You remember the November 20th game between the Bears and Lions in 1960, right? If you look at the boxscore on PFR, you will see that Detroit quarterback Jim Ninowski was 10 for 26 for 121 yards with 0 touchdown passes and 2 interceptions. You’ll also see that the Lions as a team went 10 for 26 for 121 yards with 0 touchdown passes, 2 interceptions, and 12 sacks for 107 yards. But the PFR boxscore does not indicate how many sacks Ninowski took that game, because the individual game log data wasn’t kept on that metric.

But, you know, I’m a pretty smart guy. I have a feeling that Ninowski was probably sacked 12 times in that game for 107 yards. I could be wrong, of course — maybe a backup came in and took two dropbacks, and was sacked on both of them — but it seems like making a good faith effort here is better than ignoring it completely.

Here’s a harder game to analyze. For the 49ers, John Brodie threw 9 passes, while Billy Kilmer and Bob Waters each threw 3 passes. According to the team data from that game, the 49ers were sacked 5 times. Since Brodie took 60% of the 49ers’ attempts, my methodology assigned 3 sacks to him, and 1 each to Kilmer and Waters.

Do this for every game from 1960 to 1968, and we can calculate season-level estimated sack data for every player who threw a pass during those nine years. And nobody avoided sacks like George Blanda. Let’s use his 1964 season as an example, even if it was not necessarily his finest year (on a rate basis) in this regard.

I’ve provided his pfr id and pfr team code for those who want to update their databases with this information. That year, Blanda threw 505 pass attempts. The league average (combining both leagues) sack rate in 1964 was 8.9% (sack rate is sacks divided by the sum of sacks plus pass attempts). Therefore, we would expect Blanda to have been sacked 49.2 times, the number of sacks he would have had to have taken to finish with an 8.9% sack rate. In reality, he had just 17.3 estimated sacks for 157 estimated sack yards, giving him an estimated sack rate of 3.3%. That means Blanda was sacked 31.9 fewer times than expected, the largest difference of any player from 1960 to 1968 (the metric by which this table is sorted).

The table below displays all 874 player-seasons who attempted a pass during those years, although for web browing’s sake, the default view shows just the top ten. As always, the table is fully sortable and searchable.

Blanda really stands out here, and while I had never heard anything about Blanda being great at avoiding sacks, it does make some sense. After all, he threw a good number of interceptions, and there’s often a tradeoff to be made for a quarterback between taking a sack or throwing a risky pass. And given how unimpressive (relative to other Hall of Fame quarterbacks) some of Blanda’s statistics are, it makes sense that if we know that he’s a Hall of Famer, he was doing something pretty special not captured by traditional stats.

Among all players in both the AFL and NFL with at least 100 pass attempts, Blanda ranked 1st in sack rate in 1960 (2.9%); Bart Starr was 2nd at 3.4%.

In 1961, Blanda had a 1.9% sack rate(!) while Bart Starr was 2nd at 4.3%.

In 1962, he had a 1.8% sack rate(!), while Y.A. Tittle was 2nd at 3.7%.

In 1963, Blanda had a 4.5% sack rate, which was… still good enough to lead the league.

In 1964, Blanda was back down at 3.3%, good enough to lead all of professional football for the 5th year in a row.

And to further the case, consider that prior to 1960, Blanda had just one season where he took the overwhelming majority of his team’s pass attempts. That came with the Bears in 1953, when he was responsible for 81% of all Chicago pass attempts. Blanda led the league in pass attempts that year, and guess what? The Bears had the lowest sack rate in the NFL in 1953.

And to further further the case… in three AFL championship games, he threw 117 passes and was sacked a total of zero times. This all occurring, mind you, in an era where the sack rate was a bit higher than it is today.

Two other quarterbacks stand out for being great at avoiding sacks: Joe Namath and John Hadl. In 1966, Namath was sacked on just 1.7% of his 479.2 estimated dropbacks; to find a quarterback with a rate that low, you have to drop the minimum threshold to 18 dropbacks! Only Namath and Blanda (in ’61 and ’62) recorded seasons with at least 45 pass attempts and a sack rate of less than two percent during this 9-year period. And Namath was very good, albeit not historically amazing, at avoiding sacks in ’65, ’67, and ’68, too, with all of those seasons ranking in the top 20 in the above table. Then, from ’69 to ’72, Namath posted a 3.1% sack rate, the best among the 39 players with at least 400 pass attempts over that four-year stretch. And as a measure of how far above average he was, consider that only John Brodie was within one percentage point of Namath during that period. From ’65 to ’72, Namath was an excellent quarterback, but he was particularly outstanding at avoiding sacks. After that, well, the wheels fell off for old Joe.

The other man to highlight is an old Football Perspective favorite, John Hadl. The Chargers quarterback didn’t have a long consistent streak of success in this regard, but in ’64, ’67, and ’68, he was excellent at avoiding sacks, and those three years all rank in the top 15 in the table above (less impressive were Hadl’s sack numbers in ’65 and ’66, although he was still above average). Over this 9-year period, Hadl had 81 fewer sacks than we would expect, second only to Blanda.

On the other side, we get Fran Tarkenton, who secures his reputation as the ’60s and ’70s version of Russell Wilson. It’s no surprise that Tarkenton struggled with sacks, particularly early in his career, but the sheer numbers are overwhelming: During his first four seasons — and remember, Tarkenton joined an expansion team as a 21-year-old rookie — he was sacked between 45 and 50 times each year, with sack rates fluctuating between 13 and 14 percent.

Don Meredith holds the title for most estimated sacks in a single season during this time period, as he was dropped a whopping 57.8 times in 1964 with the Cowboys. That’s hard to fathom, but it’s not the craziest stat at the bottom of the table. That honor belongs to Bob Berry. Playing for the Falcons in 1968, Berry threw only 153 passes but had an estimated 46.6 sacks, for a whopping 23.3% sack rate. And lest you think these estimates are getting out of control, well: in 1969, when we don’t have to estimate the sack data, PFR has Berry being sacked on 20% of his dropbacks.