All About the Solo: Week Four

Eric Olinger

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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 four:

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solos

This week we saw a huge shift in the number of assists given out by the New York Jets’ score keeper. They’re one of only two teams to play three home games through the season’s first four weeks, Baltimore is the other. After scoring 94 of 149 (63%) of all tackles in week four as assists, their season total jumped a full 10%. Over the last three years I’ve tracked this, I can’t recall such a huge spike from a single scorekeeper. It’ll be interesting to see how things shake out from the Jets moving forward.

There is a noticeable trend when looking at the top 12 players with the most assists in week four, ten of them are from the Jets, Redskins and Lions (who played at the Jets this week). The ridiculous amount of assists given raise the weekly fantasy floor for each player, but ultimately caps their upside, too. For a linebacker, I want as many solo tackles as possible and get irritated when I see my stud linebacker sharing his tackles, but when it comes to defensive linemen like Jason Pierre-Paul and Muhammed Wilkerson, I’ll take everything I can get my grubby little hands on.

tacklechart

Based on the season tracking numbers, we can expect to see the Bears @ Panthers, Bengals @ Patriots and Seahawks @ Redskins produce the most assists this week. On the flip side, the Jets, who were rained down on with assists last week, travel to San Diego this week and the Chargers only give assists on 20% of tackles, so look for their assist numbers to dip. There are currently 12 teams sitting at or below 20% of total tackles scored as assists and six of them play each other, Cardinals @ Broncos, Chiefs @ 49ers and Rams @ Eagles. Two more, the Dolphins and Raiders, are on bye this week. Overall, I would expect a high fantasy scoring week from these teams’ linebackers and safeties and a low scoring week from their defensive linemen, barring sack totals.  I’ll go out on a limb here and predict we’ll see Luke Kuechly, Keenan Robinson, Bobby Wagner, Kam Chancellor and Brandon Meriweather in the top 12 assists next week. Now we have a month’s worth of data. The goal is to start spotting trends and identifying some start/sits or at least give us the information needed for tie breakers among our defensive players.

Follow me on Twitter @OlingerIDP.

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eric olinger
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