SmashMouth

After a year of digging into the college game for the first time, we’re now beginning to unveil our findings. As you’ll have seen we’ve started to bring you some content including player profiles, rankings, and some interesting Signature Stats from each position.

Matt Claassen had a look at the running backs yesterday (run game and pass game), and today Gordon McGuinness has run his eye over the receivers, with one article examining Yards Per Route Run and Drop Rate, and another taking in the Deep Passing game and Slot Performance. Now we switch sides and put the linebackers under the microscope.

It was glaringly apparent, after recording tackles for every single college game last season, that the official scorers in college hand tackles out as freely to linebackers, as the official scorers in the NFL do. To try and solve that problem we now bring our Signature Stats to the NCAA, hopefully providing a better means of comparison.

Note: While we acknowledge that some players had vastly different roles in their defenses, all off-ball linebackers are lumped together in this analysis.

Run Stop Percentage

A quick refresher on how we define a stop. It is essentially any play where the primary tackler prevents an offensive success. The official cutoffs are the following:

1st down: <40% of required yardage
2nd down: <60% of required yardage
3rd down: <100% of required yardage
4th down: <100% of required yardage



Tackling Efficiency





Pass Rushing Productivity



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