One of the greatest gospels of Houston Texans lore, as according to John McClain, is that Texans defensive tackle Amobi Okoye is a fine run stopper but can't defend the pass. I tend to think he's better against the pass than he is against the run, but apparently that doesn't stack up with what actually happened on the field all that well. Okoye and Brian Cushing both had 10 or more run defeats last year, and the league leaders only managed to rack up 10.
↵↵↵Obviously, there are plenty of successful defensive plays which don't meet the standards to be counted as "Defeats." It's good to stop the opposing running back for just one or two yards on first-and-10, even if that does count as a positive gain. However, we have that as another stat: Stops. Stops represent any play that stops the offense short of our definition of success. We can look at players through both total Stops and Stops per play, a.k.a. Stop Rate. We'll do that next week. But Stops aren't really "game-changing" plays. They're generally run-of-the-mill plays.
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Okoye definitely didn't rack up as many stops as he did defeats, and it can obviously be said that contributing on eleven plays throughout the season doesn't mean he was golden the rest of the time. He's neither as good as this stat makes him out to be nor as bad as his detractors have made him out to be. He's permanently settled in that controversy zone between overrated and underrated.
↵Certainly this pokes a bit of a hole in the idea that he's a bad run defender though.