Luke Braun's Film Room: Sacks Are A Minnesota Vikings Stat

When is a sack more than a stat? Luke Braun breaks down every one of Minnesota's sacks in the Vikings defense's historic start to the season.

Photo by Todd Rosenberg/Getty Images

At the Reese’s Senior Bowl, fans, media, and those who lie in between gather to watch prospects compete for space in the NFL draft. The bleachers fill with bloggers, influencers, established legacy journalists and actual team employees to try and suss out who the NFL’s next big diamond in the rough will be.

They watch defensive line hopefuls square up against offensive line hopefuls, each with everything to prove. An assistant stands where a quarterback would normally be, perfectly still, an aiming point more than a true simulated quarterback. Sometimes the offense wins, sometimes the defense wins, and the best clips get shared all over social media.

Someone has to blow the whistle to signal the end of each of these drills. Because this isn’t a real game with full tackling, anyone watching has to decide for themselves whether or not that would have been a sack in live game action. Then, they have to decide whether those reps project forward to more future sacks.

This is an incomplete simulation. It’s fine for the purposes of evaluating early twenty-somethings and their NFL prospects, but to create a true sack, more needs to happen. To simply create pressure, more needs to happen.

If you spend a lot of time scrolling the hectic shantytown that is NFL twitter, you might come across charts like this.

Courtesy of Seth Walder at ESPN

These metrics attempt to separate the team from the player for the purposes of evaluation. “All else equal, who is the better pass rusher?” Whether it’s PFF’s grading system, Next Gen Stats’ chip data system or ESPN’s timing-based system, they all ask the same question: Who is a good pass rusher?

This question has its limits. Pass rushes are not comprised of a series of one-on-one pass rushes. You can’t staple four Senior Bowl reps together and expect it to look like a real play.

To truly generate a sack, you have to include other factors. Coverage can impact time to throw and therefore the clock that pass rushers have to get to the quarterback. Mobile quarterbacks can erase sacks, and immobile ones can invite more. And of course, quarterbacks with too high an opinion of their mobility often invite the most.

Pass rushers themselves are often asked to sacrifice their prospects at a win so that their teammate can have a better opportunity. They’ll take a “Pass Rush Loss” from ESPN, but it’s by design — adding noise to all individualistic pass rush statistics. The problem for the stats nerds is that introducing factors like coverage or opponent adds the noise that comes along with those systems. 

In this idiot podcaster’s opinion, sacks fail as a stat because they are assigned to individuals. Jonathan Greenard may take down the quarterback, but ten other players played crucial roles in ensuring offensive failure. Stat companies like Next Gen Stats or Sports Info Solutions try to develop metrics that improve this individual statistic, but as long as it’s individual, it will miss key components of defensive success.

Luckily, we’re not trying to develop a new pass rush statistic. Nor are we trying to publish a mock draft on deadline from a crowded Air BnB in Birmingham, Alabama. That’s for the nerds in Coplay, Pennsylvania to figure out. For us, we’re lucky if we understand how teams put together a successful pass rush. And no team has been more successful than the Minnesota Vikings.

The Minnesota Vikings, as a team, have seventeen sacks in their first three games. They have not yet had a game with fewer than five sacks — the first team in the last 20 years to do so. They have played three teams with arguable top five left tackles — Andrew Thomas, Trent Williams and Laremy Tunsil.

So how’d they do it? Only one way to find out. We have to watch every single one of them.

Getting Through Unblocked

“If you had not committed great sins, god would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”  ~Genghis Khan, ca. 1220

The easiest path you’ll ever have to a quarterback is an empty one. Generating that empty path is the hard part. The offense has, by rule, at least five blocking players on a given pass rep. You have to find a way to distract all of them and get your stealthy assassin through.

The most straightforward way to do that is to send six pass rushers. Here, the Vikings get a sack doing just that. 

Houston, in the deep stages of a blowout loss, have pulled C.J. Stroud for Davis Mills. They’re in an empty formation which guarantees no extra blockers. Send six and get to the quarterback.