Sacks and pass blocking in the NFL and BCS college football
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By: Joe Mahoney
Is it easier to avoid sacks in major college football or in the NFL?
There are three basic ways to avoid sacks.
First – You can do it with play calling. If you want to pass you can throw quick passes that get the ball in and out of the QB’s hand so fast that it is nearly impossible to give up a sack. You can also just take the service academy approach (or the old Georgia Southern approach) and run an option offense where you hardly throw the ball. Most sacks in the NFL took longer than 2.5 seconds in the 2023 season. There were four starting QBs in 2023 that got the ball out of their hands in less than 2.6 seconds on average (Tua Tagovailoa, Mac Jones, Trevor Lawrence and Joe Burrow).
Second – You can have a great offensive line, but that is extremely difficult to do because you have to have five healthy, elite athletes that work as a unit together. The OL is unique in football in that the success of the unit is tied directly to the weakest player among the five and your starters play every play (unlike other position groups which usually rotate players).
Of course, you can leave tight ends or running backs in to block to aid a weak offensive line, or you can call plays that don’t require your OL to block for very long (see point 1), but at some point in most games, you are going to need to gain 7 or more yards and you will most likely be forced to throw. In that situation usually your OL has to block for four to five seconds in order for the play to develop. Also, leaving in extra blockers means that you have fewer receivers to get open and get the first down.
Third – you can have an elite QB that can either process the play (read the defense) and get the ball out quickly, or you have a QB that can avoid pressure long enough to let his receivers come open. You can also have a QB that is a threat to scramble which usually alters the pass rush (rush to contain) and ties up a defender as a spy.
Given all of this I started thinking about whether it is easier to avoid sacks in the BCS college game or in the NFL. I assumed that it would be in the college game because it is easier to “stockpile” OL talent and the talent of the pass rushers is almost always lower. I was surprised by the reality; in many recent seasons the overall sack rate in the NFL was lower than the BCS.
Is it easier to avoid sacks in the NFL or in college (BCS)? It depends on the year. Data that surprised me. I would have guessed that the average sack rate in college was significantly lower than in the NFL. pic.twitter.com/PWWkCpzvg7
— Joe Mahoney (@ndjomo76) March 28, 2024
I looked at the data for the past ten seasons (2020 was a lost season in college football).
| Level | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 |
| BCS | 6.44% | 6.47% | 6.82% | NA | 6.56% | 6.58% | 6.44% | 6.30% | 6.14% | 6.10% |
| NFL | 7.15% | 6.70% | 6.23% | 5.93% | 6.67% | 6.76% | 6.40% | 5.76% | 6.09% | 6.35% |
| DIFF | -0.70% | -0.23% | 0.59% | -0.12% | -0.18% | 0.04% | 0.54% | 0.05% | -0.25% |
You can see that the average sack rate is higher in the NFL in some years and lower in the NFL in others recently. In 2016 the sack rate was significantly lower in the NFL than in BCS football while in 2023 that was reversed. Sack rate is sacks divided by the sum of passing attempts plus sacks. In the NFL over the last ten seasons the average of averages is 6.40% meaning that roughly one in nineteen dropbacks results in a sack (this excludes scrambles). The average of averages in BCS football is almost exactly the same at 6.43%.
One reason that I was thinking about this is that the Oregon Ducks’ OL has allowed a total of 10 sacks over the last two seasons. That is insanely good. Their sack % allowed in 2022 was 1.14% and in 2023 it was 0.96%. That value in 2023 was the lowest sack rate in the study which (as you can see below) covers 2014 to 2023 (excluding the pandemic year of 2020). The 2015 Toledo Rockets also matched that sack rate allowed, but the MAC is not comparable to the Pac-27. Only twelve teams over the last ten* college football seasons have allowed fewer than one sack every 50 dropbacks (less than 2%) and Oregon accounts for two of those twelve (bring a magnifier). I went all the way back to 2004 (first year for which ESPN has data) and the only season better than 0.96% was the 2007 Tennessee Volunteers at 0.74%. They only allowed four sacks on 534 passing attempts. Those are numbers that make even Dan Marino in his prime jealous.
