On page 515 of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' 2025 media guide, a chart lists the top 10 tacklers in franchise history. At the top of the list is Pro Football Hall of Famer Derrick Brooks, with 2,198 tackles. In the second spot is Lavonte David, who had 1,600 tackles entering the 2025 season and has now increased that total to 1,705.
Alternately, if one consults the NFL-sanctioned statistical service Statspass, which is widely regarded as one of the preeminent resources for league statistical research, the Buccaneers' top two career tacklers are listed as Brooks with 1,714 and David with 1,705. So is David on the verge of becoming Tampa Bay's all-time leading tackler or not?
It depends on the source.
The discrepancy traces back to the changing ways that NFL teams have collected tackle totals through the decades, and in particular the way it changed for the Buccaneers between the end of Brooks' career and the beginning of David's.
Brooks' career began in 1995. At that time, the Buccaneers recorded tackle totals based on their coaches' review of game tape the following week, and the statistics they recorded for their players. Tackles were recorded by the in-stadium stat crews and included in the postgame box score, but they were not compiled or publicized by the NFL on either a season-by-season or career basis. As a prime example, tackles were not listed – and still are not listed – in the defensive record section of the NFL's annual Record & Fact Book.
That compilation system remained in place throughout Brooks' 14 seasons with the Buccaneers, the last of which was 2008. His total of 2,198 career tackles as recognized by the team in the record section of its media guide is based on those coach-compiled statistics. It is possible, however, for statistical services such as Statspass to retroactively compile tackle totals from the box scores produced by the in-stadium stat crews for Brooks and other players, which in his case results in the alternate total of 1,714.
Lavonte David's career began in 2012. That was the exact year that the Buccaneers made a switch in their record-keeping and started exclusively using the statistics compiled during the games rather than using the numbers produced by coaches' game tape review. That is the reason that David's tackle total in the Buccaneers media guide and his career tackle stats as compiled by Statspass are identical.
To complicate matters further, there is not even a complete consensus between trusted statistical services that compile historical data from in-stadium stat crew output. For instance, while Statspass (behind a paywall; subscription required) has the totals listed above, 1,714 for Brooks to 1,705 for David, Pro Football Reference shows 1,713 for Brooks and 1,707 for David.
David has two games remaining in 2025 to potentially record 10 more tackles and surpass Brooks on the list of the Buccaneers' career tackle leaders as compiled by Statspass. It is a valid debate about which method of compiling tackle statistics – coaches tape review or in-stadium stat crews – produced the most accurate results during Brooks' career, but the differing methods used during his career and during David's makes their respective career totals difficult to compare. However one chooses to compile the career statistics for Brooks and David, they are two of the greatest and most beloved players in franchise history.
