Lending a Hand in Bringing Ballcarriers Down

In this paper we examine National Football League (NFL) Next Gen Stats data to uncover insights on how defensive teammates collectively bring down offensive ballcarriers. Traditional defensive statistics focus on individual tacklers, which is certainly vital, 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 that defensive players were from the offensive ballcarrier was a statistically significant predictor of ballcarrier speed in its deceleration path down to zero. This paper aims to contribute to the conference topics of player evaluation and performance analysis.