Tommy DeVito and the 2023 New York Giants Sack Festival

Last season, we had two units challenging historical sack records. The 2022 Eagles came close to the best sack rate for any defense in modern NFL history. The 2022 Bears came close to the worst sack rate for any offense in NFL history. Both teams fell short.

There’s no defense this year that can come close to last year’s Eagles but we have an offense that is not only matching but surpassing last year’s Bears. And they’re doing it while using multiple quarterbacks, all of whom have taken a ton of sacks. That offense belongs to the New York Giants.

The New York Giants now have 76 sacks on the season after Tommy DeVito took another seven in a 24-6 loss to New Orleans on Sunday. That matches the total for the 2002 expansion Houston Texans. The Giants, with three games remaining, are two sacks away from matching the 1997 Arizona Cardinals with 78 sacks. They aren’t going to reach the 1986 Philadelphia Eagles and the insane 104 sacks taken by Ron Jaworski, Randall Cunningham, and Matt Cavanaugh. But they are in range of matching the Eagles for sack rate because Giants quarterbacks are not dropping back to pass as often as those 1986 Eagles did. (Here’s the Internet Archive for an article that Mike Tanier wrote at my old site about that Eagles team.)

Let’s start with our own stat for adjusted sack rate, where the Giants are on pace to set the record going back to 1995. Adjusted sack rate looks at sacks and intentional groundings per pass play, adjusted for situation (sacks are more common on third-and-long, for example) and opponent. The Giants are currently ahead of the 2002 Texans, the only team to ever put up an offensive ASR higher than 13.0%. (All the ASR numbers can be found here on the far right of the table.)

If we want to go back further but see the effect that total passes have on sacks, we can just use regular ol’ sack rate without any adjustments. Now, I could run a list of the best offensess by sack rate going back to 1950, but that won’t tell us much about this year’s Giants. The list of highest sack rates is dominated by teams from the 1950s and 1960s. The top sack rates belong to the 1969 Atlanta Falcons (18.3%) and 1968 Atlanta Falcons (17.7%), with 10 of the 12 worst offensive sack rates coming before the liberalization of pass defense rules in 1978.

Instead, let’s look just at where the Giants stand among teams since 1978.

The problem for the Giants in trying to control the sack problem is that Tommy DeVito is taking more sacks than Daniel Jones did. Here’s a look at all three Giants quarterbacks. Parris Campbell also took a sack on a wide receiver option pass, but that’s not included in this table.

Obviously, it’s crazy that DeVito made it through an entire game last Monday night without taking a single sack from the Green Bay Packers. He’s taken at least five sacks in each of his other five games, including when he came in early against the Raiders in Week 9 after an injury to Daniel Jones.

The list of offensive sack rates doesn’t make this as clear as a similar list of defensive sack rates would, but sacks were more common in the 1980s than they are now. At its highest in 1984 and 1985, the NFL average sack rate was at 8.3%. Two years ago, the NFL average sack rate was just 6.2%. It’s gone up in the last two years and this year it is at 7.2%, but those chances show the importance of adjusting for the overall offensive environment of the league in a certain year.

So there’s one other way to look at these pass rushes that helps correct for the fact that sacks are less common now than they were 40 years ago. We’ll use z-scores. Z-scores is a simple statistical method that just measures the number of standard deviations that a number is away from the mean. This penalizes offenses that have more sacks in years where other teams a) have fewer sacks overall and b) are grouped together closer around the average. Looking at z-scores, the biggest outlier is the 2002 expansion Texans, not the 1986 Eagles and their record of 104 sacks — and the Giants are challenging the Texans for the highest Z-score.

In their final three games, the Giants will play the Eagles twice plus the Rams. The Eagles pass rush has really fallen off after last year and ranks 15th in adjusted sack rate. The Rams pass rush is just 23rd in adjusted sack rate. Tommy DeVito is going to take plenty of sacks anyway, but will the Giants set the ASR record?