Let me tell you something I bet you didn’t know about Byron Leftwich: he was sacked 92 times in his career. There were 44 quarterbacks from 2003 to 2012 with 1500+ passes; of that group, Leftwich ranked 17th in sack rate at 5.4%.  But here’s something I bet you didn’t know about Leftwich: on his sacks, he lost just 452 yards, and averaged just 4.91 yards lost per sack. That is the lowest average in NFL history (well, at least since the merger, but likely in history; see graph below) among quarterbacks with 1500+ attempts. ^[1]Note: From 2003 to 2012, Jeff Garcia averaged just 4.86 average sack yards lost, so Leftwich ranked second during this time. Leftwich’s career spanned this decade, but Garcia entered the league … Continue reading

We don’t spend much time looking at yards lost per sack, and perhaps with good reason.  Here are the 10 players with the lowest average yards lost per sack since 1970 among passers with 1500+ attempts, all of whom lost under 5.7 yards per sack:

• Byron Leftwich
• Rick Mirer
• Jeff Garcia
• Ryan Fitzpatrick
• Matt Cassel
• Charlie Batch
• Dave Brown
• Rich Gannon
• Jeff Hostetler
• Rodney Peete

That’s not exactly a who’s who list of the best quarterbacks in NFL history.  I’d like to spend more time looking at average sack yards lost and see what is there, so I’m going to open this up to the smart readers in the comments.  So let’s start with an interesting graph: here is the average yards lost per sack for each year in NFL history beginning in 1960:

You see a pretty interesting decline right around 1982, which is when the NFL began recording sacks as an official statistic for individual defensive players.  Query whether that actually impacted things: there’s an argument to be made that naming something actually changes behavior.  There’s also the idea that the west coast offense infiltrating the NFL in the early ’80s dropped the average distance of sacks.

What do you think explains the graph above?