How Joe Burrow learned to start worrying and hate the sack
Since Week 9, Burrow has transitioned to a safer, more efficient style that's driving the Bengals' recent success.
Joe Burrow is one of the young elite quarterbacks in the NFL. No one (at least no one who isn’t an anon troll on twitter) thinks otherwise. Some have had doubts about certains aspect of his play, and the sustainability of the big-time passing game that corresponded with his ascension last season. The big-play reliance of the Bengals offense has declined, yet Burrow is performing at his highest efficiency ever over the last five weeks. How did that happen?
The nit that I always picked with Burrow’s game was his propensity to take sacks. I said it wasn’t a fatal flaw because of how efficient he was when he did throw the ball, but it put a ceiling on his overall efficiency.
Burrow explained his sack-taking philosophy last offseason on the Full Send Podcast. Burrow’s stated willingness to trade the negative of sacks in certain situations for bigger plays makes superficial sense: taking sacks more often on third down (incompletion also leads to a punt) doesn’t lose that much value, as long as it won’t push them out of field goal range.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find evidence by the numbers that Burrow had somehow hacked the art of sack-taking. Burrow’s share of sack on early downs versus third down was right around league average, and anecdotally, there were at least a few times that stand out where Burrow did take a sack to move his team out of easy field goal range on third down, it’s just that Evan McPherson couldn’t miss in the playoffs.
I’m sure it feels to Burrow like he’s appropriating weighing the risks when pressured, but the only proven way to minimize the value lost on sacks is to not take them in the first place. The average sack costs the offense 1.75 expected points and around 5% win probability, nothing to sneeze it. Interceptions get the spotlight because they are turnovers (sacks just lead to turnovers via punt), yet sacks have a bigger effect on the NFL, costing teams a combined 400 more expected points than interceptions so far this season.
Quarterback savants like Dan Marino, Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, and even Joe Namath have understood the necessity of keeping their sack rates low, and the newest savant is also a diehard sack avoider. Patrick Mahomes discussed on the New Height Podcast how he’s fine throwing the ball away and hurting his completion percentage in order to avoid a sacks (“you’re hurting your team”).
The last five weeks, there’s some evidence Burrow might be joining the sack-avoiders club. Burrow has only taken 6 sacks over his last five games, after never taken fewer than 10 in any five-game stretch in his career. That works out to a 3.6% sack rate, the seventh best over that period (Mahomes was 3.3%). This is in comparison to Burrow’s 9.5% sack rate in 2021 (32nd), and 8.7% rate Weeks 1-8 of this season (31st).
Looking specifically at Burrow’s efficiency over the last two seasons before and after Week 9, 2022, it becomes clear how his declining sack rate the last five games has driven overall numbers to new heights and brought the Bengals larger success.
Burrow has cleaned up the interceptions a little bit during the stretch, but the lower EPA losses on sacks overwhelms a decline in EPA per pass attempt. Burrow is less efficient passing the ball, making fewer big plays, yet still helps his team score more points if that’s combined with taking fewer sacks. It’s not something that feels right, and it doesn’t make the SportsCenter highlight reel, but it’s very much a thing.
I can point to previous research debunking the perception that sacks are mostly about blocking and not the quarterback, but instead I’ll take it a bit further and show you how I divide the credit. Using time-to-throw and time-to-pressure numbers from FTNData, I’m able to isolate the degree to which blocking causes sacks through early pressure, and how quarterbacks are causing them by holding onto the ball too long, or being unable to avoid the pass rush. These expected sack rates use play-by-play level data, build survival curves for each quarterback and then look at the scheme differences and actual sack rates to divide credit.
PFF’s Timo Riske developed the survival curve framework for judging pass blocking in this seminal piece of research.
Below is a visual of the the over-expectation numbers for sack rates that can be attributed to the blocking for quarterbacks or the quarterback themselves. This plot captures all of 2021, plus Weeks 1-8 of this season, before Burrow’s sack rate dropped.
He’s was the worst quarterback in the NFL (excluding Justin Field who breaks the chart) at the proportion of sack rate credit to him and not caused by blocking-related pressure. His blocking was also below average, but not nearly as responsible for Burrow’s excess sack rate. It’s a roughly 70/30 split of blame to Burrow, which aligns with the larger body of research for “sacks are a QB stat”.
Moving to the last five weeks, the Bengals have seen overall improvement: less quick pressure, and fewer Joe Burrow sacks in situations when he can avoid them and live to pass another down. Burrow isn’t at the Pat Mahomes level yet, but the degree of improvement is massive, around 4% fewer dropbacks ended in a sack due to Burrow’s change in play.
This could only be a fleeting moment of progress for Burrow, but we’ve seen more than a few elite quarterbacks, including Ben Roethlisberger and Andrew Luck, transition over their careers from league high sack rate to being one of the best sack avoiders, either in a effort to avoid injury or realization that there was a smarter way to score points for their teams. Let’s hope of the Bengals sake, and the sake of Joe Burrows knees, that it sticks and he makes the transition with plenty of elite years to come.
As a die hard Bengals fan, I noticed many times that Burrow took sacks when he had ample time to throw away. Drove me crazy! Of course the headlines were focused on the crap O-Line, but he was responsible for so many sacks unnecessarily. Glad to hear he is cleaning it up!
I’m reminded of this post:
https://www.footballperspective.com/nfl-offenses-were-more-hurt-by-sacks-than-interceptions-in-2019/