Tom Brady is a Tampa Bay Buccaneer. That is a sentence I never expected to type. It still doesn’t feel real to me, and I don’t know if it will until I see him on the field in a Bucs uniform. Until that happens, I fully expect him to be starting for the Patriots this September — or whenever football is played again.
Ignoring the fact that they’re the Buccaneers and play in Tampa of all places, Brady choosing this team is not all that surprising. They have plenty of cap space to give him top quarterback money, which he never got (or asked for) in New England. More importantly, the Bucs could offer Brady weapons. Legit weapons. Mike Evans and Chris Godwin form the best receiving tandem in the NFL. In O.J. Howard and Cameron Brate, he has two capable tight ends to target for the first time in nearly a decade. Even Tampa Bay’s offensive line is in decent shape. It’s not particularly good, but it’s no worse than the line Brady was working with in New England, according to ESPN’s Pass Block Win Rate metric.
That Brady wanted to play with this supporting cast makes a lot of sense, but it is a bit surprising that he’d choose this coaching staff and its offensive system. This isn’t the first time you’re hearing about this odd fit. You know Bruce Arians demands his quarterback push the ball downfield. We’ve all seen Brady play and know that’s not really his thing. It has been in the past, but in the past, Tom Brady wasn’t 43 years old. You can point to Brady adjusting to his talent in 2007 when he had Randy Moss and you can even bring up 2017 when his average depth of target was up around 9 yards per attempt, but Brady hasn’t been the same quarterback these last two years.
One of the defining characteristics of Brady’s game — arguably THE defining characteristic — has been his toughness in the pocket. Well, that toughness has understandably waned as he’s grown older. He’s no longer willing to stand in the pocket for an extra beat and take a hit if it provides his receivers a little more time to get open. Now, Brady hasn’t gone full-on Eli Manning with the self sacks, but he’s trending in that direction.
This isn’t a new development, either. In 2017, ESPN’s report on the growing rift between Brady and Bill Belichick quoted a Patriots staffer who said the aging quarterback was increasingly turning down options downfield and getting rid of the ball quicker in order to avoid punishment.
Via ESPN.com:
Atypically, he has missed a lot of practices and, in the team’s private evaluations, is showing the slippage of a 40-year-old quarterback even as he is contending for MVP and is as deadly as ever with the game on the line. Injuries to his shoulder and Achilles have done more than undermine claims that the TB12 Method can help you play football virtually pain-free. Subtle changes have at times hampered the offense and affected the depth chart. On a fourth-quarter play against the Los Angeles Chargers, for instance, Brady had a clean pocket and a first read open deep, possibly for a touchdown. But Brady got rid of the ball quickly over the middle to receiver Chris Hogan, who had nowhere to run and was hit hard, injuring his shoulder. He missed all but one game of the rest of the season. “Tom was trying to get it out quick,” a Patriots staffer says. “As fragility has increased, nervousness has also increased.”
Here’s the play mentioned above.
It’s not a bad read necessarily, but the Pats have a good play called that could have resulted in a bigger gain — and probably a score — had Brady held onto the ball a bit longer. He had the pocket to do so. Instead, he threw underneath to a receiver who had little chance of picking up extra yards. You have to wonder how Arians would feel about that decision.
Arians will not shy away from criticizing his quarterback. That won’t be new for Brady, as Belichick famously treated him like all of the other guys on the roster during film sessions. But, according to that same ESPN report, Belichick’s criticism had started to irk the veteran quarterback.
“The quarterback at Foxborough High could make that throw,” Belichick often would say after replaying a Brady misfire — but he could take it, secure not only in the knowledge of his singular impact on Belichick’s career but also in the theater of it all, that the coach was doing it in part to send a message that nobody was above criticism. “Tommy is fine with it,” his father, Tom Brady Sr., said years ago over dinner in San Mateo, California. “He’s the perfect foil for it.”
Brady is less fine with it this year. People close to him believe that it started after last year’s playoff win over the Houston Texans, in which Brady completed only 18 of 38 passes and threw two interceptions. Belichick lit into him in front of the entire team in a way nobody had ever seen, ripping Brady for carelessness with the ball.
