Defensive Decoherence

If sacks weren't recorded until 1982, why is a 1981 team in there? Someone tell Deacon Jones and Steve Sabol.

Back on November 10, Tom Boswell wrote a column that discussed the Redskins takeaway woes. At that time, after eight games the Redskins had only five takeaways. The stat above says that number has doubled to ten, still well short of the 35-takeaway league average. Boswell said there was an inevitable reversion to the mean, and that the Redskins would have to defy some serious history to set a bottom-end record. I mean c'mon, the sample size is 16 per year, multiplied by the number of years takeaways have been measured (how long is that? the 40s?).

(of course as I pore over these older pieces I see that Boswell cited a Redskins franchise low of 21 in 1988, but the stat above says 18 in 1983 and 1996, so Boswell had two chances to get it right and missed both so instead of citing these pieces in our own work, Skin Patrol and I should have steered clear -- my career is not going down in flames because of some columnist's sloppy research)

The Redskins are definitely going to set franchise lows for takeaways and INTs, and are on pace to set lows for the league. It's pathetic. Hrmmm...who was the safety for that 2004 Rams team that only got 6 interceptions...let me check Databasefootball here...it was Adam Archuleta! And he got none of those interceptions! Ok, it's unfair to pile on Adam Archuleta because he's not playing, since he has a whopping 3 INTs in his 6-year career.

Actually, if we use the tortured logic of his agent, the Redskins have fewer INTs with Arch on the bench because if he was playing they would have fewer because he doesn't catch INTs and his replacement caught one, so it's like Schrodinger's Cat, Occam's Razor or some scientific shit: if Arch is on the bench not catching INTs, then he can't be on the field not catching INTs.

Carlos Rogers has hands of stone (no INT since December 2005, a freaking year ago and the guy is in on every play), Kenny Wright is an INT magnet with 20% of the Redskins production this season, Mike Rumph has three in 5 years, and none since 2003, Shawn Springs has missed 6 games so far this season and yet managed to score 20% of the Redskins INTs. The rest belong to Sean Taylor and Vernon Fox (both courtesy of Jake Delhomme) and Philip Daniels, who scored his against Byron Leftwich.

You would think in that blind squirrel-nut kind of way, one tipped pass would have landed in a linebacker's arms, one wounded duck would have been so underthrown even Carlos could catch it trailing the receiver 10 yards, or one hail mary would have come down in the end zone into a DB's arms, but you'd be wrong since the line presents no pressure and therefore no tipped passes, and since QBs have plenty of time to throw, there are not many wounded ducks and even those that there are Carlos is out of place for and since teams rarely trail at the half or end, no reason to throw the old HM.

Let's hope for a torrent of takeaways the next three games so astounding that I am forced to write an apology and a complimentary piece on the defense. I'll even throw in an incentive and this is the gods' truth: I will personally deliver flan or baklava (player's choice) to Redskins Park for any player that scores a takeaway in the next three games. If that takeaway goes back for six on the same play, I will deliver dessert to the whole defense.



Graphic on Redskins takeaway weakness: Washington Post

What's the deal with the Deacon Jones and Steve Sabol references? I normally do not decode the obsure references in the editorial comment on the image but I can't resist. In January 2002, Michael Strahan set the single season sack record with 22-1/2, and if you were watching that game as I was, you saw Brett Favre obviously go down intentionally, but whatev.

Since stats on sacks were not kept until 1982, only those players since then can qualify for this record. However, the 'sack' has existed since about 1970 when Deacon Jones coined the term. Wikipedia says Jones

felt that a sack devastated the offense in the same way that a city was devastated when it was sacked.

I have heard a different story attributed to Jones, one that I cannot verify on teh internets (as if teh internets is definietive), with a describing how it felt to tackle a QB behind the line of scrimmage, along the lines of

it's like destroying his future, it's like killing his family, it's like wrapping him up and putting him in a little sack and then beating the sack.

Not long after Strahan set the sack record, I heard an interview, on ESPN I think, with Steve Sabol of NFL Films who said he was pretty sure Deacon Jones had the record, with 26 sacks in 1967 (same Wiki link above), only over 14 games, not 16. He would know, since as the head of NFL Films, he has tape on every NFL game played since 1940-something.