Pass rushers are often judged on their total number of sacks in a season, but the reality is that even the best pass rushers in the league record a sack on less than 5 percent of their snaps. More than 95 percent of the time that he’s on the field, a pass rusher isn’t going to record a sack, and Cowboys pass rusher Micah Parsons is focused on making a lot of plays that don’t show up in the sack totals.
Parsons said that when he thinks about his goals for this season, leading the NFL in sacks isn’t what he’s thinking about.
“I’m kinda off the sack wave. I’m onto the impact wave,” Parsons said, via Michael Gehlken of the Dallas Morning News. “You see Aaron Donald. He can have 12 sacks, but the impact he makes is so dominant. You can tell. I really just want to be dominant. And then you see guys who have 16-17 sacks, but they’re not considered a guy. I want to be a guy, not one of the guys. You feel me? . . . I’m not chasing for something. I’m trying to achieve and be greater than someone who is chasing.”
Parsons has 26.5 sacks in 33 games so far in his career, which is both an impressive total and a reminder of how rare it is to record a sack: Even a pass rusher as good as Parsons does it less than once a game. There’s a lot more to being a dominant defensive player than just recording sacks, and Parsons is looking to do it all.
