Aaron Donald led the NFL in sacks this season, and his team is appearing in this year’s Super Bowl. That’s pretty rare: in the last 30 years, it’s happened just twice: Vic Beasley on the 2016 Falcons, and Kevin Carter on the ’99 Rams. If history repeats itself, it will mean that the two times the Rams have won the Super Bowl, it will have done so with the league’s sack leader, with no other team in the last 30 years having pulled off that feat even once.
The full list of sack leaders since the statistic began being officially tracked by the NFL in 1982, along with how that team’s season ended:
Donald is also going to win the Associated Press Defensive Player of the Year award for the second straight season, barring a shocking upset. There have been 11 instances where the AP DPOY also won the Super Bowl, with 4 of those in the 1970s. The last player to do it was James Harrison of the 2008 Steelers.
Donald can join an even more exclusive club by winning Super Bowl MVP: only Ray Lewis and Harvey Martin (who shared the SBMVP honors with teammate Randy White) have been both AP DPOY and Super Bowl MVP in the same season. If Donald wins Super Bowl MVP, he would join Martin and Richard Dent as the only players to lead the league in sacks and win the Super Bowl MVP award, and join Martin as the only player to also be the AP DPOY. Martin unofficially led the NFL in sacks in 1977 with 20 according to research by John Turney. In addition, for purposes of the first list, Bill Stanfill of the ’73 Dolphins also led the league in sacks and was on the Super Bowl champion, although he was neither Super Bowl MVP nor AP DPOY.
