All About the Solo: Week Three
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 through week three.
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One of my favorite parts of writing for DLF is getting to interact with a committed community of dynasty players ranging from newbies to old school veterans. I’ve been playing dynasty IDP leagues for nearly two decades now and love it when someone brings something up to open my eyes and mind to a different way of thinking. It doesn’t have to be anything mind blowing or cutting edge, sometimes it’s something simple enough to make you question why you think about something the way you do. Last week one of our readers, Brian Thompson, asked the following question: “Any reason you prefer the scorekeepers that prefer to go the solo route? I actually would rather my guys play in places where they’ll be likely to get rewarded on plays even when they didn’t initiate the tackle, especially because we can see some preferential treatment given to certain players (e.g., the Ray Lewis example) where a guy racks up fantasy points when he’s the fifth guy to arrive to a ball carrier.”
Good point.
I guess I never really thought about it like that. I’ve always looked at it like the glass was half empty as opposed to the glass being half full. On one hand it would be great for a player’s 15 total tackles to be all solos but at the same time a player who may have only actually had six solo tackles gets an additional six “charity” assists to fluff up his weekly score. Instead of complaining about what we missed out on, maybe we should be happy we benefited from a free spirit awarding tackles to everything on the field. After all, points are points.
This week we got our first look at the home score keepers of Jacksonville, New England and New Orleans. Jacksonville gave the Colts defensive players an assist on just 9.5% of total tackles while dishing out assists for the home team on 26% of the defensive plays, nearly three times as many. New England is one of only two teams to award over 50% of tackles as assists on either side of the ball, Carolina is the other and both are to the home teams.
Nate Irving recorded 13 total tackles but only two were solo tackles, the other 11 were assists, good enough for 15 fantasy points with a “standard” 2:1 tackle to assist ratio. I don’t recall ever seeing so many assists with so few solos. Brian Cushing led the league in tackles for the week with 17 total and had a near 50/50 split with eight solos and nine assists, good for 25 fantasy points. Here were the weekly leaders in assists.
This shows the discrepancy between the guys who benefit largely from inflated total tackle numbers with large amount of assists opposed to players whose fantasy points are mostly solo driven. We’ll continue tracking next week and look at the weekly leaders.
Follow me on Twitter @OlingerIDP.
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- Dynasty IDP Waiver Wire: Week Seven - October 24, 2018
- Dynasty IDP Waiver Wire: Week Six - October 16, 2018
- Dynasty IDP Waiver Wire: Week Five - October 10, 2018
