FO: Broken Tackles by Defenders in 2010

Football Outsiders (FO) continues to churn out some good articles reflecting on this past season. Last week, they took a look at which players were particularly good or bad at allowing offensive players to break a tackle. Later today, I'll recap an article in which FO looked at broken tackles for running backs.

On the "bad" side of things for linebackers was Chris Gocong, who has been praised for quietly having a good season last year. Gocong registered 52 tackles but missed 8 possible tackles; he allows a player to break a tackle 13.3% of the time. I'm not sure if this counted as a missed tackle, but if you go to this video at about the 0:17 mark, it was my worst moment for Gocong during the season. To be fair, Mike Goodson made a couple of people look foolish on that play, not just Gocong.

When it came to defensive backs, guess who was one of the most fundamentally sound tacklers? That would be safety Abram Elam, who registered 66 tackles and only allowed 3 broken tackles. That was good enough for a 4.3% rate, which was 9th best among defensive backs. The article also notes that Sabby Piscitelli, who led everyone in broken tackles in 2009, did not even have one against him in 2010. That was Piscitelli's reputation (that he was a poor tackler) when he joined the Browns, and although he did not play very much, he must have at least somewhat gotten his act together.