Are High Tackle Numbers for Safeties a Bad Thing?

[GTripp0012]

It's a pretty common analysis refrain: if the safety is making a lot of tackles, your defense probably isn't performing well. Is this really the case, or are high tackle numbers more indicative of a player with a lot of range, which is a mark of a good player?

I looked at the 2007 numbers of all safeties and how many tackles they registered per game. To qualify for this study, a player had to appear in at least twelve games, and average 5.5 tackles per game or more. Here is the complete list of the qualifiers:

Gibril Wilson (NYG)-7.1
Michael Lewis (SF)-6.5
Chris Harris (Car)-6.4
Bob Sanders (Ind)-6.4
Roy Williams (Dal)-6.1
Sean Jones (Cle)-6.0
Laron Landry (Wash)-5.9
Donte Whitner (Buf)-5.9
Von Hutchins (Hou)-5.8
Sammy Knight (Jax)-5.8
Madieu Williams (Cin)-5.7
Roman Harper (NO)-5.6
Lawyer Milloy (Atl)-5.6
Bernard Pollard (KC)-5.6
Jermaine Phillips (TB)-5.5
Kinnoy Kennedy (Det)-5.5
Josh Bullocks (NO)-5.5

A few interesting things stand out there. Though exactly half the league has one safety on this list, only New Orleans has more than one, and Josh Bullocks barely made the cut. What is clear here is that most teams do tend to have a strong safety that gets more tackles than the other, even if his designation to the team is "free" safety. Only St. Louis' safety tandem--Corey Chavous and O.J. Atogwe--finished with the same number of tackles (75), and neither made this list.

Of those 16 teams, here are their Defensive DVOA rankings (with Rush Def DVOA in parenthesis) to see how they stack up against teams who did not have their safeties making as many tackles:

3rd (8th)
4th (7th)
6th (11th)-Washington Redskins
10th (14th)
12th (22nd)
14th (10th)-New York Giants
16th (24th)
17th (16th)
19th (17th)
22nd (21st)
24th (13th)-Cincinnati Bengals
27th (9th)-New Orleans Saints
28th (23rd)-San Francisco 49ers
29th (28th)
30th (29th)
31st (27th)-Detroit Lions

Just looking at those ranks, 5 out of the 6 worst defenses in 2007 had at least one safety make more than 5.5 tackles in a single game. The teams with safeties on that list did produce a statistically significant amount of DVOA worse than those without a team on that list.

The rush defenses were even worse for the teams who had a lot of safeties making tackles. The Bengals and the Saints totally bucked this trend, but on the whole, a team who had a safety make a lot of tackles was worse against the run than the pass.

I went back a few years to see if this trend held:

2006
Chris Hope (Ten)-7.6
Sean Jones (Cle)-6.9
Sean Taylor (Wash)-6.9
Donte Whitner (Buf)-6.9
Gibril Wilson (NYG)-6.7
Stuart Schweigert (Oak)-6.7
Antwan Bethea (Ind)-6.4
Erik Coleman (NYJ)-6.3
Will Demps (NYG)-6.3
Lawyer Milloy (Atl)-6.1
Kerry Rhodes (NYJ)-6.1
Ken Hamlin (Sea)-6.0

9th (16th)
13th (11th)-New York Giants
15th (29th)
17th (17th)
20th (23rd)
21st (25th)
24th (28th)
26th (32nd)
27th (31st)
32nd (16th)-Washington Redskins

2005
Erik Coleman (NYJ)-7.6
Gibril Wilson (NYG)-7.0
Adrian Wilson (Ari)-6.8
Michael Lewis (Phi)-6.7
Lawyer Milloy (Buf)-6.6
Kerry Rhodes (NYJ)-6.5
Bob Sanders (Ind)-6.5
Kenoy Kennedy (Det)-6.1
Chris Hope (Pit)-6.0

2nd (1st)-SB Champion Pittsburgh Steelers
8th (17th)
11th (2nd)-New York Giants
14th (7th)-Philadelphia Eagles
17th (20th)
18th (28th)
21st (23rd)
26th (31st)

I bolded the teams who had a better run defense than a total defense. A few things stand out:

The NFC East seems to be the exception to the rule here. The Giants are consistently above average in defense, and Gibril Wilson average more than 6 tackles a game every season. The Eagles were above average the year Michael Lewis made the list, the Cowboys were above average when Roy Williams made it, and the Redskins were above it when Landry made it. The only exception is when Sean Taylor was on the tackles list, the Redskins were 32nd in total D, but even still, the Run D was pretty decent that year.

Outside of the NFC East, the results are pretty conclusive. If your safeties make a bunch of tackles, your defense is going to be pretty bad, and your run defense is likely to be downright awful. Conventional logic holds here. If the safety is making 6 tackles a game, with a few key exceptions, the team is playing losing football.