Khalil Mack didn’t have a sack this season entering Sunday.
The Los Angeles Chargers pass rusher left Sunday’s game just one shy of an NFL record.
Mack recorded a mind-spinning six sacks in the Bolts’ 24-17 win against the Las Vegas Raiders, which is just one less than late Hall of Famer Derrick Thomas’ all-time single-game record of seven.
Mack is one of just five NFL players, including Thomas, to tally six sacks in an NFL game (sacks became an official NFL stat in 1982). The last to achieve the feat prior to Mack was the New York Giants’ Osi Umenyiora in Week 4 of the 2007 season against the Philadelphia Eagles.
“He’d been close the whole year, to having three monster games, he just, he was close,” Chargers head coach Brandon Staley said after the contest. “Today he put it all together, but this guys one of the best edge players of the generation, he’s still that guy. He’s still that guy, and he just showed everybody ‘I’m still that guy.'”
Mack, playing against the Raiders team that drafted him, terrorized rookie Aidan O’Connell, who was making his first career start filling in for an injured Jimmy Garoppolo.
Just as impressive as Mack’s individual success — he had 10 tackles, 10 QB pressures and seven QB hits, per Next Gen Stats — was the pivotal role it played in the Chargers edging the Raiders to improve to 2-2.
“He’s one of our leaders, and [it was] one of those maestro performances, similar to Keenan [Allen] last week,” Staley said. “He’s one of the elite players in the game, he always has been, and he always will be as long as he’s playing.”
