Bengals reportedly "making push" to keep Vincent Rey

[GreenCornBengal]

Tackles are a lame stat.

If you are tackling a lot, its because you are on the field a lot, because you can't stop anyone.

Here are the top 10 tacklers from last season. (notice they all play for bad teams.)

NaVorro Bowman - SF (5-11)
D'Qwell Jackson - IND (8-8)
Lavonte David - TB (6-10)
Reshad Jones - Mia (6-10)
Paul Posluszny - Jax (5-11)
Sean Lee - Dal (4-12)
Telvin Smith - Jax (5-11)
Corey Graham - Buf (8-8)
Malcolm Smith - Oak (7-9)
Daryl Smith - Balt (5-11)

Now I'm not saying these are bad players. Bowman is a stud, obviously. I just think there is some stat bloating when you talk about tackles.

If you look at Vinny Rey's game logs from this season, youll notice many of his tackles were in the early weeks, when the defense was playing noticeably bad. This was when Burfict was not on the field and teams would drop it over the middle (because Vinny Rey is beatable) over and over again.

He averaged 8.75 tackles per game the first 8 weeks of the season but only 3.75 tackles per game the final 8.

I Hope this somewhat illustrates that high tackles are often a bloated stat that is procured from poor defensive play. Sure, there are many players that have high tackle ammounts that are great players. Keuchkly is 13th in the league in tackles... but recall he lead the league in tackles when the team wasn't playing as well....

Dhani Jones led the league in tackles once....