All-Time Career Sack Leaders, Updated with John Turney's pre-1982 Numbers

The NFL’s All-Time Career Sack Leaders, Updated with John Turney’s pre-1982 Numbers

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Unofficially, Sack Record Doesn’t Add Up

JOHN BRANCHNOV, 2006

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J., Nov. 3 — To hear the Giants tell it, with one more quarterback sack defensive end Michael Strahan will break the franchise’s official all-time sack record.

One problem: The former linebacker Lawrence Taylor has more sacks.

Officially, Strahan and Taylor each have 132½ sacks. But because the National Football League did not recognize sacks as a statistic until 1982, Taylor’s official total does not include the 9½ sacks he had as a rookie in 1981.

The 9½ sacks are not contested. They are just not counted.

It is a somewhat arbitrary quirk of N.F.L. statistics. After all, it was the attention on Taylor and the Jets’ Sack Exchange pass rush in 1981 that pushed the N.F.L. to include sacks in its record book, according to John Turney, a member of the Pro Football Researchers Association.

So the N.F.L. decided to count them — beginning in 1982. Bruce Smith holds the record with 200. Reggie White has 198, followed by Kevin Greene with 160.

As the Hall of Fame defensive end Deacon Jones once reportedly said, “Since when does ‘all-time’ begin in 1982?”

The issue has long annoyed Jones, and long fascinated Turney. Since 1993, Turney has pored over play-by-play accounts of games played decades ago, adding up sacks that no one had counted before. He studied game tape at N.F.L. Films to fill gaps in the data.

The research never ends; Turney occasionally catches a replay of an old game on television and wonders if a sack that he sees was recorded. He goes and checks.

In a telephone interview Friday, Turney said he had “no beef” with starting in 1982.

“I don’t know why they won’t grandfather folks in who were playing in 1981, “ he said. “You can find sacks back to 1970 in a very accurate way.”

For example, Turney has calculated that Jones, whose career ended in 1974, had 173½ sacks, and the longtime Rams defensive end Jack Youngblood had 151½.

Turney’s research undoubtedly helped Youngblood reach the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2001, 17 years after he left the game. But his biography on the Hall of Fame’s Web site, like the one for Jones, does not mention how many sacks he had. Only under “additional career statistics” is Youngblood credited with 24 sacks — his total after 1981.

“They used to pay me for those things when I was a rookie in 1971,” Youngblood said in a telephone interview. “They kept track of them.”

In the Giants’ news media guide, a list of the “Top Ten Sack Leaders” shows Taylor with 142, following by Strahan, then Jim Katcavage, who played from 1956 to 1968, with 96½.

The Giants, obviously, know how many sacks everyone has. But in the guide, the team notes in parentheses that sacks are an “official statistic only since 1982.”

Which leaves the Giants, and particularly Strahan, in an awkward place. Strahan said Wednesday that he would be “ecstatic” to break the record. When it was pointed out last week that not all of Taylor’s sacks were counted, Strahan, long reverential of Taylor’s accomplishments, joked that it was O.K., since he did not expect to stop accumulating sacks after his next one.

Whenever Strahan gets his next sack, he will become, according to the Giants, the official record holder.

But Taylor will still hold what Youngblood called “the real unofficial record.”