Well.. Pats offense went from 25th to 6th which is a bigger difference, and the passing stats of Bledsoe in 2000 vs. Brady in 2001 show Brady was much better. Hard to say QB had little to do with it. Anyway, we're going to need several years of Brady-less Belichick to really start to know the answer to the question of how much each is responsible.
2000 Bledsoe- 17 TD's, 13 INT's, 206 yards/game. 1st year HC within a new system and a pretty bad defense and ranked 18th in rushing attempts, 26th in rushing yards, 24th in rushing TD's, and 28th in Y/A. 2001 Brady- 18 TD's, 12 INT's, 186 yards/game. 2nd year HC and a very good defense and ranked 8th in rushing attempts, 13th in rushing yards, 7th in rushing TD's , and 24th in Y/A. Both QB's performed really similar and Brady played on the better team. And cheating started in 2001.
C'mon danmarino you're better than that. You deliberately leave out the stat that correlates the most with winning? Bledsoe 2000 passer rating was 77.3 and Brady passer rating 2001 was 86.5. That's close to 1 standard deviation difference which is HUGE. Did you even bother to try to find out why that's true? Yup.. you didn't look at attempts, just raw numbers. Brady did all that in 413 attempts while Bledsoe did it in 531 attempts. Completion% was also very different: 63.9% for Brady to 58.8% for Bledsoe. No question Brady > Bledsoe there. And given that the QB is the most influential player on the field it's extremely hard to argue Brady wasn't an important reason their offense went from 25th to 6th in 1 year. Also.. even IF there was cheating beyond what we know about that was highly influential you have no way of knowing that Belichick magically figured out how to game the NFL in ways no one else seems to be able to replicate for a decade and a half (hard to believe really) from 2001, not 2000. That's pure conjecture.
Which brings rushing attempts back into the conversation. A commitment to the run game (rushing attempts) often has a real affect on the passing game. Bledsoe had that many attempts because they had no commitment to the running game. It's kind of amazing what happens to the passing game when teams commit to running the ball.
Yup, though let's qualify this properly. The majority of the reason for the greater rushing attempts is because you rush more when you're ahead (usually late in the game) and NE in 2001 was ahead more often. Having said that, it is true that commitment to the running game (up to a point) has a beneficial influence on the passing game.
I didn't deliberately leave off anything. I posted what I did because it shows the meat and potatoes of what they each did in each season. For example, in Brady's first playoff game he had a 70 passer rating. In his second he had an 85. The meat and potatoes of those 2 games weren't much different if you factor in Brady being injured and only attempting 18 passes. Now, compare Brady's stats in that second game to Bledsoe's stats in the same game. Bledsoe: 10 of 21 for 102 yards and 1 TD Brady: 12 of 18 for 115 yards and 0 TD's However, their passer ratings are nearly as different as Bledsoe's 2000 and Brady's 2001 seasons. 77 for Bledsoe and 84 for Brady. Point being, it doesn't take much to get that 7-9 points difference. Cheating and a great defense could be that difference.
From 2015 to 2016 the Dolphins went from 32nd to 18th in the league in rushing attempts. However, I don't think we were ahead that much more in 2016 than in 2015.
Two things: 1) if the question is how something affects winning you should choose stats that correlate most with winning, so for this particular question of how much Brady helped win the "meat and potatoes" consists more of stuff like passer rating, turnover differential and TD:INT ratio than volume stats. 2) It's easy to get different passer ratings that vary wildly from game to game. Generally, standard deviation of passer rating for a single QB is in the low/mid-20's (for Brady it's 26 over his career). So game-to-game differences of up to 40-50 passer rating points is within the "norm" so to say. However.. it's HARD to improve passer rating over an entire season. Improving by 9 passer rating points from one season to the next is on the difficult side so the two aren't comparable.
It turns out most of the discrepancy in rushing attempts is in the 4th quarter, or late in the game. So while I haven't looked at the actual stats on this (too hard to get given how my data is structured) our records in 2015 vs. 2016 would indicate rushing attempts should have increased in 2016 due to being ahead late in games. On an aside.. this is one area I don't like pro-football-reference. It's hard to parse out precisely this kind of data.
And this has exactly what to do with Peyton's sucky postseason record? Peyton hurt his teams in the playoffs. The Patriots are doing just fine. Has Brady played bad and they've won? Sure. So has Manning. Both his super bowl wins. Peyton's teams have NEVER won a Super Bowl based on his postseason performance. He was carried both times. Defenses were the reason for both his Super Bowl runs. Look at how he did against KC and Baltimore in 2006. Brady defeated the legion of boom in 2014. The same one that decimated Manning the year before. Sliced him up. Manning is overrated. He's top10 all time. He's not top 2 or 3. To play a significant amount of time after 2004 when the elite QBs are throwing fewer INTS yet his were still high. Rodgers and Brady have obscene TD/INT ratios. Manning meh.
If I told you to guess the number I was thinking of, what would be easier to guess....if you knew it was always 1 or it could be 1 or 2?
There you go falling back on wins/losses. it's because you really have nothing else. Brady and Manning have the same stats in the post season. Brady has been carried by defenses and cheating his entire career. Brady defeated no one just like Manning, or any other QB for that matter, defeated no one. Teams beat other teams. That's how team sports work. Manning, and a handful of other QB's in the history of the game were able to make up for poor team play. Brady has never done that or at least has rarely done it. Guys like Rodgers and Marino and Peyton spent their entire careers doing it. Once more, anyone who claims that Peyton Manning was overrated knows nothing about football.
