Drives that feature a sack are different for Josh Allen, Bills offense

Normally in the NFL, a sack is a death knell for an offensive drive.

Not for a Josh Allen drive.

Earlier this week, this tweet circulated from Thursday Night Football Prime Vision analyst Sam Schwartzstein that showed a staggering Allen statistic:

The actual rates are 72.7% and 36.4% — there was a sack nullified by penalty on an eventual touchdown drive that Sam miscounted — but the point still remains.

With the sample-size difference in mind, I wanted to determine how absurd those rates were relative to historical data.

From 2001 – 2025, all drives — and there were over 27,00 of them — that featured a sack ended with a touchdown 7.6% of the time. Field goals occurred 13.5% of the time. That means any type of score for an the offense that endured a sack happened on 21.1% of those drives.

Unsurprisingly, this Allen-led attack is far ahead of those averages.

The next logical question in my mind centered around how Allen’s offenses have performed in this niche drive-conversion scenario overall in his career, since 2020, and when compared to the game’s other elite quarterbacks.

In his full career to date, the touchdown rate on Allen drives with a sack is 12.9%. The Bills field goal rate is 19.6%. The scoring drive rate is 32.5%. That’s more than 15 percentage points above average.

The only quarterbacks with had at least 100 such drives whose offenses have managed better scoring rates in their careers entering Week 7 are Lamar Jackson (33.1%) and Patrick Mahomes at 38.4%.

(Brock Purdy currently sits at 35.0%. Drake Maye is at 35.3%. They’ve had 80 and 82 such drives respectively).

If we start at 2020, the Allen-led touchdown rate in those scenarios increases to 14.0%. Buffalo’s field goal rate is 20.7%. That adds to a scoring rate of 34.7%.

Goodness.

That means, since the beginning of the 2020 campaign, the touchdown rate for Allen’s offenses on a drive that also featured a sack is just about double the NFL average. His team’s field goal rate is more than seven percentage points higher. And his offense’s scoring rate is more than 13 percentage points higher than the collective average.

And he’s absolutely blowing those averages out of the water to date in the 2026 season.

Yet ridiculous Allen stat.

What else is new?