The Lost Art of the Form Tackle

Defense in general is becoming a lost art. It seems like whenever a coaching vacancy comes up these days the top prospects to fill them are all offensive coordinators or coaches that had a primarily offensive background. The offensive minds are dominating the game today. They take their best athletes and put them on offense. Then they take the kid that can’t catch and put him on defense. As a result these head coaches aren’t paying as much attention to the defense and leaving it up to the assistant coaches to teach them the fundamentals.

I think tackling is definitely becoming a lost art. It’s one thing when you see head hunting safeties laying into a receiver that isn’t looking. It’s another when you see Georgia linebackers trying to bring down Javon Ringer by leaving their feet and trying to throw a shoulder into him. Or Oklahoma corners just trying to grab a WR’s jersey and hang on for dear life.

I forget the player, but I remember in the National Championship game some Florida safety deliberately throwing his head into the jaw of an Oklahoma WR along the sideline. I thought it was one of the dirtiest plays I’ve ever seen, but the announcers applauded it like it was a great hit. The NCAA should really consider some kind of punishment for kids who play like that. You can’t fine them, but you can suspend them a game or two. If the NCAA doesn’t want to do it then the conferences should step up and do it. I feel bad for the kid who has to take an exam on Monday when his head is still pounding from the concussion he suffered on Saturday.

There’s a really fine line between a good hit that inadvertently hurts someone, and a dirty hit that does. I don’t want the game to turn into NFL Blitz or whatever that terrible fusion of Mortal Kombat and Madden was. You mention shoulder and crown of helmet hits. I think shoulder hits are great. Crown of the helmet hits are terrible.

Most everyone saw that hit Ryan Clark put on McGahee, and pretty much everyone, from the officials, to the league that I would guarantee reviewed it, thought it was a clean hit. When two players are flying at each other like that, people are obviously going to get hurt from time to time. (Addendum – not a Steelers fan). A cornerback or safety isn’t going to be able to stand up a running back with the ease of a linebacker.

I also saw the hit on the Oklahoma receiver in the Championship Game. I still can’t believe that a penalty wasn’t called on either the hit, or the asshole Florida players standing on the sideline basically taunting the player that was just illegally blindsided. The Mays hit on Norwood also falls into this category. I’m just happy that Norwood wasn’t hurt too badly by it. It certainly falls into the category of cheap shots I’ve seen. Not only are these cheap shots… they are just stupid for the tackler, and a great way to end up in a wheelchair.

Finally… with regards to the NCAA… fine the school and sit the player for a game or two. If a player gets a misconduct penalty in hockey, especially for an intent to injure penalty, they have to sit a game or two. There’s no reason that can’t happen in football.

Really, finally, I’m glad everyone agrees the announcing for the NC game was the most wretched thing ever. Maybe Bryant Gumble wasn’t available.

break Mendenhall’s shoulder with a form tackle?

I guess if you want to be known as a big hitter, you don’t form tackle. Yeah, you might miss tackles here and there, more than the form tackler, but all you need is several big hits to make the highlight reel, then you can tell your agent to SHOW ME THE $$$$$$$$$$$$!!!!!!!!!!

God, I’m cynical.

Mike, you complain about the loss of defensive fundamentals in your post at the top of this page, and blame it on the rise of the offensive jugernauts we see today. Football is evolving on us again just like it did back in the 1980s when the west coast forced changes in the way teams play football. Now we see teams that throw the football 40-50 times a game and literally play basketball on turf. The defenses today are getting shredded…one way to slow all this passing down? To knock the living daylights out of a reciever…now I understand and agree with the defenseless reciever part…Norwood was not looking when that hit took place and the ball was hardly in his hands at that point…but the Clark hit was clearly a great play by the defender and a RB looking to lower his shoulder and get body lean… The only way I see football surviving in the current form is if defeneders continue to punish recievers and force them to think about the catches they are making…otherwise in 20 years football will be a glorified ultmate frisbee match…

If you watch old footgae, especially 1960’s and 1970’s footage, there wasn’t a whole lot of “form tackling”. When you factor in the fact that guys today are bigger and faster, and the game is played faster than it was back then, you end up with some of the violent collisions you see today. If you’re a safety, you’re trying to run through a guy and separate him from the ball. You’re not going to see a lot of Ray Lewis, or even Poz, hits where he isn’t squared up because he’s typically meeting the guy in the hole. As a safety, you gotta bring some wood to seaparate the receiver from the ball – Kim Herring comes to mind. And Scirotto did it against Tennessee in the Outback Bowl in 2006. This whole idea that a receiver is “defenseless” is bullshit. If a guys doesn’t bring his arms on a tackle, and the receiver bounces off, shame on the would be tackler. If he takes him out and the hit appears vicious, too bad. It’s part of the friggin’ game! Every guy out there knows it.

I also disagree with the notion that the best athletes are on offense. The fact that defenses are so much faster and more dominant, despite rule changes intended to handcuuff them, demonstrates the shift in athletes from offense to defense. Hell, Paterno could be considered a pioneer in taking offensive players and making them linebackers.

I think that the advent of the individual over the team has a lot to do with the demise of form tackling. I look at the way that ESPN glorifies the brutal hits with their "Top Ten Plays" and that horrible segment "Jacked UP!" I’m not sure if they do that stupid thing anymore, but whatever. I think that younger kids view these clips and want to see themselves on Monday Night Countdown or SportsCenter, thus leading them to think more of a highlight-reel tackle than a Concrete Charlie old-school leg-wrapper. More often than not, it seems that, aside from the possibility of a severe injury occurring, they have a greater chance of whiffing on the ball carrier and allowing the play to continue. These kids are trying to make a name for themselves and enhance their marketability and they think that there is no better way to do this than having their face splattered all over tWWL. So you can thank ESPN for ruining yet another aspect of sport.

How many times have we seen a back or receiver hurdle a tackler this year. This comes from the “poor form” tackling. The defender is coming in hard and at the last instant lowers his head, closes his eyes and tries to torpedo the ball carrier. If he is too early and too low, the ball carrier jumps right over him. So, the top guys know they have to come in higher, thus bringing in the helmet to helmet potential. And it started in the 60’s-70’s with Jack Tatum and Ronnie Lott and guys like that. We forget about those days when they used the “clothes line” tackle. Dick Butkus, Sam Huff and some of those nuts whould “take a runners head off”. (It was actually a little funny to see a runner come through the hole and all at once his lower body kept going but his head and helmet were still five yards behind.) But it was dangerous, so they outlawed that. Of course, back then we didn’t have linebackers and 235 pound safeties who ran 4.4, 40’s and benched 500 lbs.

more because his hit was fairly fresh, and he seems to have a history of doing this. He was also quoted in AOL Fanhouse yesterday saying he had a little headache after the hit and that’s “normal” after a game for him. I don’t know about “normal.” He’s probably doing some serious brain damage, yet all he cares about are the big hits… Wow what a NFL we’ve come to see.