The Eagles Secondary Can't Tackle, Also It's Hot Out

This post will be a lot like all those people that will tell you, "its hot out there!" today. No kidding. It's pretty obvious.

The Eagles secondary can't tackle and hasn't been able to for a while.

PFF has continued their series of 3 year studies of signature stats with a look at secondary tackling. Predictably, its not flattering to the Eagles. If you look at their list of the top ten defensive backs with the most missed tackles over the last 3 years, 3 former Eagles show up.

Quintin Mikell is surprisingly 4th in the league, Asante Samuel is tied for 5th (with the always overrated Antrel Rolle) and Sean Jones, who spent just one season here is tied for 7th. Ronde Barber leads all DBs in missed tackles over the past 3 years and Charles Woodson, who is often cited as one of the better tackling DBs, is also among the top 10.

But those are counting stats. Simply who missed the most tackles without taking into account how many shots they had to make a tackle. To zero in on the really worst tacklers, PFF uses tackling efficiency, which measures how many tackles are missed per attempt. Using that stat, you'll find that a Woodson is actually just average, which still makes his so called tackling prowess overrated. Ronde Barber, however, still stinks.

More about the Eagles specifically after the jump.

In what should come as no surprise, Asante Samuel is tied for dead last in tackling efficiency, missing one every 3.7 attempts. But he's gone, so we've rid ourselves of that weakness right? Wrong. Nnamdi Asomugha comes in as the 3rd worst, missing a tackle every 4.6 attempts. Now, he hasn't missed as many tackles overall as a guy like Samuel, but the evidence does seem to suggest that if he got more chances he may not really get any better. It also suggests that he probably was never a good candidate for the "Charles Woodson role" that was talked about so much last season. Actually, it seems that Charles Woodson isn't even a good candidate for that role...

It doesn't stop there though as also showing up 12th from the bottom is Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie, who missed a tackle once every 5.7 attempts. Plus, he's actually attempted a good bit more than Asomugha, so that's an even more solid indication of his lack of tackling prowess.

All that said, there is some solace in the fact that the worst offender (Samuel) is gone. I was surprised to see Quintin Mikell on the list of missed tackles, but I'm not sure we can take that to mean the Eagles have upgraded there. The current crop of safeties is so young that they wouldn't really show up in a 3 year study.