Myles Garrett: 125 sacks and the one prize they can’t measure

Myles Garrett

Photo: Erik Drost / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 29, 1995 Arlington
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	2x NFL Defensive Player of the Year · 7x Pro Bowl · 5x First-Team All-Pro · Deacon Jones Award · NFL Single-Season Sack Record

The way Myles Garrett hunts a quarterback is almost too deliberate to watch. He doesn’t rush the passer the way most elite defensive ends do — with chaos, speed, and improvisation. He reads the offense. He waits for the body to betray itself, for the tell that comes before the footwork changes. By the time a tackle thinks he has Garrett contained, the move is already over. After nine seasons in Cleveland and 125.5 career sacks, this is the most decorated defensive player of his generation — and the only question about him now is whether individual greatness can translate into the one thing it cannot guarantee.

He arrived in Arlington, Texas as the youngest child in an exceptional athletic family. His mother Audrey was an All-American track athlete at Hampton University; his sister Brea won an NCAA championship in the weight throw at Texas A&M; his half-brother Sean Williams went to the NBA in the first round of the 2007 draft. Garrett found football at Martin High School, where he recorded 19.5 sacks as a senior, claimed the 2013 Landry Award, and was ranked the second-best recruit in the country. By the time he arrived at Texas A&M as a five-star freshman in 2014, the only question was how quickly his trajectory would bend toward the NFL.

At Texas A&M, he made that question irrelevant. His freshman season produced 11.5 sacks. His sophomore year, 12.5. When a high-ankle sprain limited him in 2016, teams were already watching his film as if calculating a draft position. He left after three seasons with 32.5 career sacks, the Bill Willis Trophy, and unanimous All-American honors. The Cleveland Browns selected him with the first overall pick of the 2017 NFL Draft — the highest any player from Texas A&M had ever been chosen.

The NFL, as it tends to, made him wait. An injury cost him his first four games. His first full season produced 13.5 sacks and a Pro Bowl selection. Then the arc that would define a decade began: twelve sacks in 2020, sixteen in 2021, sixteen again in 2022, fourteen in 2023, his first Defensive Player of the Year award that season — making him the first Browns player in franchise history to claim it. Another fourteen sacks in 2024. He became the only player since 1982 to record at least twelve sacks in six consecutive seasons, a streak that quietly argued a case most analysts were reluctant to say out loud: this was, by any fair reading, the best defensive player the game had produced at his position in at least a generation.

There is one year in that stretch that cannot be discussed without complication. In November 2019, with eight seconds left in a game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, Garrett pulled quarterback Mason Rudolph down by his helmet and then swung the helmet at him, striking his head. The NFL suspended Garrett indefinitely — the second-longest on-field suspension in league history — and fined him $45,623. He served the remainder of that season. In the aftermath, Garrett claimed Rudolph had used a racial slur. Rudolph denied it. The NFL found no evidence to corroborate the claim. Garrett was reinstated in February 2020, but the incident placed a shadow over his career that none of his subsequent records have fully dissolved. It remains the moment his critics return to, fairly or not, as proof that the violence of the position exists inside him in ways that cannot always be managed by will.

What Garrett brought back from that suspension was not exactly contrition, but something more useful: clarity. He stopped using Twitter, explaining there was too much negativity in it. He went deeper into the interests that existed outside football — poetry, which he writes privately; paleontology, which he has studied seriously enough to begin work on a children’s book about dinosaurs; anime, which he follows with genuine enthusiasm. In 2023, he purchased a minority ownership stake in the Cleveland Cavaliers, serving as a team ambassador. That same year, a mural went up in downtown Cleveland’s Playhouse Square, the city expressing in paint what it could not quite express in championships. He was, to the people of Cleveland, something close to the best thing they had.

Then, in the 2025 season, Garrett did something no one in the sport had done in two decades. He recorded 23 sacks, surpassing the 22.5 that Michael Strahan set in 2001 and that T.J. Watt matched in 2021. He added 60 tackles, three forced fumbles, and 33 tackles for loss — second-most in recorded NFL history. The Browns finished that season with a strong record, and the sack in Week 18 against Joe Burrow that broke the record officially landed as the capstone on the best individual defensive season in the modern history of the sport. Garrett won his second Defensive Player of the Year award unanimously. Then he asked to be traded.

He arrived in Los Angeles this summer, dealt to the Rams for Jared Verse, three future draft picks, and a five-year, $208.2 million contract. He is thirty years old, at the precise peak of the position’s most productive window, and playing for the first time in a market large enough to match what he has become. The Rams named him a captain in his first training camp. The NFL ranked him first in its Top 100 Players of 2026. His girlfriend, Chloe Kim — the Olympic snowboarding gold medalist from Southern California — called him her best friend and said he understood, uniquely, what it meant to carry athletic pressure at the highest level. The move brought the game’s greatest hunter to Los Angeles, and to a team that has lived inside a Super Bowl window in ways the Browns never quite managed.

What the Rams offer Garrett is a different arithmetic. Nine years of dominance in Cleveland produced every individual record available at his position and one absence the statistics cannot address. Whether that absence gets filled in Los Angeles is the only number left that matters.

Tags: sports, athletes, NFL, Los Angeles Rams, Myles Garrett, Cleveland Browns, American football