The NFL’s All-Time Sack Leader

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 16, 8:55AM EDT

The NFL’s All-Time Sack Leader — © Rick Stewart / Getty Images Sport via Getty Images

Most likely, one of the NLF’s greatest defensive players, David “Deacon” Jones, came up with the word “sack” as a description of tackling a quarterback behind the line of scrimmage. The NFL started to count these as an official statistic in 1982. That means a host of players from earlier years have sack records that will never be acknowledged.

The NFL’s official description of a sack is this:

When the quarterback or a teammate makes an apparent attempt to pass at any time before he or a teammate is tackled, steps out of bounds, or fumbles behind or at the statistical line of scrimmage, the play is scored as a sack and any yards lost attempting to pass.

Since the sack pushes offenses further from the defense’s goal line, it can be a critical element in which team wins a game. The players who have the most skill at this are often among the most valuable players in the NFL.

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To determine the NFL’s all-time sack leader, 24/7 Tempo reviewed data from Pro Football Reference. Sacks were not an official NFL statistic until 1982. All sack statistics from before that season are therefore considered unofficial and were compiled by independent researchers for the 1960-1981 seasons.

The list of all-time sack leaders is dominated by retired players, many of whom have been inducted into the Hall of Fame. Only one player among the top 50 career sack leaders is playing during the 2021 season, though a handful of pass rushers are just outside the top 50 and seem likely to make the list by the end of the season.

With NFL teams relying on their passing game to carry their offense more and more, they have also stocked up on pass rushers on the other side of the ball. In the 2021 season, 13 teams are paying their defensive line more than any other position group — no other position group ranks as the highest-paid on more than six teams

The NFL sack leader is Bruce Smith. Here are the details:

> Career sacks: 200
> Years active: 1985-2003
> Team(s): Buffalo Bills, Washington Football Team

Click here to read NFL’s All-Time Sack Leaders

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.