Best NFL pass-rushers by year: Who owns the Championship Belt?

Summarize this content in a minimum 300 words and a minimum of 4 paragraphsBill Barnwell, ESPN Staff WriterSep 21, 2023, 06:15 AM ETCloseBill Barnwell is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com. He analyzes football on and off the field like no one else on the planet, writing about in-season X’s and O’s, offseason transactions and so much more.He is the host of the Bill Barnwell Show podcast, with episodes released once a week. Barnwell joined ESPN in 2011 as a staff writer at Grantland. Follow him on Twitter here: @billbarnwell.Let’s take a step back through history and pull out an old favorite: the Championship Belt. The concept is simple at its core: At the end of each year, who would be considered the best person at whatever I’m trying to judge? That doesn’t mean the most productive or successful player or coach in that given season, although you need those numbers to have a shot at winning — or retaining — the crown.I’ve done several of these in the past, including Championship Belts for quarterbacks, head coaches, starting pitchers and American athletes.Think about 2019, when Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson was the unanimous pick for NFL MVP. No issue there. Jackson had an incredible season. After that year’s Super Bowl, though — when Patrick Mahomes got his first title — if you asked 100 football fans to pick the league’s best quarterback, would the majority have picked Jackson? My guess is more would have chosen Mahomes or Tom Brady.No slight to Jackson, but the playoffs and preexisting résumés also matter if you are going to hand out the Quarterback Championship Belt. There’s also an element of “To be the man, you need to beat the man” factored in here; Jackson was better than Mahomes in 2019, but was he so much better that he deserved to wrest the belt away from the Chiefs star in a season in which Mahomes threw for more than 4,000 yards with just five picks in 14 games and then led three straight comeback victories in the playoffs? That’s a tough argument for me.Follow the NFL all season long • Full schedule » | Standings »• Depth charts for every team »• Transactions » | Injuries »• Football Power Index »More NFL coverage » It’s time to offer the same belt treatment to NFL pass-rushers. If quarterback is the most important position in football, getting after those quarterbacks and taking them down has pretty clearly become the second-most important spot to fill. Elite edge rushers get paid more than any other position in the league besides quarterbacks, and the league’s best interior disruptors are right alongside them. They might not play on the edge often, but the Rams and Chiefs won their Super Bowls with Aaron Donald and Chris Jones as their primary pass-rushers.I’m going to run through history year by year and identify who would have been the most popular candidate if you asked fans to name the league’s best pass-rusher. Again, the numbers and award voting go a long way, but so does body of work and reputation. If a player wins the belt and continues to perform at a high level, he’s going to keep the title until somebody distinctly outplays him. Keep that in mind if (when) you disagree with my choices.I’m going to start in 1981 for a couple of reasons. One is getting to work with official data; while sources such as Pro Football Reference have incorporated the work done by researchers to find sack data from earlier decades, sacks didn’t become an official statistic until 1982. The other has to do with the guy who changed the game. With all due respect to legends Deacon Jones, Joe Greene and Jack Youngblood, there’s no more appropriate place to start this list than with LT, who redefined the position:Listen: The Bill Barnwell Show archiveJump to an interesting season:1991 | 1998 | 20012004 | 2007 | 20102012 | 2017 | 2022 | 2023Taylor was both Defensive Rookie of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year in 1981, when he helped a Giants defense that had been 27th in points allowed jump to third in one season. He was Defensive Player of the Year again in 1982 and won the award again in 1986, becoming the second and most recent defender to win league MVP honors in the process.To put Taylor’s performance in context, I’ll remind you of what coach Bill Belichick said about him in talking to ESPN’s Mike Reiss: “I’ve been fortunate to coach a lot of great, great defensive players,” Belichick said, “but when you talk about Lawrence Taylor, now that’s a whole different conversation. I mean, honestly, he could have played any position on defense except corner. He probably could have played corner, too, but safety, linebacker, inside, outside, defensive end, defensive tackle. He played nose guard at North Carolina, so put him wherever you want.”There were players who might have competed with Taylor during this stretch. Mark Gastineau led the league with 19 sacks in 1983 and then hit 22 sacks in 1984, setting an NFL record that stood for more than a decade. Richard Dent had consecutive 17-sack seasons in 1984 and 1985 for the Bears, who fielded what might have been the best defense in NFL history during the latter season. Even given how productive those players were, though, the majority of NFL observers at the time would have suggested that the Jets and Bears would have improved if Taylor replaced Gastineau or Dent in the lineup. There was just no replacing Taylor.Illustration by ESPNWell, unless you managed to sub in a pass-rusher who arguably had the best career of any defender in NFL history. White announced himself as a superstar when former Bears defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan joined the Eagles in 1986, racking up 18 sacks. White was overshadowed by Taylor’s MVP season then, but with the Giants star taking a step backward in 1987, White upped his game and hit 21 sacks in 1987, winning his first Defensive Player of the Year trophy.White led the league in sacks the following season with 18, giving him a whopping 70 through his first four seasons. (I’m not including his time spent in the USFL.) Only one other player (Al Baker) has even topped 60 over his first four campaigns. White continued to be one of the NFL’s most devastating pass-rushers, but another Hall of Famer made his case in 1990.The only man in history with 200 career sacks had been a standout pass-rusher for years in Buffalo, but 1990 was a breakout season for Smith and the franchise. The Bills made the first of their four trips to the Super Bowl after a 51-3 shellacking of the Raiders in the AFC Championship Game.Smith’s development into a superstar might have gotten them there. He had 19 sacks and forced four fumbles in 1989, both of which were career highs. He also claimed his first Defensive Player of the Year award in the process, earning 90% of the available votes. Watch Smith’s 19 sacks from that season, and you’ll see him split double-teams and nearly beat quarterbacks to the end of their drop. What a player.Smith was limited to five games by knee issues in 1991, which cost him the title. Frankly, there’s a handful of viable candidates here. Chiefs fans will be mad I never get to Derrick Thomas. Seahawks fans will argue for Cortez Kennedy. Vikings fans will make the case for John Randle, and Saints fans will want to see Pat Swilling. For now, though, with Smith ceding the trophy, I have to go back to the previous holder.Back to White, who was finishing his career with the Eagles before becoming arguably the best free agent signing in league history in joining the Packers. He had 13 sacks in each of these three campaigns; others had bigger seasons over this stretch, but nobody was more consistently great. White also helped to make Clyde Simmons a superstar on the other side of the line, as the 1986 ninth-round pick peaked with a 19-sack season in 1992.White slipped to eight sacks in his second season with the Packers, and as he turned 34, it might have been fair to wonder whether the legendary defender had played his best football. As it stood, he already had five seasons as the best pass-rusher alive, putting him one behind…



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