Don't fault Tom Brady for the decline of his deep ball
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| Brady and Moss chatting, via The Spish |
With Moss's speed and great hands, it allowed Brady to just chuck the ball and let Randy go get it. It was beautiful, and made Brady look like the best deep ball thrower in the game. Unfortunately, Brady went down in 2008 and missed the last year of Moss in his prime. 2009 was a down year for both of them as Randy lost a step, Brady was coming off ACL surgery, and the connection wasn't the same. The Brady to Moss connection came to a quick end in 2010 when a declining Moss was traded away early in the season.
Brady is a great quarterback, arguably the greatest of all time. However, if there is one throw he has struggled with in his career, it's the deep ball. I went to Pro Football Focus and did some digging for stats on his deep ball. I was hoping to find pre-Moss, Moss-era, and post-Moss numbers, but PFF only had stats dating back to 2007, so there's no pre-Moss numbers. Before I give you the numbers, the way I came up with these was by finding a comprehensive chart of throws to each part of the football field of 20+ yards, as seen in the 2007 example below.
I added up the numbers and averaged them out for the 2007, 2010-2013 seasons.
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| via PFF |
2007: 32/84, 1245 Yards, 17 TD, 3 INT, QB Rating 100.7
2010: 18/49, 613 Yards, 7 TD, 3 INT, QB Rating 80.5
2011: 23/73, 746 Yards, 10 TD, 4 INT, QB Rating 91.7
2012: 31/94, 1023 Yards, 10 TD, 4 INT, QB Rating 87.4
2013: 22/75, 774 Yards, 4 TD, 4 INT, QB Rating 63.1
Obviously it's no secret that 2007 was Brady's best year throwing the deep ball, and that is thanks to Randy Moss. It is easy to be accurate when you have a player with speed like that. The jump from 2010 to 2011 is in part owed to the emergence of Rob Gronkowski as a superstar, but also credit Brady for making an improvement. In 2012, we see a spike in deep ball attempts. Josh McDaniels returned as offensive coordinator, and Josh loves the deep ball. Unfortunately, the Patriots didn't have the deep threat, which he realized, which is why the number of attempts comes down to 75 in 2013. They did bring in Brandon Lloyd for 2012, but he just didn't fill that role.
There is nobody I'd rather have at quarterback than Tom Brady, but there is no denying his touch on the deep ball isn't his strength. Some may say it has declined or that he has lost his touch, but I believe it's what it's always been. He had an all-time receiver in Randy Moss to make his average deep ball look far from it. I'm not saying we'll ever have another Moss, but should a guy like Aaron Dobson step up and fill that deep threat role, we could very well see a jump in Brady's deep ball numbers. Brady makes a lot of receivers look better than they are, but sometimes a receiver can make a quarterback look better than he is, which is exactly what Randy Moss did.
-Brian Thibodeau
Follow me on Twitter - @b_thibs34
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