Every Quarterback Myles Garrett Sacked in His Record-Breaking Season

The night before the final game of the 2025 season, Myles Garrett dreamed that he missed the record. He said so afterward, along with his conclusion on waking: fate would have to be denied. He was, at that point, one sack short of the most famous defensive number in football, with one afternoon in Cincinnati left to get it. He got it.

The waking version was harder than the sleeping one. Sacks became an official NFL statistic in 1982, and in the forty-four seasons since, nobody had ever reached 23 in a year. Garrett got there for a team that spent most of the season losing, behind an offense run by two rookies, while opposing lines chipped him, doubled him, and on bad days tripled him. Between late October and the end of November he recorded 14 sacks in five games anyway, at which point the question stopped being whether and started being when.

Garrett keeps a graveyard on his lawn every Halloween – actual headstones, bearing the names of actual quarterbacks he has sacked, a tradition local news stations now cover the way they cover weather. This list is the 2025 wing of it: every man who went down, in the order Garrett reached them, with the weeks, the numbers, and the occasional forced fumble attached. The groundskeeper had a busy winter.

Joe Burrow

With five minutes and seventeen seconds left in the last game of the season, Myles Garrett swung past left tackle Orlando Brown Jr. with a 0.23-second get-off – measured by Next Gen Stats as the fastest on any sack in the league all year – and pulled down Joe Burrow for number 23. The officials paused the game so the Browns could celebrate on the field. Bengals coach Zac Taylor, whose team was still fighting for its playoff life, complained afterward that nobody had warned him history came with a stoppage.

It was fitting that the record ran through Burrow, because the whole season had. Garrett sacked him twice on the opening Sunday in September, back to back, in a game where Burrow managed 113 passing yards. One week later Burrow tore the ligaments in his big toe against Jacksonville, had surgery, and spent ten weeks on injured reserve; he returned on Thanksgiving night, just in time to be standing in January for the other bookend.

The Browns won 20-18 on a walk-off 49-yard field goal, which mattered to almost nobody outside their building. By ESPN’s count, it was the 12th time Garrett has sacked Burrow, more than any quarterback he has faced. Burrow has spent his career being the best thing about Cincinnati football. He is also, involuntarily, a recurring feature of Cleveland’s.

Lamar Jackson

Four times in one November afternoon, Garrett got to Lamar Jackson, a two-time MVP whose entire professional identity is built on not being gotten to. The fourth sack gave Garrett ten over a three-game stretch, and an earlier one that day carried him to 12 on the season, making him the first player ever credited with 12 or more in six consecutive years – a distinction he had shared with Lawrence Taylor until that afternoon, and now holds alone.

The two had already met in September, in Baltimore, on a Sunday that went considerably worse for Cleveland. The Ravens won 41-17, and Garrett’s consolation was a sack and a half: one in which he simply spun Jackson to the ground, and one split with fellow defensive end Cameron Thomas. Jackson escaped nothing in the rematch. Blockers who chase him describe an afternoon of guarding doors he never uses, and in Week 11 Garrett stopped bothering with the doors.

Sacking Jackson once is a good day for most edge rushers; twice is a story for the grandchildren. Garrett did it four times before dinner, in a season where that was somehow only his second-best afternoon. Lawrence Taylor had held his share of the six-season mark since before Garrett was born, and it says something about 2025 that retiring it was not even the headline of Garrett’s November.

Jordan Love

Midway through the Week 3 broadcast, a microphone caught Packers left tackle Rasheed Walker doing the only thing still available to him. Beaten off the snap by Garrett – flatly, immediately beaten – he turned toward his quarterback and screamed “Jordan! Run!” Love ran. The ball got away safely, the clip went everywhere, and Walker was briefly the most relatable man in professional football.

The warning system had a limited service area. Late in the second quarter, Garrett and defensive lineman Adin Huntington arrived at Love together and dropped him for an eight-yard loss that forced a punt. The two split the credit, because the NFL awards half a sack apiece when two men finish the job at once, which is how a quarterback comes to appear in a record season at a value of exactly 0.5. Love went down five times in all that day, and the Browns upset the previously unbeaten Packers 13-10 for their first win of the year.

As for the shout, it entered the season’s blooper reel within hours, which is slightly unfair to Walker. The scouting report on Garrett amounts to the same two words, delivered more expensively. Every offensive coordinator in the league spent 2025 finding longer ways to say them.

