Broken Tackle Leaders

With the baseball postseason less than a week away and the football season now three weeks in, it’s one of the most enjoyable sports times of the year. This year, we are particularly interested in what is going on in the NFL because of new data from Sports Info Solutions. Sports Info Solutions (SIS), the new company name for Baseball Info Solutions, is in its second year of collecting in-depth NFL data similar to what has been done in baseball for the past 15 years.

The major challenge of football analysis is sorting out which players on a team are responsible for the things that happen on the field. Running backs are a perfect example. On some attempts, their speed, power, or elusiveness earn them yards that other backs would likely fail to gain in similar circumstances. However, on other plays, the offensive line or the play design could result in a relatively uncontested 10 or more yards. One way that charting at SIS attempts to isolate the ability of specific backs is by recording broken tackles on carries and receptions.

Here are the backs with the most broken tackles over the first three weeks of the NFL season:

David Johnson leads the NFL with 21 broken tackles. The Cardinals’ sophomore back quickly emerged as one of the best all-around backs in the game after he took over for the injured Chris Johnson last December. DeAngelo Williams is second with 18 broken tackles, which is amazing when you consider that he is the oldest back in the league at 33 years old and isn’t even the Steelers normal starter. It’s a pretty great luxury to have a back of Williams’ caliber behind Le’Veon Bell. Matt Forte is another back on the “wrong side of 30” near the top of the list. However, take note that both Williams and Forte have reached the top of the leaderboard in part because of their heavy workloads. With 79 and 76 touches through three weeks, they’re both in the top three for most work in the league.

Broken tackles percentage shows which backs have been the hardest to bring down on a per touch basis, and, interestingly, Buccaneers teammates Doug Martin (33 percent) and Charles Sims (34 percent) are both in the top five in that stat among backs with a minimum of 10 touches so far in 2016. Since both players have been so successful, one might assume that the defenses of the Bucs’ opponents over the first three weeks—the Falcons, Cardinals, and Rams—were disproportionately responsible for those broken tackles. However, check out the 2015 leaders in broken tackles per touch (with a minimum of 150 total touches):

Martin and Sims were again in the top three. Atlanta, Arizona, and Los Angeles may have contributed, but the Buccaneers are blessed with two of the best backs in the game in their backfield. That should prove especially critical for the team following news that Martin could miss the next few weeks with a hamstring injury.

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Fans of Stat of the Week and fans of football analytics in general should definitely check out Football Outsiders . Football Outsider’s website now offers a Premium Charting subscription which features a variety of the in-depth data collected by SIS. In addition to the Premium Charting data subscription, they also have a subscription for weekly fantasy football projections developed jointly by SIS and Outsiders. Football Outsider’s founder Aaron Schatz and SIS’s Scott Spratt co-host a weekly football podcast called Off the Charts Football Podcast. that discusses the advanced charting data and their analysis of it, including Outsider’s famous DVOA statistic. Check it out on iTunes.