One of the most unfortunate statistical issues in pro football is that there are no official sack numbers before 1982. This obviously leaves a lot of the game’s greatest players out of the loop when it comes to determining their historical importance. Pre-1982 unofficial sack totals have been floating around for years, but Pro Football Reference has taken the giant step of putting those totals from 1960 through 1981 on their website. John Turney of Pro Football Journal has been renowned for his work in this regard (Paul “Dr. Z” Zimmerman pointed out Turney’s work a long time ago), and it’s Turney’s work, along with that of Nick Webster, both members of the Professional Football Researchers Association, that has cleared the gap.
This new information presents quite the alternate history of pro football. All-time greats like Deacon Jones, Jack Youngblood, Alan Page, and Jim Marshall finally get their due, and lesser-known names like Al “Bubba” Baker (who now holds the single-season sack record with 23.0 in 1978), Coy Bacon, and Elvin Bethea find their profiles where they always should have been — right up there with the all-timers.
How much does this mean to the players who have been overlooked? Al “Bubba” Baker, who is finally revealed at the NFL’s single-season sack leader with 23 in the 1978 season (his rookie season, to boot) said on the Around the NFL Podcast that it was quite an emotional experience.
“For some reason, and I’m not kidding you, without any prompting, tears just started running down my eyes,” Baker said, via Lions Wire’s Jeff Risdon. “And my wife was inside, I opened up the patio doors. And my wife, first thing she said was, ‘What’s wrong?’ And I said, nothing’s wrong and I said come look at this. And, you know, we hugged and then I lost about an hour and a half, two hours. My daughter called. It was really emotional for my family. I guess at 6-foot-8, 290 pounds, that doesn’t sound really tough, but, we were all crying.
“You know somebody tells you you’re a sack leader and what do you do, you start crying. And I guess it’s because none of us really sat around like some players and, ‘We want this and we want that.’ We hadn’t thought about it for at least, for at least, I’m not kidding you, 20 years.”
Baker, who led the league in sacks in both 1978 and 1980 (with 17.5), and now has 131.0 sacks shown for his NFL career, is one of so many whose excellence is now more obvious to football fans of any stripe.
With that in mind, here are the top sack artists in professional football from 1960 through 1981 — presenting a far clearer picture of those players who contributed the most to quarterback disruption before the numbers became official. There were 13 players who had at least 100 sacks before the sack became an official statistic, and here they are.