Tom Brady’s streak of leading his team to the playoffs hasn’t fell off with his increasing age — but, his arm strength has appeared to dwindle.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback will start a new opportunity this season at the age of 43. He won’t be the oldest quarterback to ever play at his current age, but he’s getting close. Pro Football Hall of Famer Warren Moon played at the age 44 and shared his insight on Brady’s recent play and his career going forward.
“You saw Tom’s arm that same way at the end of last year,” Moon said on The Herd with Colin Cowherd. “It’s not a huge deterioration to where he can’t throw certain routes, but there will be times when it gets later into the year you’re going to see some of that take its place. He has great talent around him (in Tampa Bay), which is great, and he doesn’t have to do as much on that football team, which will be good for him at this stage of his career.
“So I still think he’s going have success because of those reasons, but he’s not the same quarterback he was three or four years ago.”
Brady nearly had a career-low completion percentage at 60.8 percent and struggled to move the offense in the second half of the season. His arm may have been part of the issue, but a lack of offensive weapons was the glaring problem.
Moon explained how fatigue kicks in throughout the course of a season for older quarterbacks.
“I can see — especially later in the season, and you can see this with Drew Brees and some of the other quarterbacks as well — their arms don’t have the same pop at the end of the season that they had early in the year,” he said. “That has to do with their age, and that’s something I started to see in my career when I got older, that I didn’t have that same pop in my arm. A lot of it has to do with your legs because you’ve just become fatigued over the course of the whole season.”
[vertical-gallery id=89424]