Tackling one tough question

Rivera tries to balance physicality with caution

WASHINGTON

Every so often during the long, humid mornings in Ashburn, one sound will break through the whistles and shouts to capture everyone’s attention. It’s the noise of a real hit, of two armored, vending machine-size men slamming into each other — a distinct crunch.

Several times during training camp, energetic free safety Troy Apke has delivered this type of resounding thump. The split second afterward is tense — everyone OK? — and the moment digs at coach Ron Rivera’s conflict. He must balance the physicality he wants with the caution he needs — because while player safety remains a top priority, he’s also worried a preseason without any games will hurt his defense come the regular season because his players haven’t tackled.

“You want to simulate as much as you can, and not everybody’s going to get the right amount of tackles in practice to get yourself ready,” Rivera said. “You try to create as much of an opportunity to be similar to it without getting anybody hurt. So that’s another concern as we continue to go through this.”

This year’s unease echoes that of 2011, when a lockout prevented players from getting on the field until late July and offense later surged. Rivera thought poor tackling plagued his Carolina Panthers for about half the season. Though the situations aren’t perfectly similar — “In 2011, we had no contact with our guys,” Rivera pointed out — they’re similar insofar as control-oriented coaches are anxious about a potential decline in the quality of play.

This year, coaches adopted different strategies. For Tampa Bay, Bruce Arians said he would use live tackling. For Dallas, Mike McCarthy planned fundamental tackling drills every practice. For San Francisco, Kyle Shanahan believed tackling to the ground increased the chance for injury, and he preferred an approach similar to that used by Washington — limit contact to padded players popping each other — but he still left open the possibility of tackling.

“There’s going to be a few guys on this team where, gosh, it’s neck and neck and it’s got to play out,” Shanahan said. “As a coaching staff, we’re going to have to figure out how to put those guys in that position, which will be new for us.”

Others push back on the idea that tackling offers insight. They believe worries about poor tackling early in the season might be overblown.

Aaron Schatz — the founder of Football Outsiders, an analytics website — pointed to the numbers. Football Outsiders data showed the rate of broken tackles not only did not increase from 2010 to 2011 but actually decreased slightly. Schatz admitted this is an inexact science; broken tackles are tracked subjectively, so the real rate “can be hard to say for sure.”

“It is noteworthy that our charting of broken tackles did not go UP in 2011,” Schatz wrote in a text message. “I don’t want to say going down meant tackling was BETTER, but we certainly didn’t seem to notice tackling getting WORSE.”

From a player’s perspective, Washington linebacker Jon Bostic doesn’t see the absence of tackling as a major issue, either. In the past decade or so, the NFL has looked at and legislated tackling more aggressively in response to its handling of concussions, and overall it has become safer but more difficult. Defenders sometimes feel as if they’re choosing between hitting high and incurring fines and suspensions or going low and injuring an opponent’s leg.

The key to all of this, Bostic said, is form. He noted teams often don’t tackle much during organized team activities or training camp in a regular year, and he made a point of the fact that each position relies on mental reps translating to the field. In camp, he has concentrated on angles, “fitting up the ball carriers” and trying to knock them back before letting them go.

“It’s important to emphasize that stuff during practice because even during the season we don’t live tackle,” he said. “A lot of these things that you practice over and over and over throughout camp, this stuff ’s got to carry over into the game.”

On Friday, as Washington neared the end of practice, Apke laid out another receiver up the middle. He crunched free agent wideout Isaiah Wright with something that, in a little over two weeks, would have counted as a tackle.

In a perfect world, Rivera would like to give his players more of a chance to connect on real hits, to follow through on these collisions. Though Bostic and Schatz might disagree, the coach still believes it would help them prepare for the season. But for now, as the team tries to hone its fundamentals and stay healthy, these moments of simulated tackles are what they can do — and Rivera and his coaching staff can only hope it’s enough.