by Aaron Schatz

Today, more of our series presenting various 2011 stats from the multitude of Football Outsiders spreadsheets. Broken tackles are a stat from game charting, not from the standard play-by-play. We define a "broken tackle" as one of two events: either the ballcarrier escapes from the grasp of the defender, or the defender is in good position for a tackle but the ballcarrier jukes him out of his shoes. If the ballcarrier sped by a slow defender who dived and missed, that didn't count as a broken tackle. We only measured broken tackles for standard plays; volunteers didn't have the time to track them for all special teams plays.

The resulting numbers are subjective, obviously, but there were over two dozen charters involved, so no team's numbers could be overly slanted because of the bias of a single specific charter. We know that there are a other groups on the Web who track broken tackles, and because of the subjectivity, their numbers won't be exactly the same as ours. Given the mistakes that are easy to make when marking players off of television tape, a difference of one or two broken tackles isn't a big deal. But looking at the players with the most and fewest broken tackles does a good job of showing us which ballcarriers are able to power through defenders -- or avoid them with agility -- and which ballcarriers go down quickly when there's contact.

One interesting thing about broken tackles is that, while our definition has stayed constant in the three years we've been counting them, the number of broken tackles has gone down five percent in each season, between 2009 and 2010 and then again between 2010 and 2011. I have no idea if this means that tackling has improved over the last couple of years, or if our charters were a little too lax in marking broken tackles back in 2009 and have gradually been adhering tighter to our definition, or if perhaps the opposite is true and the charters are being too strict and missing too many broken tackles. Anyway, these are the numbers we've got, so these are the numbers we've got to go with.

Here is a list of all running backs with at least 20 broken tackles in 2011:

LeSean McCoy led our count of broken tackles last year after finishing third in 2010. Most of the same running backs who had a lot of broken tackles in 2010 also had a lot in 2011. The biggest riser is Matt Forte, who we only recorded with 15 broken tackles in 2010, although he had 27 in 2009. The big drop came from Peyton Hillis, who went from 35 broken tackles in 2010 to just four in 2011. Some of that has to do with fewer carries, but his rate of broken tackles per touch went from 10.6 percent to 2.2 percent, which was the lowest rate for any running back with at least 80 touches. Two other running backs who saw their broken tackle totals plummet were Cedric Benson, who dropped from 30 broken tackles in 2010 to just 10 in 2011, and Danny Woodhead, who went from 20 in 2010 to just three in 2011. Most of the other players who climbed or dropped on the list did so primarily because they had a big increase or decrease in touches. For example, Reggie Bush went from 10 to 29, while Darren McFadden fell from 37 to 12.

(2010 broken tackle numbers are in this article, and 2009 numbers are here. For 2009, the individual numbers are an ESPN Insider piece, but the team numbers were free on Football Outsiders.)

LeGarrette Blount had the "Beast Mode Run of the Year," the play with the most broken tackles charted on one run. In Week 11 against Green Bay, we have him avoiding Sam Shields, Morgan Burnett, A.J. Hawk, Desmond Bishop, and Eric Walden on a 54-yard touchdown run.

Here's another way to look at things, the highest and lowest rates of broken tackles per play. We're adding together catches and carries to get the total number of touches for each player. This is just running backs, with a minimum of 80 touches:

Jacquizz Rodgers just misses making these lists, with only 78 touches, but he led all rookies with 19 broken tackles. That's a 24.4 percent rate of broken tackles per touch.

This is the third year where Frank Gore has been one of the lower running backs in broken tackles. We had 24 broken tackles for him in 2009 (8.5 percent rate) and 11 broken tackles last year (4.4 percent rate). Gore has a rep for breaking tackles, but it doesn't seem to be earned.

Michael Vick and Tim Tebow tied for the lead among quarterbacks with 22 broken tackles apiece. This year we took up Bill Simmons on an idea that he had on one of last year's B.S. Report podcasts, and we specifically tracked "Houdinis," the number of plays where a quarterback escaped a possible sack. Vick had 17 of these and we didn't record another quarterback with even half that many.

Aaron Hernandez led all tight ends or wide receivers in broken tackles, by a wide margin, and his Patriots compatriot Rob Gronkowski was fourth. Here's a look at the top ten wide receivers and tight ends in broken tackles:



A list with the lowest rate of broken tackles for wide receivers would be kind of silly, since there were a lot of wide receivers and tight ends with only one or two broken tackles. Of note, we had only two receivers who had more than 40 catches with zero broken tackles according to our charters: Brandon Lloyd and Jabar Gaffney. Percy Harvin had only six broken tackles in 2011 after leading all wide receivers in both 2009 and 2010.

The league leader in broken tackles by offensive tackles was Guy Whimper, with one. You might remember that play from this edition of Walkthrough.

Finally, here's the overall list for broken tackles on offense:

Broken Tackles by Offenses, 2011 Offense Plays Plays w BT Total BT Pct Plays w BT PHI 1018 86 96 8.4% ATL 1046 82 99 7.8% PIT 995 78 93 7.8% TEN 969 70 78 7.2% CHI 967 66 73 6.8% BUF 976 64 73 6.6% NE 1068 65 75 6.1% CAR 987 60 64 6.1% DAL 1001 60 68 6.0% DET 1052 62 73 5.9% HOU 1027 60 65 5.8% NO 1104 64 81 5.8% SEA 993 57 68 5.7% MIN 999 57 63 5.7% NYG 1006 57 67 5.7% JAC 984 55 63 5.6% Offense Plays Plays w BT Total BT Pct Plays w BT DEN 1004 55 62 5.5% TB 950 52 69 5.5% OAK 999 54 59 5.4% ARI 979 49 55 5.0% SD 1026 51 65 5.0% SF 971 48 58 4.9% GB 962 47 52 4.9% MIA 978 47 51 4.8% KC 1005 45 50 4.5% CLE 1012 45 57 4.4% BAL 1016 44 49 4.3% IND 938 39 44 4.2% WAS 1018 38 45 3.7% CIN 1004 37 39 3.7% NYJ 1019 34 41 3.3% STL 1004 29 33 2.9%

Next week, I'll run the list of the most broken tackles by defenders and defenses.