Though T.J. Watt would trade all of his sacks for a Pittsburgh Steelers’ playoff berth, if there’s a silver lining to a season going down the tubes, it’s Watt. With two takedowns of Indianapolis Colts QB Gardner Minshew Saturday, Watt is up to 16 sacks on the year. And he has an outright sack lead across the NFL.
As that chart shows, Watt is now a half-sack ahead of Minnesota Vikings’ Danielle Hunter. Those two have held the top spot for most of the season while Los Angeles Chargers’ Khalil Mack has come on strong over the last month.
Like we noted in today’s Stats of the Weird, Watt is the first player since…himself in 2021 to have 16 sacks in his team’s first 14 games. With Pittsburgh’s playoff hopes up in smoke, the thing to watch for over the final three games might be if Watt can break the sack record of which he holds a share of. The record mark is 22.5, Watt matching Michael Strahan in 2021, meaning he’ll need seven sacks over his next three games to break it.
Accomplishing that will be a stretch but not impossible. Watt just had a two-sack performance in Week 12 against the Cincinnati Bengals. Seattle Seahawks QB Geno Smith has been sacked 27 times this year, not an offensively high number, but there’s been games where he’s been dropped in bunches. There’s been three games this season Smith has been sacked at least four times, including a six-sack day in a Week 12 loss to the San Francisco 49ers. And Watt has 14 sacks in his career against the Ravens, second-most of any team he’s played against (Cleveland is number one with 17).
Record or not, if Watt can end the year with the sack record, it’ll be for the third time in his career, doing so in 2020 and 2021. The only other player in history to do so more than twice is Deacon Jones, who did it five times during his Hall of Fame career. Watt would be the first in “official” sack history since the stat was kept by the NFL in 1982.
