October 26, 1952: Wild Man Willey

October 26, 1952, 70 years ago: The Philadelphia Eagles beat the New York Giants 14-10, thanks in part to the efforts of Norm Willey, a 24-year-old defensive end from West Virginia. There appears to be no surviving film of this game, but Hugh Brown of the Philadelphia newspaper The Evening Bulletin
wrote, "Willey awed inhabitants of the Polo Grounds by dumping New York Giants quarterback Charlie Conerly 17 times as he attempted to pass."

The term "sack" hadn't yet been used to describe such a play. It would be years before Los Angeles Rams defensive end Deacon Jones came up with the term. Since passing ahead of the line of scrimmage is illegal, those 17 attempts could only have happened behind it -- therefore, they were sacks.

So unless Brown got it really wrong, "Wild Man" Willey sacked Conerly 17 times. In one game. To paraphrase a later Philly sports legend, "Not a season, not a season, not a season: We talkin' 'bout a game."

Interestingly, given what happened at that same stadium a little more than a year earlier, the name of the Eagles' starting quarterback was Bobby Thomason -- not quite "Bobby Thomson."

Willey wasn't huge, not even by the standards of his time: He was 6-foot-2 and 224 pounds. He must have been fast, though. At a time when seasons were 12 games long, he appears to have gotten 20 to 30 sacks a season.

Officially, the single-game record is 7, by Derrick Thomas of the Kansas City Chiefs in 1990; the single-season record is 22 1/2, by Michael Strahan of the Giants in 2001, and tied by T.J. Watt of the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2021; and the career record is 200 by Bruce Smith, from 1985 to 2003. If Brown was even half-off with his account, Thomas' record goes by the wayside, and the Strahan/Watt record is probably wrong as well.

Willey played for the Eagles from 1950 to 1957. He remained in the Philadelphia area, coaching at Pennsville Memorial High School in Salem County, on the New Jersey end of the Delaware Memorial Bridge. He died in 2011, outliving Thomas, a victim of a car crash.