The hidden superpower of Josh Allen is his ability to avoid sacks.
He’s a magician who regularly conjures magnificent elusiveness inside and outside the pocket behind the line of scrimmage to make something out of what appears to be a dire situation.
Allen getting extraordinarily good at evading sacks coincided with his ascension to elite status in the NFL. While the sharpening of that skill is certainly not the sole reason the Bills quarterback has been so good for so long now, the alignment of those
timelines is both fascinating and telling.
A season ago, when Allen took a career-high 40 sacks during the regular season, that superpower faded. The best way to quantifiably measure a quarterback’s elusiveness in the pocket is with the advanced metric pressure-to-sack rate, which is precisely what it sounds like — the frequency at which a quarterback pressure becomes a quarterback sack.
For all intents and purposes, the line of demarcation for pressure-to-sack rate is 20% in the NFL. If a quarterback is near, at, or above a pressure-to-sack rate of 20%, he’s really struggling in this regard.
If he’s closer to 15%, he’s doing fine work.
If he’s hovering near 10% in pressure-to-sack rate, he’s probably the NFL’s most elusive quarterback in these scenarios.
During the 40-sack 2025 campaign, Allen’s pressure-to-sack rate was 18.6%, his highest rate since 2019. It ranked 28th out of 45 qualifiers.
Before that, here’s how Allen fared, by season, in this metric and where he ranked among qualifying quarterbacks (lower is better):
2024: 8.0% (1st/44)
2023: 10.3% (2nd/45)
2022: 14.7% (9th/41)
2021: 10.6% (1st/39)
2020: 10.7% (3rd/42)
As you can see, I wasn’t exaggerating in the first few paragraphs. Allen has been a wizard in this area, and he’s been excellent avoiding sacks while pressured for a long time now.
But many speculated the 18.6% pressure-to-sack rate during his Age 29 season in 2025 was the first sign of Allen’s decline.
In the first three games of the 2026 campaign, he was sacked eight times and had pressure-to-sack rates of 16.7%, 11.8%, and a whopping 33.3% in the games leading into Week 4.
I’ll give this next sentence a little Mark Twain twist — the reports of the death of Allen’s ability to evade sacks were greatly exaggerated.
In the last three outings, Allen has once again, summoned the sack-eluding magic. He’s been sacked three times and has pressure-to-sack rates of 7.1% against the Patriots, 9.1% against the Rams, and 7.7% in Las Vegas against the Raiders.
And those incredibly low pressure-to-sack rate contests came after all the speculation about a potential knee injury following a hit to his leg in the second half against the Chargers in Week 3.
Even with the shaky-ish start, Allen’s 2026 pressure-to-sack rate entering the bye week is 13.9%, almost identical to his career average of 13.7%.
In the 2020s, when it has come to dodging sacks in the face of pressure, no quarterback has been better than Allen. After a down 2025 and a somewhat concerning start to the 2026 campaign, Allen’s enchanting sack-avoiding ways have returned.
