Jacksonville coach Jack Del Rio was so disgusted by how many tackles the Jaguars missed earlier this month in a 30-13 loss at Tennessee that he took an unusual step in today’s NFL: He had his team practice in full pads. Del Rio even considered, but ultimately rejected, having his players actually tackle in practice.
“You can design it any way you want, you can have any number of X’s and O’s and D-linemen and linebackers and secondary guys,” Del Rio said. “You can distribute them any different which way you want, but if you can’t tackle, you can’t stop people, you can’t play good defense.”
Del Rio is not alone in his frustration. Tackling, one of football’s bedrock elements, seems to be worse than ever, setting running backs and wide receivers loose and confounding coaches desperate for a remedy in an era when tackling has become an only-on-Sunday requirement.
Missed tackles are not an official NFL statistic, but Football Outsiders, a Web site that provides statistics, began tracking them this season. In Week 4, it counted 131 broken tackles in the 12-and-a-half games that were charted, an average of 10-and-a-half per game. One trend most exposes how poor tackling is. According to the NFL, there were 81 touchdowns of 50 yards or more through Week 8, the most since 1970, great for highlight reels, a nightmare for defenses.
From their first practice at Pop Warner, players are taught to put their facemask into the ball carrier’s chest, wrap him up with their arms and explode with their hips into the runner. But once the NFL’s regular season starts, full-speed tackling happens only on Sunday.
It was not always like that. Tony Dungy, a former coach and current NBC analyst, recalled that when he played for the Pittsburgh Steelers, coach Chuck Noll never held a practice that was not in full pads, even on Friday, the lightest day of the practice week. There was contact every day.
“You got used to hitting and tackling,” Dungy said.
But that was before the salary cap and roster limits. A hard cap and soft tissue do not mix, and avoiding injuries during practice is now the primary concern for teams.
By the time Dungy became the Indianapolis coach, players even had pad-free days in training camp. If the Colts played a Monday night game, they would practice for the next game with no pads to spare their bodies. The Colts never practiced in pads on Fridays, and late in the season Dungy would call for no pads on Thursdays.
So while his players still practiced technique — taking the correct angle to the ball or at most wrapping up the ball carrier before releasing him — the physical aspect of tackling was virtually absent.
“It does show,” Dungy said.
LaMarr Woodley, a linebacker for the Steelers, who are considered one of the best tackling teams, said: “People take for granted that you can just go in there, hit somebody and make the tackle ... It’s something you’ve definitely got to work on to prepare, and have to practice during the week.”
And when teams do not?
“Those are the teams that miss a lot of tackles,” Woodley said.
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