Pro Football Reference adds pre-1982 sacks to record, highlighting previous year’s Buffalo Bills

There are legendary players and stories of great plays in the early years of professional football, but much of the record is apocryphal. Unlike professional baseball, which followed detailed scorecards almost from the beginning, football was not as demanding. For example, statistics such as defender hits and defended defenses are now common, but they were not born until the 21st century. Even rudimentary information, such as single-player games or drops, didn’t come to the box points until the 1990s. For this reason, it’s hard to compare today’s players to the stars collected 50 years ago, even to surface-level statistics.

However, some of those former players will finally see a decent record for their size, thanks to the obsessive efforts of two members of the Pro Turkey Research Association, John Turney and Nick Webster. Prior to 1982, the sack was not an officially recorded statistic, so we have not had statistical information on the great passers-by of the past. As a blog post in the football statistics database pro-football-reference.com says Turney and Webster conducted a comprehensive review based on previous records to reconstruct official sacks in total from 1960. As a result, they claim that 99 percent of sacks in 1970-1981 are now recorded, as well as the majority of sacks in 1961–1969.

As a result, we now have a clearer picture of previous Buffalo Bills bills from teams from previous years. The greatest benefactor? Defense work Tom Sestak. A three-time unanimous All-AFL selection, Sestak played for the Bills team from 1962-1968. The PFR record shows that Sestak collected 52.0 sacks during its seven-year career, which is Fifth in the Franchise Scoreboard. It’s also a defense franchise sack record ahead of Kyle Williams ’48.5 sack.

Sestak also has a Buffalo Bills DT record for one-season sacks at 15.5 in 1964. It is the third highest total number of individual seasons in the history of all Bills players; Bruce Smith holds a record 19.0 in sacks in 1990, and Bryce Paup had 17.5 in 1995.

Another player whose greatness was recognized was Gentle Ben Williams, a defensive head who played for ten seasons at the Bills from 1976-1985 and who also died in May last year. As his Ole Miss obituary noted, when Williams retired from the NFL, he was Buffalos ’career bag leader with 45.5 sacks. Additional accounting has raised his total to 52.0 sacks, tied with Sestak in fifth.

One important detail for Bills fans: Bruce Smiths ’sack remains intact. NFL legend Deacon Jones, the Secretary of Defense, was also the man who coined the term sack. He played from 1961-1974, meaning his entire career dropped to the unofficial sack register. A study by Tourney and Webster confirms that Jones had 173.5 sacks in his layered career, which is still behind Smith and Reggie White.