Zaire Franklin

Four years a special-teamer, four years a tackle machine — there's no middle phase to his career.

From 2018-2021 Franklin was a 7th-round special-teamer averaging 21 tackles a year and never cracking 40. Then 2022 hit and the line snapped vertical: 148 → 159 → 155 → 123 across his four years as a starter. No gradual ramp, no rookie-deal breakout year — just four quiet seasons and then immediate top-of-league volume the second the snaps showed up.

He has led the Colts in tackles every year he has started — four straight.

Four consecutive seasons as the Colts' tackle leader, with the margin over #2 stretching as wide as 71 tackles in 2023 (159 to E.J. Speed's 88). The most recent season is the tightest race — Nick Cross is 5 back — but Franklin has not been off the top line since the day he became a starter.

The Bobby Okereke departure after 2022 is the moment the room became Franklin's outright; before that he was sharing volume with a fellow heavy hitter. Since then it has been him and a rotating cast of safeties trying to keep up.

2024 was an NFL tackle title — quietly, on a 7-game losing streak team.

Franklin led the entire NFL in tackles in 2024 — ahead of Budda Baker, Roquan Smith, every brand-name linebacker in the league. He did it on a non-playoff Colts team that finished 8-9, the kind of context that keeps a tackle leader off Pro Bowl ballots.

The 2023 race had been a near-miss — 159 tackles, 2nd in the NFL behind Bobby Wagner's 164. Franklin closed the 5-tackle gap the next year and won it outright.

Among the 2018 LB draft class, he's now 4th in career tackles — ahead of his own All-Pro teammate.

Franklin was pick 235 — the 7th-rounder of his class — and he's now passed every member of the 2018 LB cohort except the three first-round / early-pick stars: Roquan Smith, Fred Warner, Tremaine Edmunds.

The most striking line is the one right below his: he has more career tackles than Shaquille ‘Darius’ Leonard (669 to 585), a 2x All-Pro and former Colts teammate whose role he eventually inherited. The volume gap is partly health — Leonard's career was cut short — but it's also the durability story: Franklin has missed only a handful of games since 2022.

He's a forced-fumble specialist hiding inside a tackle machine.

The volume tackler narrative leaves out the disruption: 11 career forced fumbles as a starter, with a 5-FF season in 2024 that tied for top-5 in the NFL that year. Add 33 career TFLs in four starting seasons and the profile shifts — he's not just cleaning up runs at the second level, he's blowing them up behind the line.

The 2022 and 2024 seasons are the loudest — 12 and 11 TFLs respectively — while 2023 (the 159-tackle year) is the outlier where the disruption rate dropped even as the volume peaked.

His ceiling game is a 15-tackle Sunday — and he's hit it twice.

Two 15-tackle games — one in his first season as a full-time starter (2022 W4 vs Tennessee) and one in the opener the next year (2023 W1 vs Jacksonville). His top-7 games all sit at 13+ tackles, and four of them came in 2024 alone — the season he ended up as NFL tackle leader.

The 14-tackle night at Arrowhead in 2025 (Week 12 at Kansas City) is the most recent of the high-water games. Six of his seven biggest tackle games have come in AFC South divisional play or against playoff teams — the volume scales with snap count, and bad-game-script weeks for the Colts defense produce the spikes.