Yaya Diaby

Career arc: a 7.5-sack rookie year flagged him as a steal — every year since has been quietly better in different categories.

The 2023 rookie line (7.5 sacks, 12 TFLs, only 8 QB hits) was a notably 'finisher-heavy' shape — he was sacking quarterbacks he barely touched. The next two years inverted it. 2024-2025 brought 39 combined QB hits to only 11.5 sacks — much more pressure, less luck on the finish. The TFL number has been remarkably stable: 12-13-13. The total disruption profile (sacks + QB hits) has trended up every year.

Through year three he's the only Bucs EDGE in double-digit career sacks not named Shaq Barrett or Vita Vea.

19.0 career sacks at 0.40/game through three years is a top-quartile outcome for a third-round pick. The TFL rate (0.79/game) is the cleanest number: it ranks Diaby in the same neighborhood as Will Anderson Jr. and Aidan Hutchinson for that one statistic — players taken in the top 5 picks of their drafts.

Diaby has out-pressured every other 2023 third-round EDGE — by a wide margin.

The deeper context: Diaby was the third EDGE off the board in round 3 of 2023 (after Andre Carter II and YaYa Diaby — same draft). Three years later he's the only one of his round-three peers still starting and producing. TB got an effective EDGE one at pick #82 in a draft where the top-10 EDGEs cost first-round picks.

He's a between-the-20s pressure menace — almost none of his work shows up in the red zone.

84% of his career sacks come outside the red zone — a striking concentration. Most edge rushers see their per-snap pressure rate spike in scoring territory (shorter fields shrink the dropback window). Diaby's pattern is the opposite: he's a slow-developing edge rusher whose moves need real estate.

The practical read for offenses: don't overhelp him with chips on early downs in the open field, and feel free to leave him 1-on-1 inside the 10.

Two career multi-sack games — both came against San Francisco, two years apart.

His only two 2.0-sack games came against the 49ers, in 2023 Week 11 and 2025 Week 6 — same opponent, identical box score line. Brock Purdy / SF's protection scheme apparently doesn't have an answer for whatever Diaby does in those reps.

More broadly: he's never had a 3-sack game. His production model is the steady 0.5–1.0 sack outing every two or three weeks, which is part of why the season totals look smaller than the underlying pressure data suggests.

The 2024 statline looked like a step backward (4.5 sacks). The underlying pressure data says it was actually his best year.

2024's 4.4 QB-hits-per-sack is one of the largest 'unlucky' ratios in the league that year. He hit quarterbacks 20 times and only finished 4.5. The next year, the QB-hit volume stayed almost identical (19), but his finish rate normalized — 7.0 sacks.

The 2023 number is the opposite: a 1.1 ratio that suggested overperformance. Reality landed in between. The stable hand is the QB-hit count — and it's been trending up each year.