If Brady was getting tired of Belichick’s schtick, it’s hard to believe he’s making this move (at this point in his career) for more of the same treatment. We don’t know how Brady and Arians will mesh, but it’s no sure thing that these two will get along. We’ve seen Brady get into it with offensive coaches numerous times.
Arians might be hard on his players, but, by all accounts, he listens to his quarterbacks and values their input when putting together a game plan. That may have been easier for the old coach when he was working with passers like Andrew Luck, Ben Roethlisberger, Carson Palmer and Jameis, all of whom are known for holding onto the ball and pushing it downfield, but you have to wonder how much this offense will have to change in order to accommodate a player like Brady.
Let’s use Sports Info Solutions charting data to figure that out. Here are Brady’s and Winston’s 2019 statistical splits based on drop type, which is a good illustration of the plays that were being called for them…
The one thing that immediately jumped out to me when I started pulling this data is the similarity in play-calling in terms of drop types. I expected Brady to have far more quick dropbacks than deeper drops, but his percentages are right in line with Winston’s.
Even more surprising, Brady was just as efficient on those deeper drops. The interceptions made a huge difference (duh) but don’t discount the wide gap in sacks. Brady did a better job of avoiding them, but that goes back to the whole “avoiding contact” thing. It wasn’t as if Brady was avoiding pressure well — he was mostly giving up on those plays earlier than Jameis was. He led the NFL with 41 throwaways and, in spite of his advantage in EPA, Brady had a lower rate of success on those plays. Sometimes it’s better to risk taking a sack.
One of the key differences in Winston’s and Brady’s splits is play-action usage. That’s one area where Arians and Bucs offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich will need to adjust. In 2019, Tampa Bay used play-action at one of the lowest rates in the league. The Pats were on the higher end, using play-action at a rate 50% higher than the Bucs did in 2019.
It’s a bit surprising that Arians hasn’t already made that adjustment, considering Winston’s splits. Of the 30 interceptions he threw last season, 28 came on attempts with no play-action. With play-action, Winston’s interception rate dropped to 1.8%. My theory: those linebackers that caught most of his interceptions were drawn to the line of scrimmage and out of the throwing windows on play-action looks. If Arians wanted to curtail Winston’s turnovers, he should have demanded more play-action from Leftwich, but I digress.
It isn’t until you drill down into the type of routes that Winston and Brady threw that you really start to see a difference. Using Sports Info Solutions data, I grouped similar routes to get an idea of what kind of throws Brady and Winston were making. For each group, you have the number of attempts for each route cluster as well as the passer’s accuracy percentage.
The big difference can be found in the deeper routes, unsurprisingly. Winston threw 41 go routes aimed outside the numbers more than 15 yards downfield. Brady threw only 11, and only two were charted as accurate by Sports Info Solutions. Here’s a cut-up of those throws.
Brady still has enough arm strength to make most of the throws he’ll be required to make in Arians’ offense. He was particularly accurate on deep outs and comeback, posting an accuracy rate of 86% on those throws, but the vertical routes that helped fuel the Bucs offense in 2019 — Tampa Bay added 13.1 Expected Points on those attempts — will likely follow Winston out of town.
They will be replaced by shorter routes, which Brady threw at a much higher rate than Winston did. Maybe with more talented receivers, those shorter passes will turn into bigger plays. There is evidence suggesting that they will. Per NextGenStats’ Expected Yards After Catch metric, the Patriots receivers were among the worst in the league at generating yards-after-catch; the Bucs receivers were among the best.
Just playing with better players will naturally boost Brady’s statistics, but it’s not a given that his arrival will have a similar effect on Tampa Bay’s receivers. The Greatest Quarterback of All-Time didn’t get great pass protection and his receivers had trouble separating from defenders last season, but Next Gen Stats’ Completion Percentage Above Expectation takes all of that into account using tracking data, and Brady finished near the bottom of the NFL in that metric. Here are a few of the names ahead of him in the rankings: Eli Manning, Andy Dalton, Marcus Mariota, Kyle Allen. Winston finished around league average.
With Brady behind center, there will be fewer negative plays, but the big plays may not come as frequently. That much is obvious. What isn’t obvious is how Brady’s and Arians’ personalities will mesh and what adjustments either will be willing to make in order to find a good middle ground — if there’s any to be found, that is.