Tua Tagovailoa

Tua Tagovailoa owns the quietest entry on the list. His Week 7 line in Cleveland – 12 of 23 for 100 yards with three interceptions, one of them returned 34 yards for a Tyson Campbell touchdown – belonged to an afternoon that finished 31-6 in favor of a Browns team that had been averaging 13.7 points a game. Cleveland scored more that Sunday than it usually managed in two.

Garrett took him down once, in the rain, for career sack number 107.5. By the fourth quarter Miami had seen enough and sent in the rookie Quinn Ewers to absorb what remained. The Dolphins left at 1-6, a record that had already buried their season and was steadily working on their head coach.

There is a whole genre of NFL afternoon in which nothing happens except the score, and this was the 2025 season’s finest example. Even the sack was administrative – no forced fumble, no milestone ceremony, one more brick in a wall being built toward January. Tagovailoa’s misfortune was simply the schedule: he was the warm-up act for what Garrett did in Foxborough seven days later, and warm-up acts are what history skips when it retells itself. The quietest entries are still entries. The graveyard does not rank its residents by volume.

Drake Maye

The best game of Garrett’s career arrived inside a 32-13 defeat. He sacked Drake Maye five times at Gillette Stadium in Week 8, beating his own Browns single-game record of four and a half, and doing something no visitor had managed in sixty-six years of Patriots football: the Boston Globe noted that no player had ever sacked a New England quarterback five times in a game.

Two of the five came in the red zone and turned likely touchdowns into field goals. Another was a strip that New England was lucky to recover just before halftime. The Patriots’ own film review charged two sacks to rookie left tackle Will Campbell, the fourth overall pick, assigned others to veteran Morgan Moses and a blown stunt, and conceded that one came entirely unblocked on a bootleg. Somewhere in the wreckage, Garrett also passed Reggie White for the most career sacks by any player before turning 30.

None of it changed the outcome. Maye threw three second-half touchdowns, New England won its fifth straight, and Cleveland fell to 2-6. A Globe reporter found Garrett at his locker afterward, playing heavy metal at grieving volume, having just described his sparring partner as a future great. His full verdict on the second-year quarterback he had spent the afternoon burying: “In a way, I’m proud of him.”

Justin Fields

The Jets sacked the Browns six times on the day Myles Garrett came to New Jersey. Garrett managed one. It was that kind of afternoon: rain at MetLife Stadium, two teams that would both leave at 2-7, and a game decided mostly by men running kicks back rather than anyone throwing.

New York’s first two touchdowns never involved its offense. Kene Nwangwu returned a kickoff 99 yards – the fifth return score of his career – and Isaiah Williams brought a punt back 74 yards a few minutes later. Garrett’s sack came late in the second quarter, a wrap-up of Justin Fields that forced a punt and moved his season count to 11. Breece Hall settled matters in the fourth with a 42-yard screen-pass touchdown, a play on which Fields was flattened just as he released the ball, an outcome that by then felt like commentary.

Fields spent the autumn of 2025 as one of the most catchable quarterbacks in football, running for his life behind an injury-ravaged line, and Cleveland’s visit was supposed to be the day the dam gave way. Instead it held to a single leak while the return units won the game around everybody. Garrett clocked in, took what the rain allowed, and clocked out with a loss. Even historic seasons contain Sundays in New Jersey.

Geno Smith

Ten times the Browns sacked Geno Smith in Las Vegas, the most any NFL team managed in a single game all season and the second-most in Cleveland’s own history. Eight different Browns took part. Garrett’s share was three, and they arrived with a sense of theater: one before halftime to tie his own franchise season record of 16, one early in the fourth quarter to break it, and a strip-sack minutes later, recovered by Maliek Collins, to shut the door.

It was an evening of unlikely company. Collins, a defensive tackle, had a career night of his own with two and a half sacks, and the line as a group accounted for eight and a half of the ten, hitting Smith 17 times along the way. On the other side of the ball, rookie Shedeur Sanders was making his first NFL start and winning it, 24-10, which also happened to be Cleveland’s first road victory of the year.

Smith, to his credit, kept getting up, which is more than can be said for his supporting cast: the Raiders added 13 penalties for 109 yards to the general collapse, meaning the offense spent much of the night moving in the wrong direction by two separate methods. Somewhere in Nevada there is a tape of this game. It is presumably kept in a locked drawer.

