Updating the way we talk about ballhawks

This week, I made the biggest update to one of our custom stats in about a decade: I’ve added tackles for a loss to the stats we track as a part of our “ballhawks” stat.

Let’s talk about why.

Why do this?

I’ve been in conversation with people who listen to Blue 58 for most of this season about this exact issue, and it was prompted by a simple question: why do we consider sacks as a part of this stat but not tackles for loss?

To back up for a second, I took the idea for tracking “ballhawks” from former Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Packers reporter Bob McGinn. He kept an eye on which players made the most plays on the ball, which he defined as sacks, forced fumbles, passes defensed, and interceptions. Add those stats up, and you have a given player’s “ballhawks” for a given game, season, or career.

It’s simple and, I think, intuitive. Football is, at its core, about the ball itself. You can’t score without it, and stopping the other team from doing things with it is the defense’s whole job. It stands to reason that players and defenses who are the best at making plays on the ball are going to be the most successful overall.

It’s not foolproof, but it works pretty well and seems to align with the eye test. Guys who you’d think of as better players tend to make the most plays on the ball.

And now, we’ve added tackles for loss to that equation. Here’s why.

The stats we track as “ballhawks” are not all equal. Interceptions are the most impactful; you get one, and you’ve ruined a drive. Next come sacks, which have a pretty good chance of ruining a drive. Passes defensed erase a play, but usually don’t affect a whole drive. And forced fumbles are good to have, but they don’t always lead to a turnover. We can quibble about marginal differences, but that seems like a pretty good hierarchy.

But tackles for loss seem like an obvious omission, in hindsight. While most TFLs won’t produce as many lost yards for the offense as a sack, they’re definitely a negative play for the offense and the defender in question deserves credit for them. And, truthfully, some sacks are about equal with a TFL. There have been at least two instances of a zero-yard sack by the Packers this year (Xavier McKinney got credit for one when he knocked the ball out of Bryce Young’s hands in Week 9, and Micah Parsons got one when he took down Dak Prescott in Week 4). If that kind of overlap is taking place, I figure we might as well credit the defenders who are doing the job regularly.