While looking through the Green Bay Packers’ 2025 stats to get ready for the start of the 2026 season, something interesting caught my eye. I noticed that in his 15 games last season, Packers quarterback Jordan Love was sacked merely 21 times, a sack rate of just 4.57%. That seemed pretty darn low to me, so I looked a bit deeper and found something that was surprised me even more.
No active quarterback has been sacked on a lower rate of their dropbacks than Love over their careers.
It’s a common refrain
that sack rate is more of a quarterback statistic than an offensive line. Offensive lines allow pressure, but the quarterback has the ball in his hands and is the final determining factor on a sack. A quarterback can feel pressure coming and get the ball out quickly (either on target or via throwaways); he can navigate the pocket and avoid the pass rush; he can break tackles in the backfield and scramble to avoid sacks.
Jordan Love, while not a truly elite athlete, does all of these things well, and he has been a top-10 quarterback in terms of minimizing sacks in each of his three seasons as the Packers’ starter. Notably, he usually gives his receivers a good chance to make a catch rather than just avoiding the rush and chucking the ball into the stands, like a certain Chicago Bears quarterback did last season. But it is impressive to note that Love’s consistency in sack avoidance is uncommon among NFL quarterbacks over his tenure.
Love has finished no worse than 7th in sack rate and has been lower than 5% in each of the last three years, establishing a clear trend. Only two other players even did this twice in that span: Josh Allen and Bo Nix. After back-to-back top-two and sub-4% seasons in 2023 and 2024, Allen fell off harshly in 2025, reverting to a rookie season sack rate of 8%. Nix, meanwhile, has been elite in this area since arriving in the NFL; his 3.76% sack rate would be the active leader if he had been around long enough to qualify for the leaderboard, which should happen sometime during 2026.
Looking at career numbers for qualifying quarterbacks — those with at least 1,500 pass attempts, according to Pro Football Reference — Love is the clear #1 among active players. His 4.27% sack rate beats 2nd-ranked Patrick Mahomes (4.46%), who has been hurt by significantly higher sack rates over the last two years. They’re the only two under 5% for their careers; Jared Goff, surprisingly, is number 3 at 5.19% (throwaways playing a part?), followed by Allen at 5.3% and Tua Tagavailoa rounding out the top five at 5.5%.
Love is in some pretty rarified air here, and it’s worth noting that Pro Football Reference’s leaderboard includes unofficial sack numbers from 1960 to 1981, after which when the sack officially became a stat, and AFL numbers as well. Love’s career rate ranks 7th all-time behind a top 6 of George Blanda, Peyton Manning, Dan Marino, Doug Williams, Mark Rypien, and Drew Brees. That’s an impressive group — each of those players is a Pro Football Hall of Famer, a Super Bowl-winning quarterback, or both.
Notably, Love’s predecessor is much lower on these lists. Aaron Rodgers’ career sack rate is more than two full percentage points higher than Loves, at 6.42%. That puts him as a middle-of-the-pack player, ranking 18th among 34 qualifying active QBs and 89th out of 204 on the career leaderboard.
Rodgers, famously, would rather have taken a sack than throw the ball into harm’s way. Love is less afraid of putting the ball up, but that tendency has served him well so far in his career; his accuracy on deep balls and under pressure is very good, and the EPA/play numbers love him for not just minimizing the negative plays, but also being able to generate some positives out of them.
This is an important factor to keep in mind as the Packers head into a week one matchup with questions on the offensive line ahead of the blitz-happy Minnesota Vikings defense. If the Packers were putting a more sack-prone quarterback behind this line, optimism about Green Bay’s performance in this game would be tempered, but Love has proven that he is able to avoid sacks at a historically-good rate while still generating positive plays. He’ll need to do just that on Sunday if the Packers want to open the season 1-0.
