Vikings defense end Danielle Hunter has recorded a sack in every game this season, making him just the 8th player since 1982 to record a sack in each of his team’s first 8 games:
| Rk | Year | Tm | W | L | T | W-L% | Count |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | William Fuller | 1994 | PHI | 5 | 2 | 0 | 0.714 | 7 |
| 2 | Shaun Ellis | 2003 | NYJ | 2 | 5 | 0 | 0.286 | 7 |
| 3 | Robert Mathis | 2005 | IND | 7 | 0 | 0 | 1.000 | 7 |
| 4 | DeMarcus Ware | 2008 | DAL | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0.571 | 7 |
| 5 | Dwight Freeney | 2009 | IND | 7 | 0 | 0 | 1.000 | 7 |
| 6 | Demarcus Lawrence | 2017 | DAL | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0.571 | 7 |
| 7 | Everson Griffen | 2017 | MIN | 5 | 2 | 0 | 0.714 | 7 |
| 8 | Danielle Hunter | 2018 | MIN | 4 | 2 | 1 | 0.714 | 7 |
Of that group, only Freeney, Griffen, and Mathis ran the streak to 8 games, and no player has recorded a sack in each of his team’s first 9 games.
Through three and a half seasons, Hunter has 33.5 career sacks, which is remarkable given a pair of factors: he was a third round pick, and he only turns 24 years old on Monday. Hunter is extremely young for his year: Terrell Suggs was born on October 11th, and he is the only other player since 1982 who had at least 30 sacks in his first four seasons and was 23 at the start of his fourth season. The third-youngest player with 30+ sacks through 4 seasons was Shawne Merriman, who was born in May.
There are 80 players with 30+ sacks through 4 seasons since 1982; over half of them were first round picks, and just 26 of those 80 were not drafted in the first two rounds. That makes Hunter’s success — as a third round pick — all the more amazing. The graph below shows those 80 players and their number of sacks through four seasons on the X-Axis. On the X-Axis is their age at the start of their fourth season, and the size of the bubble represents the round the player was drafted (bigger bubbles = later pick). Hunter, in purple stands out for having a larger than average bubble and for being so low on the Y-Axis; i.e., he was not a top pick and he’s super young (and, of course, he still has 9 games this season to move farther along the X-Axis):
At the top of the graph is Cameron Wake, who was 30.6 years old at the start of his fourth season. There are only a handful of players with 40+ sacks through four seasons who were not selected in the first or second round: Wake (43 sacks), Richard Dent (49), Charles Haley (40.5), Elvis Dumervil (43), Jared Allen (43), Tim Harris (48), and Justin Houston (48.5). Only two more were second round picks: Bill Pickel (42.5) and Andre Tippett (43.5). And of that group, every single one was at least 25 years old by the start of their fourth season (Harris was the youngest, with his 25th birthday coming on the opening Sunday of the ’89 season). Hunter, remember, is still 23. If he can finish the season with 7 more sacks, he’ll have 40 through 4 seasons. That would make him one of the most unusual players to reach that threshold.