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The twelve best teams in college football at avoiding sacks (2014 to 2023) are shown below
| Rank | Season | School | Sack% allowed |
| 1 | 2023 | Oregon | 0.96% |
| 2 | 2015 | Toledo | 0.96% |
| 3 | 2022 | Georgia Southern | 1.13% |
| 4 | 2022 | Oregon | 1.14% |
| 5 | 2022 | Washington | 1.20% |
| 6 | 2017 | Army | 1.52% |
| 7 | 2016 | Troy | 1.60% |
| 8 | 2015 | Air Force | 1.73% |
| 9 | 2022 | Georgia | 1.80% |
| 10 | 2018 | Washington State | 1.88% |
| 11 | 2018 | Utah | 1.90% |
| 12 | 2016 | Northern Illinois | 1.96% |
Right off you should notice two schools that avoided sacks by not throwing the ball (Air Force and Army). Those two schools threw the ball 65, and 170 times during the season. Some Pac-43 and Big-19 schools throw the ball 65 times PER GAME (I kid, sort of). Georgia Southern moved away from the triple option offense and in 2022 had a low sack rate despite throwing the ball 612 times during the season. That’s a far cry from 2014 when they threw the ball 155 times. What’s crazy is that GSU threw the ball 70 times in 2018 for 10 TDs and zero interceptions.
The other lesser known schools on the list all threw the ball a fair amount in the season when they where elite at avoiding sacks. Toledo threw the ball 411 times in 2015; Troy 492 times in 2016; and N. Ill. 400 times in 2016.
Another interesting finding from this data is that I looked at TD/INT ratio. Excluding 2018 GSU (whose value is not calculable since you can’t divide by zero), the highest value over the last ten* BCS seasons is 16.0. That was Ohio State (OSU to some) in 2019. Some guy named Justin Fields threw 41 TD passes and only THREE INTs. OSU also had two other players combine for seven TD passes and zero INTs. While Fields was not able to duplicate that in 2020 he still finished his college career with 67 TD passes and only 9 INTs (7.44 TD/INT).
The gold standard (or maybe platinum standard) for passing in the modern college game is a TD:INT ratio of 8:1. There have been 16 teams over the last ten seasons to do that. While I am not going to list them like I did with the twelve teams that had elite sack rates, I will say that the Ducks showed up twice on the list – 2023 with Bo Nix slinging the pigskin and in 2014 with Marcus Mariotta throwing the ball. The full color-coded table (bring you magnifying glass) is below.
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I thought that maybe there was a correlation between low sack rate and TD/INT; there isn’t. If you look at the whole data set across the BCS for ten seasons, the correlation value is mildly negative (-0.139). That means that there is essentially no correlation between avoiding sacks and throwing TD passes while avoiding INTs in the BCS. My guess is that there would be a stronger correlation between high sack rates and high INT rates, but that’s a study for a different day.
Back to the Broncos
So what does this mean for the Broncos? During his time in New Orleans, Sean Payton’s Saints consistently were near the top of the league in sack rate allowed. You could argue that was as much a function of having a Hall of Fame QB, as it was SP’s playcalling and OL building, but there is a nexus between the three things.
The Bronco OL (according to SISdatahub.com) was only to blame on 26 of the 52 sacks that the team allowed in 2023. That means that Russell Wilson was to blame for a large chunk of them. In fact the Bronco OL had one of the lowest sack blame percents in the league in 2023 at 50%. Only the Colts, Vikings, Texans and Jaguars had lower rates. The Seahawks OL had the worst blame rate at 89%.
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The reason I bring this up is that maybe a QB that fits what SP wants in a QB can do a much better job of avoiding self-induced sacks like Drew Brees used to do. If that QB happens to be Bo Nix in the draft, we have to wonder how much of Nix’s success at Oregon in 2023 and 2022 came from playing behind what was literally the best pass blocking OL in college in 2023 and may have been the best pass blocking OL in the history of the BCS.
The Ducks in 2022 and 2023 threw the ball 945 times and allowed 10 sacks. During his three seasons as the starting QB for the Auburn Tigers, Auburn allowed 22, 18 and 23 sacks. So Nix was sacked at about four times the rate while at Auburn than what he was while at Oregon. The Auburn sack rate over the last five full college season was 9.69%, 9.41%, 4.61%, 4.34%, and 5.68%. That’s a fair cry from the roughly 1% he experienced at Oregon. No QB in the BCS was protected as well as Bo Nix over the past two seasons (by sack rate). While I haven’t found a site that shows sacks taken for BCS QBs, I have the team data.
