Pro Football Reference gives us pre-1982 NFL sack data

How many sacks someone like Deacon Jones had before they were an official stat is now known with some certainty.

Before 1982, sacks were not an official NFL statistic. So there was an endless hypothetical related to some NFL legends whose careers ended long before then.

Pro Football Reference has completed the deep dive, using game books, play-by-play logs, etc. The site estimates it has 99 percent of the sacks from the 1970 AFL/NFL merger through the 1981 season, 95 percent of the sacks from 1966-1969 in both leagues and about 80 percent of sacks from 1961-1965.

ProFootballReference @pfref

Thanks to decades of research by John Turney and Nick Webster, we have updated our site to add sack data all the way back to 1960, 20 years before it became an officially recorded statistic Check out our blog to learn more about this amazing new update sports-reference.com/blog/2021/07/p…

ProFootballReference @pfref

Yes! We list them side-by-side with the Official leaderboard so users can see both

Michael Pallas 🎤💻🏈 @thejetshub

@pfref Will you be updating the career leaders?

Of note, as the leader in the “how many sacks would he have had? conversation, Deacon Jones becomes third all-time with 173.5 “unofficial” sacks. Jack Youngblood, with much of his career before 1982, sits at No. 6 with 151.5. Alan Page, Carl Eller, Claude Humphrey and Al Baker also join the list in the top-25.

Also of note is Michael Strahan’s official single-season sack record (22.5 in 2001). The unofficial single-season leader is now Baker, who had 23 unofficial sacks in 1978 when he won Defensive Rookie of the Year. Jones also would have had three seasons with at least 21.5 sacks. He’d be the only one among nine guys in NFL history to get at least 21 sacks in a season to do it more than once.