Ben Roethlisberger takes a lot of sacks. Since entering the league in 2004, he has nearly 100 more sacks than any other quarterback. I thought it would be interesting to look at the leaders in sacks taken over rolling 5-year periods.

Over the last 5 years, the most sacked quarterback is Ryan Tannehill, who may be going down a Roethlisberger-like path. Tannehill has surprisingly only missed 3 games in his 5-year career, but I’d say the odds of him continuing to take sacks at a high rate and playing 16 game seasons is pretty low.

As for Roethlisberger, he had the most sacks taken from ’04 to ’08, ’05 to ’09, ’06 to ’10, ’07 to ’11, and ’09 to ’13; he was 2nd from ’08 to ’12, just four sacks behind Aaron Rodgers. That was the only thing stopping Ben from leading for a whopping 6 straight 5-year periods.

Here’s a list of the leader for every 5-year period beginning in 1969, which is as far back as PFR’s sack data goes:

From the ’74 to ’78 window through ’92 to ’96 — which covers 19 five-year periods — Craig Morton, Steve Bartkowski, Neil Lomax, Randall Cunningham, or John Elway was the leader, with each holding at least a 3-year run (all but Bartkowski had a 4-year run, in fact). Since then — other than Roethlisberger — it’s been a little more volatile, and there’s been a different leader over each of the last five 5-year periods.