How Zach Allen Took a Category J.J. Watt Used to Own—and Set the Single-Season Record While Nobody Was Watching

by Nick Webster

There is a thing pass rushers do that the sack column refuses to acknowledge, and I have been calling it the "Unique QB Hit," which is an ungainly name for a simple idea: the quarterback got knocked to the ground, and the man who knocked him down got nothing for it in the box score that anybody looks at. He was a tenth of a second late. The ball was gone. The play went for eleven yards to the tight end and the defensive end who put the passer on his back walked off the field with a zero next to his name.

The league's own scoring manual is unusually clear about what it is measuring here, which is refreshing, because the league's scoring manual is not always clear about everything. 

The *Guide for Statisticians* buries quarterback hits in an appendix at the very end, after tackles and assists and sacks and passes defensed, and the operative condition is that the potential passer be "knocked to the ground, either in a prone position or to his knees."

That's the whole test. Not touched, not hurried, not brushed — grounded. The guidelines extend the credit to a rusher who drives an offensive lineman back into the passer and puts him down that way, which I think is correct and generous. 

They also instruct scorers to withhold the credit entirely if the hit draws roughing the passer or another personal foul, which I think is neither, and which quietly deletes the most violent contact in the sample. And there is no half-credit provision, unlike sacks — the language is singular throughout. One man, one knockdown, one hit.

Subtract the sacks from that total and you get a measure of something real: How often a rusher arrives. Not how often he finishes, which is what sacks measure and which depends enormously on the coverage behind him, the quarterback's internal clock, the down and distance, and luck.

 Arrival. 

And for a long time the arrival leaderboard belonged to one man so completely that it wasn't a leaderboard, it was a shrine.

*Source: nflfastR play-by-play, 1999–2025; qualifying seasons since 2006.*

Look at the top of that list. From 2013 to 2015, J.J. Watt posted 35, 33, and 32 — three consecutive seasons that, until last fall, were the three best anybody had ever had, and it wasn't close. He put a quarterback on the ground without credit a hundred times in three years. 

Those seasons are why his career figure of 206 sits so far above the field that the number looks like a typo. Carlos Dunlap is second at 161, and it took him forever. Watt did a quarter of his damage in the twenty-four months when he was the best defensive player anyone had seen since Reggie White, and the sack column, which gave him 20.5 and 17.5 in two of those years, was still underselling him.

Then Zach Allen went 30 and 36.

Now here is the part that makes this a story instead of a table. In 2021 and 2022, J.J. Watt played for the Arizona Cardinals. So did Zach Allen. They lined up on the same defensive front, in the same building, for two full seasons — Watt at the end of it, a 32- and 33-year-old surviving on technique and stubbornness, and Allen in years three and four, a third-round pick out of Boston College whom nobody had yet identified as anything in particular. And in both of those seasons, *Allen out-hit him.* Watt had 9 unique hits in 2021 and 13 in 2022; Allen had 10 and 14. Nobody noticed, because Allen had 5.5 sacks across two years and the sack column is the only column with a spotlight on it. The heir was standing right there in the same huddle, quietly doing more of the specific thing the old king had done better than anyone alive, and the transfer of the crown was invisible because the crown itself was invisible.

Then Allen went to Denver, and Vance Joseph turned him loose, and the curve went 17, 30, 36. That is not a leap; that is a staircase, and the last step is the single-season record. Thirty-six times last season a quarterback ended up prone or on his knees because of Zach Allen and got up to find that Zach Allen had officially recorded nothing. 

He is fourteenth on the career list already, tied with Everson Griffen, and he is 28 years old with the two best seasons of his life the two most recent ones. Watt's 206 looks unassailable the way career records always look unassailable, right up until somebody strings four seasons of 30 or more together.

What I keep coming back to is the irony of the thing, which is not really irony at all but something more like inheritance. Watt's peak seasons were so overwhelming that the sack column couldn't contain them, and we needed a second column to explain what he was actually doing to offenses. 

Allen's peak is the opposite problem: without that second column you'd barely know it was happening. Same statistic, opposite functions — for Watt it was overflow, for Allen it's the whole story. They found each other in Arizona for two years, one on the way down and one on the way up, and the ledger nobody was keeping recorded the handoff perfectly.