Coaches talk about “winning the collision” constantly, but rarely with a number attached. We pulled the contact data from the Framesports records, millions of events across thousands of matches at every level, to see what the collision battle actually looks like.
Four in five tackles are completed
Tackle completion across our data sits at 80.7%. So roughly one tackle in five is missed, and that missing fifth matters more than the made four-fifths, because missed tackles are where line breaks and tries come from. A team that pushes its completion from 80% to 85% is not improving by five percent, it is cutting its misses by a quarter.
Collision dominance in the tackle is rare, and you would expect it to be
You do not need our exact definition to judge this one. A dominant tackle means the plain thing it sounds like: the tackler clearly wins the collision, stopping the carrier or driving them backwards, not just dragging them to ground. Picture how often a defender truly manages that against a player running onto the ball, and the figure lands about where you would guess. In our data, only 14.2% of completed tackles are dominant. The other 85% get the job done without winning the contact, which is no surprise when the player with the ball is the one carrying the momentum.
Genuinely dominant defence is hard, and that is exactly why it is prized: a side that can lift its dominant-tackle rate even a few points is doing something most teams cannot.
The reason it matters is not the hit, it is what the hit buys. A dominant tackle wins the gain line and, just as importantly, slows the opposition’s next ball. Quick ruck ball, recycled in two or three seconds, lets an attack play against a fractured line; slow ball lets the defence reset and brings the jackal into play over the tackle. The extreme version is the choke tackle, holding the carrier up so the contact becomes a maul and the turnover comes to you. Dominant tackles are rare precisely because they are hard, but each one tilts the next phase in your favour.
On the ball, the carrier usually wins (and that is just physics)
Flip to attack and the picture flips with it. The ball-carrier wins the collision on 89.1% of carries in our data. Before you read that as attacking genius, most of it is physics. The carrier chooses the line, arrives with momentum, and falls forward, so winning the collision is close to the default for whoever has the ball. That is exactly why the defensive side of the number is the one worth studying. Carriers are supposed to win contact. A defence that wins it anyway is doing something genuinely hard, and as it turns out, something that shows up on the scoreboard.
The defences that win the collision score more
Here is the layer most stats stop short of. We split matches by how often a team won the collision in defence, its dominant-tackle rate, and then looked at how many tries that same team scored. In their higher dominant-tackle matches, teams scored 7.8 tries on average, against 6.7 in their lower ones, and across thousands of matches a team’s dominant-tackle rate tracks its own try-scoring closely, a correlation of around 0.6, which is strong for something as noisy as match data.
It reads backwards at first, your defence driving your own attack, but it is sound rugby logic. Win the collision in the tackle and you slow or steal the opposition’s ball. Slow and stolen ball becomes turnovers and transition, the broken, unset situations that are the most dangerous attacking platform in the game. Dominant defence does not only stop tries, it manufactures the chaos you score from. To be clear, this is the analysed team’s own scoring, not a measure of what the opposition managed, but the pattern is consistent and it is a strong argument for coaching the collision as an attacking weapon, not just a defensive one.
What this means for your team
Two levers stand out. On defence, completion is the foundation (cut the missed fifth before chasing dominant hits), and dominant tackles are the rare edge worth coaching deliberately rather than hoping for. On attack, winning the collision is the norm, so the question is less “did we win contact” and more “did we win it quickly enough to play off front-foot ball”. Tracking dominant tackles and collision-dominant carries as their own numbers, rather than lumping them into a generic “physicality”, is how you actually move them, which is the thinking in the metrics that actually matter.
How we worked this out
Based on the tackle and carry events in the Framesports data: millions of events across thousands of matches at every level, built on the most accurate data collection system in rugby, so the numbers are reliable. Figures reflect the analysed team’s events. See also rugby by the numbers and how this feeds the Framesports platform.
