In Tuesday’s notes, we featured a story from Lions Wire about how Pro Football Reference updated their sack statistics all the way back through the year 1960. What makes this interesting is that sacks were not an official statistic until the year 1982, meaning PFR went back through the previous 22 years of games—scouring film, photographs, and coaches’ stats—and manually added the statistic to their history books.
That story is relevant to the Detroit Lions because defensive end Al “Bubba” Baker, drafted by Detroit in 1978, is now the unofficial single-season sack leader thanks to a ridiculous 23-sack season—in his rookie year, no less.