Brandon Dorlus

0 sacks as a rookie → 8.5 sacks in Year 2. One of the biggest single-year jumps for any 2024 draft pick.

Dorlus was a 2024 4th-round pick out of Oregon who barely saw the field as a rookie — 2 games, 1 tackle, 0 sacks. The Year-2 jump has been one of the loudest in the league: 8.5 sacks, 11 QB hits, and 11 TFLs in 14 games.

That's a 0.61 sacks-per-game pace — the kind of rate that, sustained across a full season, projects to a 10+ sack year. For a player who entered 2025 with zero career sacks, this is a top-3 Year-2 leap among defensive linemen in the entire draft class.

11 QB hits, 11 TFLs, 8.5 sacks — every pressure stat in lockstep in 2025.

What's unusual about Dorlus's breakout is how aligned all his pressure stats are. Sacks (8.5), QB hits (11), and TFLs (11) are all clustered in the same range — meaning he isn't getting cheap sacks on free runs or one-off coverage sacks; he's winning real pass-rush reps over and over.

A 1:1.3 sack-to-QB-hit ratio is starter-level finish rate, not luck-driven. The 11 TFLs say he's beating run blocks too — he's not a sub-package-only player.

His first career sack came in Week 2 of 2025 — he's now closing in on a top-15 league sack total.

Dorlus has produced sacks in 7 of his 14 games this year — a 50% game-to-game hit rate that's higher than most established starters. The peak game was Week 9 vs. New Orleans (2 sacks, 2 QB hits, 2 TFLs) — a complete-pressure stat line.

The 8.5 sacks through 14 games puts him squarely in the league's top 20 for the position, despite being a 4th-round pick on his rookie contract.

He's getting pressure every week — 7+ games with a QB hit, 6 games with a TFL.

Setting sacks aside, Dorlus has been a backfield presence almost every week:

- 7 different games with at least 1 QB hit - 6 different games with at least 1 TFL - 3 games with multiple QB hits (Weeks 2, 9, 12)

That's the difference between a player who's having a sack-luck season and a player whose pressure rate is real. Dorlus's 2025 has the signature of someone whose Year-3 production should stay in the 8-10 sack range, not regress to the mean.

Most 4th-round D-linemen never hit 5 sacks in a single season. Dorlus has 8.5 in Year 2.

The base rate for 4th-round D-linemen producing an 8+ sack season in their first two years is around 5%. Most players in his draft slot become rotational pieces (3-4 sacks per year) or never establish a role.

Dorlus is on the best-case curve — comparable to Year-2 breakouts from interior rushers like Kobie Turner (LAR, 9 sacks in Year 1) and Byron Young (LAR, 8 sacks in Year 1). The Falcons' D-line investment in him as a 113th-overall pick is already paying back in production that 1st-round D-linemen routinely fail to deliver.

Zero career postseason snaps — yet he's outproducing players who've started in multiple playoff games.

Dorlus's career playoff resume: 0 games. The Falcons haven't reached the playoffs since 2017 and finished out of the picture in 2024.

The 8.5-sack 2025 season is happening on a team that may or may not reach the postseason — but the production puts him into a category where his next contract conversation starts with "are you a foundational piece of this D-line for the next 5 years?" That's a very different question than Atlanta was asking 13 months ago when he was 0-for-2 in his rookie campaign.