The Jets' Dominance on the Defensive Line
New York’s Sack Artists
Wall Street in the 1980s was larger than life, a world of excess and chaos. It could also be a volatile place, a powder keg just waiting to explode.
The New York Sack Exchange - the game-changing defensive line for the New York Jets in the early 1980s - was no different.
Mark Gastineau, Joe Klecko, Mark Lyons, and Abdul Salaam. Tremendous, league-altering talent, defensive magic on the football field. Internal strife and old grudges still relitigated decades later.
These four bulldozers, all drafted by the Jets, helped fuel a franchise turnaround that took the team all the way to the 1982 AFC Championship Game. Not to mention they were so utterly dominant as a defensive unit, they also helped to finally make the sack an official stat in 1982.
“Back then, we played football,” Gastineau says in the New York Sack Exchange 30 for 30 documentary. “If you hit a quarterback and he got up, then you didn’t do your job.
The Opening Bell of the New York Sack Exchange
The 1970s were a decade to forget for the New York Jets. They never came close to sniffing the playoffs, let alone entertaining thoughts of a Super Bowl.
But that all changed as the Jets began to draft each member of what would become the New York Sack Exchange: Salaam in 1976, Klecko in 1977, and Gastineau and Lyons in 1979. No doubt a volatile mix of talent, but toughness on a scale we mere mortals can hardly fathom. Klecko, after all, did once wrestle an actual brown bear at an outdoor show in Cleveland.
After a few years together, and an 0-3 start to 1981, everything finally started to click.
Maybe it was the nickname that finally fueled the team.
As the Jets were floundering to start that 1981 season, a contest was launched in Jets Report magazine to find a name for the front four. Jets fan Daniel O’Connor submitted the name “The New York Sack Exchange,” which was announced in September as the winner. The Jets public relations department latched onto the nickname, fans started hanging Sack Exchange banners at the stadium, and the rest is history.
The Jets went 10-2-1 the rest of that season.
Those 1981 Jets lost in the wild-card round to the Buffalo Bills - the same postseason that gave us the classic Freezer Bowl and Dwight Clark’s immortal catch - but the Sack Exchange solidified itself as one of the best defensive lines in history. That season remains the only time two teammates would finish a season with 20 sacks each (Klecko and Gastineau), and the Jets led the NFL with 66 sacks in total.
"It wasn't a question of whether we'd get to the quarterback, it was how many times," Lyons has said.
This was not a defense any opposing quarterback wanted to see staring back at him.
Closing Time for the Sack Exchange
But like a stock market at the height of a bubble about to burst, there was burgeoning friction among the Sack Exchange. It was no secret that Klecko - the Chairman of the Board of the New York Sack Exchange - and Gastineau had their issues with each other. Neither man could truly understand the other. Klecko, like much of the rest of the NFL, despised Gastineau’s sack celebration dance. Gastineau, in many ways, alienated himself from the rest of the team.
The 1982 AFC Championship - the Mud Bowl in Miami - was another heartbreaker for New York and the Sack Exchange. Salaam was traded the following season, and though Lyons, Klecko, and Gastineau stuck around together for most of the decade, winning accolades and setting single-season sack records, the Jets as a team never could quite get over the hump.
To this day, there are hurt feelings and resentment over the past. But when it was once open for business, the New York Sack Exchange was one of the most punishing, successful defensive lines in football history. Whatever issues they had off the field, these four men were able to put it aside within the confines of a football field and once again make Jets fans proud of their team.
