Professional Football Researchers Association Forum
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I'm looking to find Minnesota Vikings defensive stats, particularly tackle data from 1967 (Alan Page's rookie year) through 1978.
Does anyone know where one could find that or if they've seen it or have some of it?
I have noticed that in 1977 the Vikings began putting individual defensive stats inside the biographies of the players. But prior to that, I have yet to find a way for track down Vikings defensive tackles stats data other than Gamebooks for the Playoff Games, which seem to have tackle data all the way back to the 1st NFL-AFL Super Bowl.
An example I'd like to do is something along the lines like this. This is taken from the 1971 Minnesota Vikings Gamebooks as I wrote some parsers that went through the gamebooks. I can duplicate this across teams pretty well with the models I've trained and using an online service for the compute ($2 for 1000 pages).
The 2001 Vikings media guide is on archive.org. (I have a paper copy, it may be in others of that era. This info is no longer in the Vikings media guide at present.)
Year by year recaps were done that listed statistics. The tackles and sack leaders were listed. It was usually about 5 players per year for tackles, the same or more for sacks.
Look, I'm a numbers guy, but I cannot imagine caring enough about tackles to track down every tackle.
What's a good number of tackles for a season? No one even has a working definition, which is one reason it's never been an official statistic.
Someone had 125 one year, okay, that' s good, I guess. Maybe they had a poor defensive line and the linebackers and defensive backs had to do everything. Don't know. No context.
