Week 3 Quick Reads | Football Outsiders

by Vincent Verhei

Houston Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson has taken a dozen sacks this season, losing 70 yards in the process. Baker Mayfield of the Cleveland Browns has only taken 11 sacks, but he trumps Watson with 81 yards lost on those plays. Is that info meaningful? Do deeper sacks hurt an offense more than shallow sacks? Is there a point where an offense can play better by taking more sacks, so long as those sacks are closer to the line of scrimmage?

Let’s start by looking at which quarterbacks take the shallowest and deepest sacks. In the ten-year stretch from 2009 to 2018, there were 351 instances of a quarterback taking at least 16 sacks in a season — theoretically, one per scheduled game. (Marcus Mariota and Kyler Murray have already hit that threshold this season — congrats guys! — but since nobody else has, we’ll ignore 2019 for today.) That includes a number of players who didn’t meet our typical threshold of 200 dropbacks in a season, including five players from last season (C.J. Beathard, Jeff Driskel, Lamar Jackson, Cody Kessler, and Brock Osweiler). In 2014, Chad Henne of the Jacksonville Jaguars was sacked 16 times in only 94 dropbacks, the fewest dropbacks among the 351 player-seasons we’re analyzing here.

Case Keenum’s average sack with the Texans in 2013 lost 10.6 yards, most of any qualifier in the last ten years. The next year, a different Texans quarterback, Ryan Fitzpatrick, lost 3.95 yards per sack, the fewest. Fitzpatrick is also in second place in that category with his 2016 season with the New York Jets.

The 2018 Ravens managed to place two quarterbacks on the shallow-sack leaderboard in Jackson and his predecessor, Joe Flacco. This is most significant because Flacco has usually taken deeper sacks than most quarterbacks. His average sack has lost 7.10 yards in his career; in Denver this year, he has averaged a loss of 7.36 yards on 11 sacks.

Here are the total leaderboards, looking at all players who took at least 48 sacks (three seasons as a hypothetical starter, though again some players get there much faster than that) in the past decade:

The first thing you’ll notice here is that there is a large difference between players at the extremes in this category. Ryan Tannehill’s average sack has lost 44% more yards than Christian Ponder’s over their careers.

As you’d expect, you’ll find several names shuffled around in both sets of tables. Some obvious body types stick out too — the guys who take deep sacks are generally lead-footed statues (except for Donovan McNabb), while players who take shallow sacks are typically smaller and quicker (except for Philip Rivers).

Fitzpatrick’s repeat atop the shallow-sacks leaderboard is an indication that some quarterbacks might consistently take shallower and deeper sacks, and the numbers show he’s not an isolated example. Among the 223 instances of quarterbacks taking 16-plus sacks in back-to-back seasons, the year-to-year correlation in average sack depth was 0.462. This is fairly sticky given the random nature of most football stats.

With that in mind, you might expect to see certain types or styles of passers post similar sack depths, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Before starting this, I expected to find that deep-ball quarterbacks who averaged high yards per completion with low completion rates — your Jameis Winston, Cam Newton types — to take deeper sacks than their peers, but that isn’t true. There is practically zero correlation between completion, yardage, touchdown, or interception rates and sack depth. There is no relationship between sack depth and age or draft round either. As we noted earlier, there is some correlation between size and sack depth, but it’s very weak — just 0.095 for height and 0.089 for weight. In both categories, it’s the biggest players who take the deepest sacks. Players under 6-foot-4 had an average sack depth of 6.45 yards; that average climbed to 6.61 for players 6-foot-4 or taller. Players under 240 pounds had an average sack depth of 6.50 yards; that average climbed to 6.89 for players 240 pounds or heavier.

If any type of quarterbacks tend to take shallower sacks, it’s the extreme rushers. There have been eight quarterback seasons in the past decade that gained at least 20 percent of their total offense (rushing plus passing yards, minus yards lost on sacks) on the ground. (It’s a fascinating list: Josh Allen, Lamer Jackson, Terrelle Pryor, Tim Tebow, Michael Vick, Russell Wilson, and Robert Griffin twice.) The average sack depth in those eight seasons was 6.14 yards. The average for all other quarterback seasons was 6.54 yards.

Does any of this actually matter? DVOA accounts for specific yardage on each play, and thus deeper sacks have a harsher penalty than shallow ones. In the big picture, though, that doesn’t seem to matter. The correlation between pass offense DVOA and sack rate last year was -0.575; the correlation between pass offense DVOA and yards lost on sacks per dropback was weaker at -0.527. And average sack depth was basically neutral at -0.029. Taking big sacks is bad, but it’s better to avoid sacks entirely than to worry about about how close they come to the line of scrimmage.