Will McDonald IV

4 sacks in a single game vs Cleveland (Week 10, 2025) — one of only 10 such games since 2021.

Week 10, 2025 vs Cleveland: 4 sacks of Dillon Gabriel, 5 QB hits, 4 TFLs in a single game. That game alone accounts for half of his entire 2025 sack total (8). Across 1,359 regular-season games since 2021, a player has recorded 4+ sacks in a game exactly 10 times — McDonald is in that list alongside Myles Garrett (three times), Khalil Mack, and T.J. Watt. The rest of his season looks like a reliable but unspectacular starter. Week 10 looks like a different player.

Why it matters. A single 4-sack game is one of the rarest individual performances in modern NFL — putting McDonald in a 10-game club since 2021 shared with Garrett, Mack, and Watt reframes how you watch his ceiling.

3 sacks of Will Levis across three different quarters — Week 2, 2024 — was the career inflection point.

Week 2, 2024 vs Tennessee: 3 sacks of Will Levis, plus a forced fumble. The play-by-play shows sacks in Q1 (13:39), Q2 (8:46), and Q4 (:29) — all three on Levis, spread across the game. It was the first multi-sack game of his career and the inflection point.

His full 2024 total was 10.5 sacks (not 9 — three half-sacks add 1.5). The Week 2 explosion anchors the season: without it, he's an 8-sack player with a consistent but unspectacular profile.

Why it matters. A 3-sack, 1-forced-fumble game in Year 2 is the single data point that turned the bust narrative into a breakout story — the specifics matter because the explosion came against a struggling QB and hasn't been fully replicated since.

His QB-hit rate is elite, but sacks haven't kept up — a 'pressure without finishing' profile.

43 QB hits but only 18.5 sacks across 2024-25 — a hits-per-sack ratio of 2.32, the highest among the four highlighted EDGEs. He's *getting there* on roughly the same frequency as Bonitto or Tuipulotu — he's just finishing fewer of them.

That's a fixable problem (pass-rush plan, hand fighting, conversion drills) and the kind of thing that often closes in Year 4. If his hit rate stays this high and the conversion improves to league average, his 2026 sack ceiling jumps significantly without any other change.

Why it matters. A 2.32 hits-per-sack ratio — highest among active EDGE starters with 15+ sacks in this two-year window — quantifies exactly why McDonald feels more impactful on tape than his sack total suggests: he gets there, he just doesn't close.

#2 in the 2023 EDGE draft class by career sacks — and the gap below him is massive.

Across three seasons, McDonald sits #2 in the 2023 EDGE class with 21.5 career sacks — more than Tyree Wilson (#7 overall), Nolan Smith, and Lukas Van Ness combined (31.0 total among those three vs McDonald's 21.5 alone). The only player ahead of him is Will Anderson Jr. (#3 overall), a legitimate All-Pro caliber rusher.

The "bust" framing that followed his 3-sack rookie year now looks like a misread of a slow-developing player who has clearly separated himself from everyone else in his draft class not named Anderson.

Why it matters. McDonald outpacing three first-round EDGE picks — including two selected ahead of him — reframes the draft value story entirely: he's not just an acceptable outcome at #15, he's the second-most productive pass rusher from one of the deeper EDGE classes in recent memory.

10 sacks through Week 13 of 2024, then just 0.5 in the final 5 games — a near-complete shutdown.

McDonald had 10.0 sacks across 13 games to open 2024 — a 0.77-sacks-per-game clip. He then recorded just half a sack in five late-season games (a shared sack on Tua in Week 18), a collapse of over 85% in production rate. The Jets went 1-4 in those final five weeks.

2025 has not shown the same late-season pattern, but distribution remained uneven: 4 of his 8 sacks came in a single Week 10 game vs Cleveland. The late-2024 disappearance — whether fatigue, scheme adjustment, or opponent adaptation — is a real concern for a top-15 pick whose value depends on sustained pressure.

Why it matters. An 85% drop in sack rate over the final five games of 2024 is not small-sample noise — it's the kind of second-half fade that distinguishes a dominant rusher from a solid starter, and it's the key data point any fantasy manager or cap analyst should know.