Bryan wrote:I remember an article in the 1991 or 1992 "Team NFL" magazine (the off-shoot of the Prolog) which discussed 'normalizing' team-generated tackle stats. It was before the metric heyday, and the premise of the article was Jessie Tuggle leading the Falcons with 207 tackles and Dave Waymer leading the Niners with 87 tackles...was it really possible for one team's leading tackler to have more than twice as many tackles as another team's leading tackler?
The article looked at the "tackle opportunities" for each team, compared them to the individual tackle numbers sent out by the team's media dept, and then came up with some inflation adjustment...a "Tuggle tackle" was worth 0.65 while a "Waymer tackle" was worth 1.25. After all the math work, the conclusion was basic common sense: the players on bad defenses made more tackles than the players on good defenses because they are on the field more, and the ILBs/MLBs generally made the most tackles.
In regards to Tuggle, it showed that while he was among the league leaders in tackles, he wasn't the #1 guy nor was accumulating tackles at a noticeably higher rate than other ILB/MLBs. He was mixed in with Al Smith, Kyle Clifton, Larry Kelm, etc.
It comes down to that, yes, oppotunites, but it also comes down to was quality control coaches call an "assist". I've look pretty close, and on a gambook there are solos and assist which are totaled to get "tackles". That number is often similar to the tackles that coaches come up with. The issue is that there is then what a coach calls an "assist" and when you add tackles to the coaches "assist" you come up with guys with 200 or more tackles.
In 1977 Alzado had 77 tackles (solo and assists) the coaches credit him with 80, pretty close, but then there is another category of assists which was a lot, cannot remember off-hand but like maybe 40, which gave him 120 or so "tackles"
