Winning never gets old, but Brady might
Never count out Tom Brady, they say. Which, fair enough! Before his 28-3 Super Bowl against the Atlanta Falcons, the biggest comeback in Super Bowl history was 10 points, done twice, and Tom Brady led one of them. Last season at age 40 he led the NFL in passing attempts and passing yards and he threw for 505 yards and three touchdowns and no interceptions in the Super Bowl and lost. Phew. He’s Tom Brady! Like white people deciding to try to eat healthy in their 40s, he is eternal.
And this year, the Patriots are fine. They will win the division again because the Bills and the Jets and the Dolphins are basically rodeo clowns. Those three have been outscored this season by a combined 217 points, and no other division has more than two teams that have been outscored on the season. Thanks for coming out, guys.
But Tom Brady … hasn’t been great? He’s been OK! I mean, they’re 7-3. Maybe New England is not dead. Maybe New England can summon some dark magic to defeat Pittsburgh or the Chargers or Houston or Tennessee or Kansas City, leaving Andy Reid looking at the scoreboard like it was a 1,000year-old mystical puzzle in an ancient forgotten tomb, again.
But if you look, everything seems to be falling apart just a little, maybe more. (That was a sentence about football.) Let’s go to the numbers, while recognizing that in football the small sample size argument has more and less relevance than in any other sport, because when you play 16 games against an unbalanced schedule — or when the Bills, Jets and Dolphins are nearly 38 per cent of your schedule every year — a few good or bad games can add up to something that seems bigger than it might be.
Tom Brady is … fine. His completion percentage is 65.2, in line with his ca- reer numbers. Yards per attempt have dropped from 7.9 to 7.4 — eh. Percentage of throws that are touchdowns is down to his lowest level since 2013, but not dramatically.
Interception percentage is the highest since 2011, and Brady has thrown one fewer pick this year than he did all of last year. His overall passer rating is 94.7, which is slightly below his career average and like a few things is his lowest since 2013, as well. He’s fifth in passing yards.
But this is all happening against a backdrop of a league that is hopped up on pass-friendly goofballs, so Brady is 16th in passer rating, 11th in ESPN’s Quarterback Rating, 13th in Football Outsiders’ quarterback rating. He’s finished outside the top six in any of those categories once — 2013, when New England lost to Denver in the AFC championship game — in the last 10 years.
Yes, Rob Gronkowski basically died this season. No, Josh Gordon isn’t Randy Moss. But what if this is real? What if instead of following Peyton Manning’s trajectory — career-threatening injury, record-breaking seasons, and at 39 a sudden and startling drop off the cliff, but a Super Bowl thanks to a truly monster defence — Brady is finally eroding like most people do: not all of a sudden but gradually, losing a step as the world speeds up and evolves and spins away from us? What if despite all his stretching, his diet, his attention to every detail, his desperate fight against the inevitability of age, he’s actually, legitimately, 41 years old?
Yes, he’s only played 10 games, and six monster games down the stretch — or four, or three — could change all of this. He still has one Bills game, one Dolphins game, and two games left against the Jets.
But ESPN pointed out Brady is last among QBs in passer rating against the blitz at 59.6, even though he hasn’t been pressured too much. That’s something that happens to old QBs. It was some- thing that Seth Wickersham report on the Pats last year mentioned as a worry among some Patriots coaches. We all get old. Maybe it’s Tom Brady’s turn.
(Watch him win the Super Bowl.)