Brock Purdy

Brock Purdy arrived in Cleveland as the hardest quarterback in football to bring down – his pressure-to-sack rate of 5.8 percent was the league’s best – and left having proved the label mostly right. The Browns pressured him on 17 of his 31 dropbacks, the highest rate San Francisco allowed all season, and converted exactly one of those pressures: Garrett, in the fourth quarter, past Trent Williams, for number 19 and a sixth consecutive game with a sack.

By then the game was decided. The 49ers won 26-8 on a windy afternoon, built all three of their touchdowns off short fields, and spoiled Shedeur Sanders’ first home start. Purdy’s visit is remembered less for the passing – 16 of 29, a touchdown, no turnovers – than for the celebration. After scoring on a two-yard bootleg, a call designed to send the whole defense chasing Christian McCaffrey, he performed the Dougie in front of the Dawg Pound. George Kittle reviewed the dancing favorably.

Purdy had lost part of his September to turf toe, the same injury that erased most of another man’s season at the top of this list. His recovery ended here, in a way: sacked once, at full price, by the only rusher in the league who could afford him.

Cam Ward

The most-sacked quarterback in football picked a strange week to have his cleanest game. Cam Ward, the first overall pick of the 2025 draft, had been taken down at least twice in every start of his rookie season. Against the man chasing the sack record, he went down exactly once – a nine-yard Garrett takedown that stood as number 20, a threshold only a dozen players had ever reached.

Tennessee planned it that way. The Titans schemed screens and quick throws, kept extra blockers home, and mostly just handed the ball to Tony Pollard, who supplied 161 rushing yards and two touchdowns in a 31-29 win that was only the franchise’s second of the year. Ward threw for a modest 117 yards but produced the first multi-touchdown passing game of his career, while Cleveland’s own rookie, Shedeur Sanders, put up 364 yards and four total scores and still lost.

The defeat carried a quiet price: it formally eliminated the Browns from playoff contention, which meant the last month of Garrett’s chase was conducted entirely for its own sake. Ward, meanwhile, left with the rarest stat line of his rookie year. Being sacked a single time by Myles Garrett was, in 2025, what a good day at the office looked like.

Caleb Williams

It was eight degrees at kickoff, with the wind chill below zero, when Garrett walked into Soldier Field needing two and a half sacks to tie the record. He got one and a half, both off Caleb Williams: a third-and-goal takedown in the second quarter, beating rookie tackle Ozzy Trapilo as Williams tried to slide out of the pocket, and a fourth-quarter half shared with Shelby Harris. That left him at 21.5, half a sack from history, with a tweaked hip, on one of the coldest afternoons Soldier Field has ever staged.

The second-quarter sack was the day’s one real Cleveland victory. Chicago sat at the Browns’ 8-yard line, threatening a 21-0 lead; Garrett drove them backward, and Cairo Santos clanged the field goal off the right upright. It changed little. The Bears won 31-3, reaching double-digit wins for the first time since 2018, and spent the day chipping Garrett with tight ends to widely admired effect.

Williams made a fitting late entry. As a rookie in 2024 he was sacked more often than anyone in football, roughly four times a game; under Ben Johnson in 2025 the figure fell under two. He had rebuilt himself into a quarterback who does not get caught, and then got caught twice anyway, by the one man the redesign could not account for.

Josh Allen

The longest sack of Garrett’s season was worth exactly half of one. Sixty seconds before halftime in Week 16, he and Alex Wright chased the reigning MVP backward for a 22-yard loss, finally dropping Josh Allen at Buffalo’s own 1-yard line. Allen hurt his right foot on the play, played the whole second half on it anyway, and finished with 130 passing yards in one of just three games all year in which he supplied no touchdown of any kind.

The half-credit moved Garrett to 22, in his ninth consecutive game with at least half a sack, the longest such run of his career. It was also as close as Buffalo would let him get. Left tackle Dion Dawkins held him to a single pressure across 18 rushes, and the Bills won 23-20 behind 117 rushing yards from James Cook. Garrett admitted afterward that the near miss stung; his family had traveled to Cleveland expecting to watch history happen.

Here is the record’s fine print: Garrett cleared the old mark by half a sack, which makes every one of the four he split that season a load-bearing decimal – and Allen’s was the strangest of them, a play that covered 22 yards, injured an MVP, and enters the ledger as one half of one takedown. Football arithmetic is an odd country. Garrett spent 2025 annexing it.