NFL Defense Stats Decoded

Last updated: 5th November 2026. Stats current to the end of NFL week 8 2026 regular season.

Defense stats record the things a defender does to stop the other team: tackles made, quarterbacks sacked, passes knocked away or intercepted, fumbles forced. There is no single number that sums a defender up the way passer rating sums up a quarterback, and once you know why, the whole box score gets easier to read.

The defensive columns were the ones that took me longest to make sense of, and it wasn’t because the definitions are hard. It’s that I kept trying to read them like offensive stats, looking for the biggest number and assuming that was the best player. On defense that logic breaks, and this page is mostly about why.

This is the second of three guides under NFL Stats Decoded. A quick note on spelling before we start: the unit is the defense, with the American spelling, because that’s what every stat sheet uses.

I will be updating the stats here weekly for 2026 so you can easily check them and also unpack them at a glance with the guide below.

NFL Week 8 team defense stats

Why defensive stats are harder to read than offensive ones

Three reasons, and they explain almost every oddity further down this page.

Defenders are trying to make things not happen. An offensive stat records something achieved: yards gained, a pass caught. Most defensive success is an absence. The receiver who was covered so well the quarterback never threw to him produces no statistic at all.

The jobs are wildly different. A linebacker is paid to be near the ball on every running play. An interior lineman is often paid to occupy two blockers so the linebacker can get there cleanly. One of those shows up in the box score and the other does not, and neither player is doing anything wrong.

Some of it is judgement, not measurement. Yards are measured. Tackles are awarded by a human deciding who actually brought the ball carrier down in a pile of bodies. That’s a real difference in reliability, and it’s worth knowing which columns are which.

The tackle stats

Solo, assisted and combined

A tackle is bringing the ball carrier to the ground, or stopping his forward progress so the play is whistled dead. It comes in three columns:

• SOLO is a tackle he made on his own.
• AST is an assisted tackle, where he brought the man down along with a teammate.
• COMB is combined tackles: solo plus assisted, added together. It’s the number broadcasters usually quote.

Some sources weight an assist as half a tackle when calculating totals, which is why you’ll occasionally see a tackle figure ending in .5 and why two sites can list slightly different numbers for the same player. Nothing has gone wrong; they’re counting the same events with a different convention.

Here’s what the top of the list looked like in 2025.

NFL combined tackle leaders, 2025 regular season. Source: Pro Football Reference.

Player	Team	Position	Combined	Solo
Jordyn Brooks	MIA	Linebacker	183	99
Jack Campbell	DET	Linebacker	176	89
Devin White	LVR	Linebacker	174	95
Cedric Gray	TEN	Linebacker	164	97
Bobby Wagner	WAS	Linebacker	162	79

Look at the position column. Every one of them is a linebacker, and that is not a coincidence. Linebackers start each play behind the defensive line, which puts them in the best position on the field to arrive at the ball carrier. Tackle totals are a map of where a player lines up at least as much as a measure of how well he plays.

What tackles don’t tell you

Two things worth carrying with you.

A tackle says nothing about where it happened. Bringing a runner down after two yards and bringing him down after twenty both count as one tackle. A defender on a struggling team can pile up an enormous total precisely because the opposition keeps running the ball successfully at him.

And the counts themselves are softer than they look. Yards are measured; tackles are awarded live by a person deciding who brought the ball carrier down. Different scoring crews reach different conclusions, so the same performance can produce slightly different numbers depending on where the game was played. There’s more on how far to trust them in the questions at the foot of this page.

The pass-rush stats

Sacks

A sack is tackling the quarterback behind the line of scrimmage before he can throw. It’s the most valuable single thing a pass rusher does: it loses the offense yardage, wastes a down, and sometimes knocks the ball loose.

Sacks are shared. If two defenders get there together they take half each, which is why sack totals so often end in .5.

Player	Team	Sacks
Myles Garrett	CLE	23.0
Brian Burns	NYG	16.5
Danielle Hunter	HOU	15.0
Aidan Hutchinson	DET	14.5
Nik Bonitto	DEN	14.0

NFL sack leaders, 2025 regular season. Source: Pro Football Reference, and Garrett’s line

Double figures is the usual marker of a strong pass-rushing season. Myles Garrett’s 23.0 in 2025 was a long way beyond that, and he was named Defensive Player of the Year for it.

Tackles for loss (TFL)

A tackle for loss is bringing any ball carrier down behind the line of scrimmage, so the play ends up losing yardage. Sacks are a subset of it: every sack is also a tackle for loss, but a TFL can equally be a running back stopped in the backfield.

It’s a useful column because it catches disruption that the sack total misses. Maxx Crosby recorded 28 tackles for loss in 2025 against 10.0 sacks, which describes a player who was constantly in the backfield whether or not the quarterback happened to have the ball.

QB hits and pressures

A QB hit is credited when a defender knocks the quarterback to the ground after he has released the pass.

This is the column that helped me to understand how to read pass rushers.

Denver’s Zach Allen, who recorded 47 QB hits in 2025, more than anyone else in the league, from 7.0 sacks.

Seven sacks isn’t a stand out number, but when combined with forty-seven hits it means he was reaching the quarterback constantly and someone else was finishing the play, or the ball was already gone.

He was named first-team All-Pro, and if you had judged him on his sack total alone you would have wondered why.

You’ll also hear about pressures and hurries, which count forcing the quarterback off his spot without hitting him.

Those aren’t official league statistics; they’re charted by analytics providers, so the numbers differ depending on who did the charting.

