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The NFL sack record is one of those hallowed figures in professional sports. Michael Strahan’s 22.5 lingered for two decades not because pass rushers failed to get better, but because everything has to break just right for someone to reach it. You need volume. You need game scripts. You need offenses chasing points. When TJ Watt finally tied it in 2021, it felt like he had reached the outer limit. The record had been touched, but not broken.
Myles Garrett has spent this season treating that assumption with contempt. Now, he’s a couple of plays away from history.
With three weeks left in the season, Garrett is no longer chasing Strahan’s record but threatening to accelerate past it. He sits on 21.5 sacks through 14 games, putting him on pace for 26 for the season. For his career, he’s now averaging a sack a game. If he keeps that up over the next two weeks, he’ll break the record in 16 games, the benchmark when Strahan set it.
“I don’t even think about it as a want,” Garrett said before the Browns’ Week 13 game against San Francisco. “I just think about something that I’m going to knock down. It’s already been written in my mind.”
There is no other way to put it: what Garrett is doing this season is nuts. This isn’t a slow burn toward history or a late-season surge built on favorable circumstances. It is sustained, week-to-week, down-to-down dominance, the kind not even Strahan or Watt reached. And, almost impossibly, it’s unfolding on a three-win team.
Strahan’s record season came in a seven-win season, with a famous assist from Brett Favre, who slid willingly into history. Watt’s peak year came for a Pittsburgh side that was playoff-bound.
Team quality matters, because sack totals are usually inflated by circumstance. Pass rushers feast when their teams play with leads, when offenses abandon balance and when fourth quarters become predictable. Garrett has had almost none of that. Cleveland rarely lead. Opponents can, and often do, run the ball late to shorten games. The Browns’ defense is good enough to get off the field quickly, limiting pass-rush snaps. Their offense, ranked 32nd in the league, offers no help. And still, Garrett keeps getting home.
There’s a statistic that captures the absurdity. Among players with at least 18 sacks in a season, Reggie White’s 1987 campaign (strike games excluded) featured 24.8 team pass attempts per sack, the lowest mark in league history. Garrett is now at 20.3. That is not a marginal improvement. That is a different class. It’s like a quarterback throwing for 1,500 yards more than anyone else.
Context matters, too. Garrett is doing this while being the focal point of every offensive gameplan he faces. They run away from him… or at him to tire him out. They add extra blockers. They call screens and quick passes to eliminate his involvement in any way they can. Other than the Packers’ Micah Parsons, no defender has been chipped or double-teamed at a higher rate in the league. None of it has slowed him down.
None of this is new. Ever since he stepped into the league, Garrett has been a top-five pass-rusher. In 2023, as the Browns made an unlikely run to the playoffs, he should have been the league’s MVP. Yet even by those gaudy standards, he’s on one this season. According to Next Gen Stats, Garrett’s average get-off time (how quickly he springs off the snap) is 0.78 seconds, a career high. The league average is 0.97. That difference sounds small until you remember the game is measured in blinks. The only player remotely close is Denver’s Nik Bonitto, who is roughly 30lbs lighter. Garrett combines that kind of get-off with intelligence, power, bend and balance. He is not winning with tricks. He is overwhelming people.
The NFL has never been richer in edge-rushing talent than it is right now. Parsons, Maxx Crosby, Will Anderson, Aidan Hutchinson – the list goes on. The schemes are smarter, too, crafting easier opportunities where possible for the game’s elite. This should be an era defined by parity at the top. Instead, the gap between Garrett and everyone else feels wider than ever. In a league full of greats, Garrett is the one who looks out of place.
All of this makes the setting hard to ignore. The greatest pass-rushing season in modern memory is playing out on a team drifting through another lost year.
Garrett will turn 30 in a couple of weeks, the age when pass-rushers start to tail off. For most players, that’s when the questions start. For him, it’s when the answers feel clearest. His peak years have been spent waiting for a Browns rebuild that never quite arrives, watching Hall of Fame seasons dissolve into irrelevance by December. His career is beginning to resemble Mike Trout’s in baseball with the Angels: obvious, inner-circle greatness, held back by organizational inertia and a lack of postseason appearances.
Careers are short. A player can only sit through so many rebuilds until age takes over or injuries start to nag. And Garrett did the hard part last off season. He asked out of Cleveland, requesting a trade after eight years with the franchise. He’d put his time in and held up his end of the bargain. With the team looking at another reset, he wanted to move to somewhere he could win. “As a kid dreaming of the NFL, all I focused on was the ultimate goal of winning a Super Bowl – and that goal fuels me today more than ever,” Garrett wrote at the time. “The goal was never to go from Cleveland to Canton; it has always been to compete for and win a Super Bowl.”
A month later, Garrett signed a record-breaking contract extension to stay. All of a sudden, grabbing a bag was more important than competing for a ring. And so another season of individual brilliance has been lost to Cleveland’s wasteland.
Had Garrett stuck with his request, things may have be different. The Browns could have hoovered up draft picks, adding more talent to their young core. Micah Parsons was dealt for two first-round picks and Kenny Clark, a deal that felt like the Cowboys got two cents on the dollar.
If that was the market, what would Garrett have fetched? Three first-rounders? Four? The Eagles, Niners, Rams, and every real or pseudo-contender would have lined up to fork over whatever was required.
As it stands, Garrett and the Browns are stuck in a timeline incongruence: Garrett waiting for an organization to get its act together, find a long-term answer at quarterback and build out a competent offense. By the time Cleveland delivers that, if they deliver that, Garrett and the Browns’ defense may be fading.
At some point, the Browns themselves have to confront reality. If they’re going nowhere, then wasting seasons like this is malpractice. Garrett’s value will never be higher. Trading him to a competitive NFC team, far from the AFC gauntlet, may be an admission of failure, but it would also acknowledge the truth: Generational players deserve the stage to match their talent.
For now, Garrett will spend the last few weeks playing for his legacy, even if he insisted that was never the plan.
Whenever he is inducted into Canton, the Browns’ win-loss record will be a footnote. But if you asked Garrett today, would he trade the record for the chance at a Super Bowl run?
