Mark Gastineau forced a smile as he congratulated Michael Strahan for breaking his single-season sack record on the final day of the 2001 season. Gastineau, though, was incensed at how Strahan broke his record, and he let Brett Favre — the quarterback Strahan tackled for the record-breaking sack — know about it more than two decades later.
Strahan got the record after Favre (who was seen talking to Strahan moments earlier) slid right in front of him near the end of the game. As you’ll see in the video below, Gastineau confronted Favre at a memorabilia show last year. Favre was friendly at the beginning at the conversation, but Gastineau quickly made it clear that he had a two-decade-old ax to grind.
“I’m gonna get my sack back,” Gastineau told Favre. “I’m gonna get my sack back, dude. … You hurt me. You hurt me. You hear me? You really hurt me. You hurt me, Brett.”
Gastineau, whose 22.0 sacks in 1984 stood as the record for 17 years, feels that the NFL should have stepped in and disallowed Strahan’s record-breaking sack to count.
“The NFL should have stopped that,” he said. “(Favre) took that record away from me.”
Favre later responded to the video on social media. He said that the sack was the result of him deciding to run a bootleg and “squeeze the last bit of fun out of a hard-fought game.” But instead of seeing an open field, Favre saw Strahan and immediately went down.
“In a different game or situation, I would have made a bigger effort to avoid the sack or TFL,” Favre wrote on X. “But at no point was I thinking about hurting Gastineau. Maybe it crossed my mind to help Strahan. I didn’t think it through. That wasn’t my forte at the time. I just wanted to have fun and compete. In retrospect, I understand how Gastineau feels. We played a brutal game. Gastineau played during an era where guys didn’t make generational wealth.
“I see now how being the Sack King would elevate his value at card shows, strengthen his case for the Hall of Fame, increase his demand as a public speaker. I had no way of knowing that then. I realize now the potential financial implications because football is far more business-oriented than when me or Mark played.”
Favre hopes that this situation helps shed light on Gastineau’s impressive career that included three All-Pro nods, five Pro Bowl selections and a Defensive Player of the Year award. Gastineau is also the Jets’ all-time career sack leader.
“I have a great deal of respect for Mark,” Favre wrote. “I hope one day he joins me in the Hall of Fame. He earned it.”
Gastineau’s record was eventually matched by Jared Allen in 2011 and surpassed in 2021 by T.J. Watt, who tied Strahan’s record of 22.5 sacks. Ironically, the player who unofficially has the record is Al Baker, who registered 23 sacks in 1978 as a member of the Detroit Lions. Unfortunately for Baker, the NFL did not begin to make individual sacks an official statistic until 1982. (Baker’s total was compiled by Pro Football Reference in 2021.)
The footage of Gastineau’s encounter with Favre is part of ESPN’s upcoming documentary on the Jets‘ iconic “New York Sack Exchange” defensive line, a unit that included Gastineau, 2023 Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee Joe Klecko, Marty Lyons and Abdul Salaam.
