30 tackles in a game
Flipping sides of the ball, it is hard to fathom that former Texas Tech defensive back Donald Harris recorded a school-record 30 tackles against Arizona in 1988. Such a performance is likely never to occur again.
Last year, only nine players on the Red Raider defense had more stops than that for the entire season and the single-game high for any player was the 19 Jordyn Brooks registered against Oklahoma state.
Harris was a fantastic athlete who was a football and baseball star at Tech. In fact, he remains the highest-picked Red Raider ever in the Major League Baseball draft when he was taken No. 5 overall by the Texas Rangers in 1989. What’s more, after his baseball career flammed out, he was signed by the Dallas Cowboys in 1992 but never saw the field.
During that 1988 football season, Harris, an All-Southwest Conference safety, had 141 tackles and three interceptions. In other words, just over 21% of his tackles that season came in his 30-tackle game against the Wildcats.
Though Harris was a defensive back, this is another record that seems untouchable even given the way the game is played these days. His day was a time when safeties made almost as many tackles in the running game as linebackers, especially strong safeties that played closer to the line of scrimmage.
But now that the position requires more pass coverage than ever, the tackle totals for safeties are dropping from what we saw in the 1980s and before. In 2019, Douglas Coleman made 63 tackles, the most of any Red Raider defensive back. What’s more, Jah’Shawn Johnson‘s career-high was 91 and current NFL veteran Cody Davis never had more than 101 in a season. What’s more, teams seem to substitute their defensive players so liberally today that it doesn’t seem possible for a player to be on the field enough to even approach 30 tackles in a game.
Last season, no team in the nation ran more plays than Wake Forest, which averaged 82.9 per game. That means that a player with 30 tackles against them would have made over 1/3 of the stops in the game. I couldn’t find a box score for Tech’s 35-19 loss against Arizona to see how many plays the Wildcats ran that day in 1988 but it likely wasn’t 82 meaning that Harris was probably in on close to 45% of his team’s stops. Though the number of plays per game continues to rise, it’s hard to fathom any Red Raider ever doing what Harris did when he had 30 tackles in one game.