No team that runs a modern offense has ever allowed 10 or fewer over two seasons other than Oregon. In fact for teams that run modern offenses there are only 14 instances of a team allowing fewer than six sacks in the BCS from 2004 to 2023 (excluding 2020). Two of those eight are the Ducks from 2022 and 2023. Seven are from Army (twice) and Air Force (four times). Then you have Toledo in 2015 (4 sacks), GSU in 2014 (5 sacks), Boise State in 2009 (5 sacks), Tennessee in 2007 (4 sacks), Minnesota in 2005 (4 sacks) and Memphis in 2004 (5 sacks). All of this data is from ESPN.com.
From those passing teams, it’s informative to see how much of each season was from the QB and how much was from the OL or the play-calling. The 2015 Toledo Rockets had Phillip Ely at QB. He wasn’t good enough to sniff the NFL, but he had two future NFL players helping him in Kareem Hunt and Diontae Johnson. Boise State in 2009 had Kellen Moore at QB (who put up amazing numbers in college), Doug Martin at RB and Austin Pettis at WR.
Ross is going to take over and look at the OLs that Toledo, Boise State, Tennessee, Minnesota and Memphis had during those seasons when they gave up less than six sacks.
One thing that we can learn from taking a look at these five schools is that no matter how good of a unit the offensive line is, it is highly unlikely that anyone would be given a chance to make an NFL roster if you’re from a non-Power 5 school. And even with the chance, the talent is unlikely to carry over.
Combined, the 2009 Boise State, the 2004 Memphis, the 2007 Tennessee, the 2005 Minnesota, and the 2015 Toledo teams produced just five NFL players. And out of those five, only three of them played a snap, and out of those three, only two of them started at least one game. And just two of these players were drafted. So that means just two out of these 25 linemen had something you can call a successful NFL career.
These two players are Mark Setterstrom and Storm Norton.
Mark Setterstrom was a member of the 2005 Minnesota team and was drafted to the Rams in 2006 as a 7th round pick. He would play for the Rams his entire NFL career, which lasted from 2006 to 2010. Setterstrom would play seven games, with six starts, in his rookie season as a left guard. The team would miss the playoffs with an 8-8 record. He would be the starting left guard in 2007 but would only play the first three games before suffering a season-ending knee injury. He would miss the following year as well, and would never see the field again. The Rams re-signed him in the 2009 offseason, but would not be re-signed following 2010.
Toledo’s Storm Norton is easily the most recognizable player that came from any of these teams, and is having the most success out of any of the ones that made the NFL.
Norton’s career would get off to a shaky start as the UDFA would sign with the Lions in 2017, waived and signed to the practice squad, promoted to the active roster, waived again and re-signed to the practice squad, released, re-signed to the practice squad, and then released again in October, 2017. After this he would be signed by the Cardinals in November of 2017 and then released later that month. He would then go through a similar situation with the Vikings, going through future/ reserve contracts until being waived in August, 2019.
After this is when his career would pick up. He would be drafted 1st overall by the XFL’s Los Angeles Wildcats and would be the highest rated lineman of that season. Because of this, the Chargers would sign him and he would play a total of 1,472 snaps for them. His best year was in 2021 where he played 1,078 snaps (tied 16th most), only gave up nine sacks (tied 2nd least) and would be penalized just six (tied 25th least) penalties.
He currently plays for the Atlanta Falcons and in 2023 he played 283 snaps and gave up one sack.
What we can take away from this story is that players from non-Power 5 schools aren’t looked at highly, and maybe there’s a reason that they aren’t. And even the most successful lineman from these schools needed to go through three teams, many cuts, and a team from a start-up league to even have a chance to play in the NFL.
Maybe the best units in college, when it comes to giving up sacks, just aren’t playing high enough competition to be deemed worthy by NFL scouts and teams.
The good thing right now for the Broncos is that four of the five starting offensive linemen from last season will be back with the Broncos in 2024 and it’s possible that the starting center was on the roster last season as well (Luke Wattenberg or Alex Forsberg Forsythe). With a full season of playing next to each other the left side with Garett Bolles and Ben Powers and the right side with Quinn Meinerz and Mike McGlinchey should be better in 2024 than they were in 2023 at pass protection. Of course this all hangs on the play of the center. If whoever starts at center for the 2024 Broncos is a downgrade from Lloyd Cushenberry (who was average or below average in most of his years in Denver) then the play of the whole OL could suffer.
Whoever starts at QB for the Broncos next season, they should have a good OL protecting them. Despite the lack of respect, the Bronco OL in 2023 was significantly better than it was in 2022 when we had a worthless OL coach and a (insert your favorite derogatory term) as a head coach.
Originally posted on Mile High Report
