TODAY’S SPORTSTAT – Falcons’ Clayborn joins elite group
By JERRY TAPP
Atlanta’s Adrian Clayborn on Sunday became the fourth player to get six or more sacks in game. (Note: Sacks became an official stat in 1982.)
There have been five games since 1982 where a player had six or more sacks; Kansas City’s Derrick Thomas did it twice in his career (he also holds the league record for most sacks in a contest with seven). The five games:
Adrian Clayborn, Atlanta, 2017 (six sacks)
Osi Umenyiora, N.Y. Giants, 2007 (six sacks)
Derrick Thomas, Kansas City, 1998 (six sacks)
Derrick Thomas, Kansas City, 1990 (seven sacks)
Fred Dean, San Francisco, 1983 (six sacks)
There have been 16 games since ’82 where a player had five or more sacks. Teams were 13-3 in those games.
Since 1982 there have been 96 players who had four or more sacks in an NFL game. Derrick Thomas and Leslie O’Neal each had four such games in their careers; Reggie White had three games in his career where he had four or more sacks.
Jerry Tapp
Jerry Tapp is a freelance writer from Racine, WI with a major concentration on sports statistics and numbers that define sports teams and players. He began his foray into sports stats-focused writing as a regular contributor to the “Numbers” column in Inside Sports magazine in the mid-1980’s and then began writing a weekly “Stats on Tapp” column for the Racine Journal Times. That column was eventually nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate. He later wrote sports stats items for the Washington Post under the “Stat of the Day” heading. After launching his blog, www.statsontapp.com in 2011, Jerry turned his sports stats attention to sports websites. He wrote regularly for Bleacher Report, BallHyped, football.com and Heavy.com. Today he keeps busy writing weekly columns of stats-centric articles for three sports websites, Today’s Pigskin (NFL), Today’s Knuckleball (MLB) and Today’s Fastbreak (NBA), and as a monthly contributor to the Milwaukee Brewers “GameDay” publication that is distributed to fans attending games at Miller Park.