Bob Dole
10-13-2004, 08:34 AM
Typically when looking to refute or back up a point on here, Bob Dole has sometimes been a bit befuddled by the NFL Gamebook tackle statistics. This tidbit from Dr. Z's 8/8 column was interesting.
Joe of San Antonio counts tackles and matches them against the numbers that appear in the paper. He says he'll come up with two or three for Ray, and then guess what, the listed figure is something like five tackles, six assists. This is true, not only for Ray but many defensive super stars (more prevalent among linebackers, for some reason). Brian Urlacher, for instance, or Derrick Brooks. And it's especially true when it's a home team stats crew doing the tallying. Just check, for instance, how many more "assists" the home team has, cumulatively, than the visitors.
Every now and then at a game I'll get a seat in the press box near the stats crew. I enjoy watching them work, especially how they record tackles and assists. I'll see them give an assist to somebody who arrives late and merely falls on the pile, and once I got so steamed about this that I started heckling them. "That wasn't an assisted tackle ... the play was long over," and I cut it out when I saw, forming on their lips, the magic word, "Security!"
Have any of you tape-and-rewatch guys ever gone through and counted the tackles and compared with the official published numbers? It might be interesting if we had a number of people do it some week and then compared our own results to each other and the official totals.
Joe of San Antonio counts tackles and matches them against the numbers that appear in the paper. He says he'll come up with two or three for Ray, and then guess what, the listed figure is something like five tackles, six assists. This is true, not only for Ray but many defensive super stars (more prevalent among linebackers, for some reason). Brian Urlacher, for instance, or Derrick Brooks. And it's especially true when it's a home team stats crew doing the tallying. Just check, for instance, how many more "assists" the home team has, cumulatively, than the visitors.
Every now and then at a game I'll get a seat in the press box near the stats crew. I enjoy watching them work, especially how they record tackles and assists. I'll see them give an assist to somebody who arrives late and merely falls on the pile, and once I got so steamed about this that I started heckling them. "That wasn't an assisted tackle ... the play was long over," and I cut it out when I saw, forming on their lips, the magic word, "Security!"
Have any of you tape-and-rewatch guys ever gone through and counted the tackles and compared with the official published numbers? It might be interesting if we had a number of people do it some week and then compared our own results to each other and the official totals.