The coverage stats

Interceptions

An interception is a defender catching a pass meant for the offense. It’s the biggest single swing available to a defense, because it ends the drive and hands the ball over in one play.

Kevin Byard of Chicago led the league in 2025 with seven, and a group of five defenders tied behind him on five apiece.

Across a whole season, that’s the spread between leading the league and being merely very good, which tells you how much luck sits inside the number.

A tipped ball that lands in your hands counts exactly the same as a brilliant read.

There’s also a trap here. A cornerback nobody throws at cannot intercept anything. Some of the best coverage players in the league post modest interception totals precisely because quarterbacks avoid them.

Passes defensed

Passes defensed, shown as PD, counts passes a defender knocked away without catching. It’s the more honest measure of coverage work, because there’s much more of it and much less luck involved.

Read it next to interceptions rather than instead of them. A defender with a lot of passes defensed and few interceptions was there time after time and didn’t finish. A defender with few of either was either quiet or so respected that nobody threw his way, and only watching him will tell you which.

Forced fumbles and recoveries

Two separate columns that people often merge.

FF, forced fumbles, is knocking the ball loose from a ball carrier. That’s a skill, and defenders who are good at it do it repeatedly.

FR, fumble recoveries, is coming up with the loose ball afterwards. That is very largely luck. An oval ball bounces unpredictably and whoever falls on it gets the credit.

Forcing fumbles predicts something about a player. Recovering them mostly doesn’t, which is worth remembering when someone quotes a defender’s takeaway total as if the whole thing were earned.

Why no single number ranks defenders

This is the point of the whole page, and one table makes it better than any explanation I could write. Three defenders, all named first-team All-Pro for 2025.

2025 regular season. Source: Pro Football Reference.

Player	Position	Sacks	Combined tackles	TFL	QB hits
Myles Garrett (CLE)	Edge rusher	23.0	60	33	39
Zach Allen (DEN)	Interior lineman	7.0	38	4	47
Jordyn Brooks (MIA)	Linebacker	3.5	183	13	4

Pick any column and you get a different winner. Rank them on sacks and Garrett wins by a distance. Rank them on tackles and Brooks wins by a distance, with Garrett third. Rank them on QB hits and Allen, who has the fewest sacks of the three, comes top.

None of those rankings is wrong, and none of them is meaningful, because the three men were doing different jobs. Garrett’s job was to get to the quarterback. Brooks’s job was to be at the ball on every running play. Allen’s was to collapse the middle of the pocket so that somebody could. The same panel of voters looked at all three and called each of them one of the best in the league at what he does.

So the question to ask of a defensive stat line is never “is this number big”. It’s “is this number big for someone who plays this position”. Compare edge rushers with edge rushers and linebackers with linebackers, and the columns start telling you something real.

Team defense stats, briefly

Everything above is individual. Whole-team defensive numbers, points allowed per game and yards allowed per game, work differently and predict rather more, so they live in NFL Team Stats Decoded alongside the other numbers that decide who wins.

The short version: points allowed per game is the one that matters most, and yards allowed needs context, because a defense can give up plenty of yards between the twenties and still be hard to actually score on.

Where NFL betting fits in

A short note, because you’ll see these numbers used this way.

Defensive stats feed player props, which are bets on one player’s individual statistic rather than on the result. Tackle totals are the most common, precisely because linebackers produce them so reliably. Sacks appear too, though they’re a much lumpier number to price, since a pass rusher can play brilliantly and finish with none.

Last seasons NFL Team defense stats

Common questions about NFL defense stats

What is a good number of sacks in an NFL season?

Double figures is the usual marker of a strong pass-rushing season, and only a small group of players reach it each year. Myles Garrett led the NFL in 2025 with 23.0, which is exceptional rather than typical, and he was named Defensive Player of the Year. Sacks are shared between defenders who get there together, so totals often end in .5.

What is the difference between a sack and a tackle for loss?

A sack is specifically tackling the quarterback behind the line of scrimmage before he throws. A tackle for loss is bringing down any ball carrier behind the line, including a running back stopped in the backfield. Every sack is also a tackle for loss, but not every tackle for loss is a sack.

Why do linebackers have so many more tackles than defensive linemen?

Because of where they line up. Linebackers play behind the defensive line, which puts them in the best position to reach the ball carrier, while linemen are often occupying blockers so that someone else can make the tackle. In 2025 every one of the top five combined-tackle totals belonged to a linebacker. Tackle counts reflect position as much as performance, so compare players against others in the same role.

What is a QB hit in NFL stats?

A QB hit is credited when a defender knocks the quarterback down after he has already released the ball. It measures pressure that arrived slightly too late to be a sack. It’s a useful column because a player can generate constant pressure without the sack total to show for it: Zach Allen led the NFL with 47 QB hits in 2025 from 7.0 sacks, and was named first-team All-Pro.

Are NFL tackle stats reliable?

Less than you’d think. Tackles are credited live by statisticians watching from the press box, and deciding who actually made a tackle in a pile of bodies is a judgement call. Counts vary noticeably from one team’s crew to another, which is why analysts lean on sacks, tackles for loss and pressure numbers instead.

What does PD mean in NFL defense stats?

PD stands for passes defensed: passes a defender knocked away or broke up without intercepting them. It’s generally a steadier measure of coverage than interceptions, because there are far more of them and much less luck involved in whether one happens.

Where to go next

NFL QB Stats Decoded covers the other side of the pass rush, including what all those sacks do to a quarterback’s numbers. NFL Team Stats Decoded covers the whole-team figures that actually predict results. For the full map of every stat, go back to NFL Stats Decoded.