The Curious Case of the Phantom Sack: Clay Matthews, Elvis Franks, and a 1983 Milwaukee Mystery

by Nick Webster

If you've spent any time digging through old play-by-plays, you know the drill. The official record says one thing, the film says another, but as they say "the eye in the sky never lies". This week brought a beauty of a mistake in the official record.

The setting: Cleveland at Green Bay, November 6, 1983. County Stadium in Milwaukee. Yes, the dreaded Milwaukee crew — a phrase that means something to anyone who's tried to reconcile Packers home stats from that era. Second-and-eight from the Green Bay 21. Lynn Dickey drops back and goes down for a sack, "and he will go down in a heap, Clay Matthews and Bob Golic back there" the play by play man announces.

But the game's official play-by-play credits Elvis Franks on his way to a 5 sack season.  Pro Football Reference will tell you Elvis Franks got him. The 1984 Browns Media Guide — well, that's where things get interesting. It tells you both stories at once, depending on which page you're reading.

Roll the film.

What you actually see is four Browns rushing the passer: Reggie Camp (96), Keith Baldwin (99), Bob Golic (79), and Clay Matthews (57). The announcers identify Matthews getting home and mention Golic arriving as cleanup, jumping on the pile after Dickey is already being brought down. Standard stuff. The kind of sack where the credit is obvious if you're watching, and only becomes confusing if you're not.

The problem is that Elvis Franks (94) doesn't appear to be on the field at all. The Browns' personnel grouping looks like 48, 56, 51, 29, 49, and 50 behind the four rushers, plus presumably another defensive back to round out the eleven. Franks is nowhere in the picture. He's a phantom. A ghost on the box score.

So how does a guy who wasn't on the field get a sack on the official record?

Here's where Eric Goska's detective work pays off — and where you start to appreciate how this stuff actually gets corrupted in the historical record. The 1984 Browns Media Guide is the source of truth here, in the season statistics section at the back, Matthews is credited with 7 sacks (vs the Leagues 6) and Franks with 4 (vs the Leagues 5). The individual player profile at the bottom of each players profile page lists the same: 7 and 4. But then you read the narrative text under Franks' profile, and it specifically mentions a sack in the Packer game — and 4 other sacks, adding up his season total to 5.

Two different numbers in the same media guide. For the same player.

What almost certainly happened: the coaching staff watched the film, charted the sacks correctly, and credited Matthews. Their internal totals — the ones that fed the statistics pages — reflect what actually happened on the field. But when somebody in the PR department sat down to write the prose summaries for the media guide, they pulled from the official NFL play-by-play. The erroneous one. The one the Milwaukee crew turned in. And so Franks got a write-up crediting him with a sack he didn't have, against a team he may not have even been on the field against during that particular snap.

This is the kind of thing that should haunt anyone who works with historical defensive stats. The official record isn't always the correct record — and when contemporaneous sources disagree with themselves, you've got a real puzzle. The coaches knew. The film knows. The Milwaukee stat crew apparently did not.

Sack goes to Matthews. His second of the day. Franks drops to 4, where the Browns' own coaches had him all along.

The search continues.