Lending a Hand in Bringing Ballcarriers Down

EasyChair Preprint 13844

Abstract

In this paper we examine National Football League (NFL) Next Gen Stats data to uncover insights in how teammates collectively bring down ballcarriers. Traditional defensive statistics focus on individual tacklers, which is certainly an important skill, but in a team game there is often more than one defender who contributes to the stop. This paper was our submission for the 2024 NFL Big Data Bowl to “create metrics that assign value to elements of tackling”. We found that individuals who slowed down ballcarriers had a strong positive correlation with tackles and that the distance players were from the football was a statistically significant predictor of ballcarrier speed on its way down to zero.

Keyphrases: Defensive Statistics, Gridiron Football, National Football League, Sports Analytics, Tackles

@booklet{EasyChair:13844,
  author    = {Isaih Battiste and Charles Danoff and Christopher Hanes},
  title     = {Lending a Hand in Bringing Ballcarriers Down},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 13844},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2024}}