Why the league hasn’t done more to standardize this is beyond me. There are some teams that over the years have become notorious for awarding more assists than league average, teams like Indianapolis and San Diego in the past.

When you play fantasy football, IDP or not, you try to find tools, statistical data, trends, or anything else to get a leg up on the competition. I have compiled the tackles awarded from each game through the season’s first eight weeks and broken them down by solos and assists awarded to both the visitor and home teams by the home scorekeeper. The teams highlighted in green were the team that gave out the fewest assists for the week and the teams in red were the teams that gave out the most assists. On the right you can see the total amount of tackles, both solo and assists, and the percentage of tackles that were recorded as assists. I separated the visitor and home teams here too just to see if any teams were leaning heavily one way or the other. On the far right it is a percentage of total tackles, both visitor and home combined, recorded as assists. I decided that anything more than 30% of total tackles being given as assists was too much and they have been highlighted in red. The grey signifies that team did not play at home that week.

Let’s take a look at the data:

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eric olinger
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