The Wall Street Journal-20080131-The Brady Bunch- The Stats Pointing to Super Bowl Success
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The Brady Bunch: The Stats Pointing to Super Bowl Success
Full Text (958 words)A great novelist, Hemingway once said, competes only with the dead. A great quarterback, he might have added, competes only with the retired.
This Sunday, the New England Patriots' Tom Brady goes for his fourth Super Bowl ring. Should the Patriots beat the New York Giants, Mr. Brady will have reached a peak previously scaled by only two others: the Pittsburgh Steelers' Terry Bradshaw, who won Super Bowls in 1975, 1976, 1979 and 1980, and Joe Montana, whose San Francisco '49ers won the big game in 1982, 1985, 1989 and 1990 -- though among quarterbacks in the past half century, Bart Starr is a ring up on all of them, having won NFL championships in 1961, 1962 and 1965 and the first two Super Bowls, played at the end of the 1966 and 1967 seasons.)
Moreover, Mr. Brady, should he win his fourth championship, will have done so at age 30, younger than his three illustrious predecessors: Mr. Starr and Mr. Montana were both 33 when they captured their fourth, while Mr. Bradshaw was 31.
Despite Mr. Brady's donning of a walking cast for what has been reported as a mild high ankle sprain, the majority of football analysts consider the odds heavily in favor of Mr. Brady getting that fourth ring -- and in the process tying Joe Montana for a third Super Bowl MVP award. (Messrs. Starr and Bradshaw both won two Super Bowl MVPs.)
In 41 Super Bowls, quarterbacks have been named MVP 21 times, and this one will also likely be decided with the passing game. Most agree that the Giants' improved defense, the one that carried them to postseason upsets over Tampa Bay, Dallas and Green Bay, is about the equal of New England's. And on offense, on the ground, the Giants were fourth in the NFL in total yards rushing at 2,148 with a 4.6-yards- per-carry average, while the Patriots were only 13th with 1,849 yards and 4.1. The difference between the two teams is in their passing games.
Mr. Brady's numbers over the course of the 2007 season were overwhelmingly better than those of his Giants counterpart, Eli Manning. Mr. Brady threw 578 passes to Mr. Manning's 529, completed 68.9% to Mr. Manning's 56.1%, and had 4,806 yards passing to Eli's 3,336. He threw an all-time NFL high 50 touchdown passes against only eight interceptions, while Mr. Manning had 23 touchdowns and 20 passes picked off. Mr. Brady's cumulative NFL quarterback rating of 117.2 was a whopping 43.3 points higher than the Giants QB's 73.9. But it wasn't just in the quantity of yards and touchdowns where Mr. Brady has an enormous edge -- it is also in the quality of his numbers. As stats guru Bud Goode has been telling us for decades, the most important basic statistic in professional football, the one that correlates best with winning, is simple yards per throw -- that is, the number of yards a quarterback passes for divided by the number of times he has thrown the ball. Mr. Brady's 8.32 average was No. 1 in the league, while Mr. Manning's 6.31 was good for only 28th place.
If the 12-point underdog Giants are to upset the Patriots, they will have to overcome the biggest statistical passing gap in Super Bowl history. To consider just the two quarterbacks' draft history, however, is to wonder which one should be called the underdog. Mr. Manning was the first overall pick in the 2004 NFL draft; Tom Brady was the 199th player selected in the 2000 draft -- like Bart Starr, who was the 200th player picked in 1956, Mr. Brady didn't have much of a reputation coming out of college. (Joe Montana, Mr. Brady's idol while growing up in San Mateo, Calif., was No. 82 in 1979.)
In fact, Mr. Brady's football career almost never happened. He didn't play football until the ninth grade, and his first team lost all eight of their games. Nearly everyone, Mr. Brady included, thought his best sport would be baseball. (He was drafted out of high school by the Montreal Expos, who also drafted him out of college in the sixth round -- higher than he was drafted as a football player.) If not for the urgent pleas of then-New England offensive coordinator (and now Notre Dame head coach) Charlie Weis, he might not have been drafted at all.
Despite all the Super Bowl rings and despite a perfect 2007 season in which he led the league in completion percentage, yards passing, TD passes and yards per game, Mr. Brady still has his critics, who are fond of noting that this is really his first great season in the seven he has been a starter. Though he led the league in TD passes with 28 in 2002, 2007 was the first year he threw for more than 30. It was also the first season in which he averaged better than eight yards a throw and the only time he's compiled the league's best passer rating.
Former New York Giants General Manager Ernie Accorsi, who has seen all of the NFL Hall of Fame quarterbacks over the past half century, disregards the critics. "I don't give a darn about what someone's passer rating is," he told me in a recent interview. "I once saw a passer rating that had Milt Plum ahead of Joe Namath. The position isn't called 'passer,' it's called 'quarterback.' And there's only one statistic that matters: winning. Here's how I judge a quarterback. I ask the question, 'Who do I want to take my team down the field with the game on the line?' And right now the quarterback who does that the best is Tom Brady."
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Mr. Barra writes about sports for the Journal.
