A Note On Tackles

"Tackles" have been an official stat since 2001, but there is still some confusion about what the term means. For example, CBS Sports and NFL.com both show Luke Kuechly with 164 Tackles in 2012. But Pro-Football-Reference only gives him 103 tackles.

Luke Kuechly had 103 "tackles" last year. Or did he?

This is because CBS and the NFL are adding together "Solo Tackles" and "Assisted Tackles", but Pro-Football-Reference is only counting "Solo Tackles" (with a column next to it for "Assisted Tackles").

ESPN adds more confusion. Instead of a column called "tackles", they have a column called COMB (for "combined") and one called TOTAL. This doesn't clarify anything, because "total" and "combined" are essentially synonyms, both meaning to "add up".

(This convention even confuses ESPN's own writers. Their Fantasy Projection for Kuechly mentions "200 total tackles" when it is clear that what they really mean, according to their own nomenclature, is "200 combined tackles".)

So... for Football Mogul, we are sticking to the NFL's official definition:

[A tackle is] recorded when a defensive player makes contact with an offensive player, forcing him to go to the ground. Tackles can be recorded as either "solo tackles" or "assisted tackles".

In other words, "tackles" includes both "solo tackles" and "assisted tackles". For every tackle that occurs in the simulation, Football Mogul either awards a "solo tackle" to one defensive player, or an "assisted tackle" to each of two different players.