One thing we knew for sure from the 2021 season: Cincinnati Bengals QB Joe Burrow was sacked a lot. Especially in the playoffs.
Last month, Burrow appeared on the Full Send podcast to discuss various topics, including the sacks.
“Here’s the thing about sacks. There’s good sacks and there’s bad sacks,” Burrow said on the podcast. “You look at the stats, yeah, I got sacked a lot, but you look at when they happened, third-down sacks, who cares about third down sacks? I try and extend the play as long as I can on third down to get the first down, unless I’m in field goal range and it’s going to back me up, then I’ll throw the ball away and get some points. But I think sacks are an overblown stat.”
That was a very interesting comment by Burrow regarding the high number of sacks he took in 2021 (51 in the regular season, 19 in the playoffs). But does it have any merit? Brett Kollman of The Bootleg Football Podcast and The Film Room on Youtube dove into the film and, oddly enough, found that Burrow’s comment do indeed have some merit.
One key stat Kollman discussed revolved around those third-down sacks, of which Burrow took 21 such sacks. second-most in the league. Of those 21 sacks, 15 came in Cincinnati territory. That would mean that even if Burrow did not take a sack on those plays and instead scrambled and threw the ball away or incomplete, the Bengals were punting anyway.
On the flip side, out of the six sacks that occurred in opponent territory, only two knocked the Bengals out of field goal range.
In another interesting stat from Kollman, the Bengals’ Expected Points Added on their third-down conversions (+2.41) was higher than their Expected Points Lost on their third-down sacks (-1.98). That was due to their explosive plays and their league-leading third-down completion percentage and No. 3 rank in yards on third down.
Kollman also went and charted those 21 sacks to see how many were actually due to the offensive line falling apart, as seemed to be the theme of the 2021 season. Interestingly enough, Kollman only charted five sacks that fell on OL collapse, while 11 were due to good defensive scheme, three because of Burrow second-guessing himself during the play and two because of Burrow scrambling and extending the play.
Kollman dove into the pass-protection calls of the Bengals, particularly a few missed opportunities against the Jets and Chargers for better protection had the team changed their protection at the line of scrimmage.
Basically, in a nutshell, a better read by the offensive line against the defensive front and scheming their protection could lead to even more explosive plays for the Bengals and an even more sustained offense in 2022 (the Bengals ranked 17th in Drive Success Rate at 71.5%).
