Most Sacks in a Football Game

The record comes from the Hall of Fame's own page on Derrick Thomas. It says he recorded an NFL record seven sacks in a game versus the Seattle Seahawks on November 11, 1990, and that he recorded a league-leading and team record 20 sacks that season. The page does not list who is second, and the weekly tables below do not reach back to 1990, so this page does not rank the games before 1999.

For the years the tables do cover, the most sacks in a football game by one player is 6. Osi Umenyiora (2007), Adrian Clayborn (2017) and Khalil Mack (2023) each had 6. No player in the data reached seven, which means the record has stood for a game played before the tables begin and has not been matched in the seasons since.

Five or more sacks in a game is rare enough to list in full. The table has every game in the data with at least five, 11 in all, sorted by sacks and then by the most recent season. Half sacks are kept as the table records them, so a figure such as 5.5 is not a typing error.

One game in the list has no player name in the source table: the Titans against the Ravens in week 12 of 2002, with 5 sacks credited to a player the table does not identify. The page shows that row as it stands and does not guess a name.

Most sacks come one at a time. In the regular-season data, 25,249 player-games include at least one sack, and the share falls quickly with each extra sack. Two or more sacks happened in 3,595 of them, which is 14.2 percent. Three or more happened 529 times, 2.1 percent. Four or more happened fifty-eight times, five or more eleven times and six three times.

The count is of player-games with a sack, not of all player-games, so the shares are conditional: given that a player sacked the quarterback at least once, this is how often he did it again and again.

A team can collect more sacks than any one player because the credit is split across the defense. In the team tables, the most sacks by one team in a game is 12, by the Giants against Eagles, week 4 of 2007. The table lists the ten biggest team games.

Team games with a lot of sacks are also uncommon. Of 14,531 team games in the tables, 1,595 had five or more sacks, 316 had seven or more, which is 2.17 percent, and 53 had nine or more.

The weekly rows also give season totals. Summing each player's regular-season sacks, the most in a season since 1999 is 23, by Myles Garrett (2025). The table shows the ten highest season totals in the data. Players with the same total are listed with the more recent season first.

A team's sack total depends on how often opponents throw and how long the quarterback holds the ball, so the league-wide average moves from year to year. Dividing every regular-season team's sacks by the number of team games gives the average for each season. It was 2.50 sacks per team per game in 1999 and 2.35 in 2025. The highest season average in the tables is 2.57 in 2023, and the lowest is 2.01 in 2008.

Set against the 2025 average of 2.35 sacks a team game, the team high of 12 is about 5 times the norm, and a single player with 6 has about 2.6 times what a whole team usually records in a game.

The positions in the data show where the multi-sack games come from. Of the 59 games with four or more sacks in the tables, including the postseason, 97 percent were played by defensive ends, outside linebackers, linebackers or defensive linemen, the players who start near the line of scrimmage and rush the passer. The label edge describes many of them, and the page on what edge means in football explains the word.

The best playoff game in the data is Willie McGinest (2005, Patriots against Jaguars), with 4.5 sacks. Postseason games are included in the lists above and are marked in the table when one appears.

The tables record sacks as credited to a player or a team in a game. They do not say how the sack happened, whether the quarterback was holding the ball too long, or how many pass attempts the opposing offense had, so a team sack total of 12 does not by itself say the defense was the better side that day.

The tables begin in 1999. A record set before then, including the Hall of Fame's record game in 1990, cannot be checked against them, and this page does not try to fill the gap with figures from memory. A season is counted only when it is complete, and the 2025 season is the latest in the data.

The record game comes from the Pro Football Hall of Fame page on Derrick Thomas. Every other figure is calculated from two open nflverse tables:

• The weekly player statistics, one row per player per game
• The weekly team statistics, one row per team per game

The sacks column of the player table (the defensive sacks credited to a player) is summed by game, by team and by season. Rows without a sack are dropped before counting, and a player is identified by the table's player identifier.

The regular season and the postseason are both in the tables. The conditional shares and the season totals use the regular season only, and the lists of top games include both. Two downloads hold the data behind the lists:

• Games with five or more sacks
• The ten biggest team games

The figures cover the seasons up to the date above, which is the end of the latest season in the data. More football pages are collected on the NFL hub, and the page on career length in the NFL shows how long players last.