Halfway through the 2020 season, things were looking good for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. They were 6-2 and contending for the top seed in the NFC.
Then the next month happened. The Bucs (7-5) have lost three of four, including back-to-back games against the Los Angeles Rams (7-4) and Kansas City Chiefs (10-1).
It seems Tom Brady, 43, is starting to show his age, no?
“I think Brady is playing good football. I don’t think he’s playing good-enough football,” PFF analyst Eric Eager said on The DA Show. “The bar is so much higher now for quarterbacks in the NFL to be in that elite category. Brady, I think, is comfortably underneath that.”
Brady ranks second in the NFL with 3,300 yards and is fourth in passing touchdowns (28), but he ranks 23rd in yards per attempt (7.0). That’s an improvement over his final season in New England (6.6), but it’s still one of the lowest marks of his career.
“I think he’s playing good enough for Tampa if their weapons round into form, if their defense improves back to where they were for them to be a contender,” Eager said. “The issue is a numbers game. Their path to the Super Bowl is basically securing that 5-seed in the NFC, which basically gives you a bye, because you’re playing the NFC East division winner, and then getting hot. But with some of these quarterbacks, Brady is incrementally more negative on a play-for-play basis. For a guy who doesn’t have the biggest arm in the world, for an offense that isn’t sort of a big-play offense anymore, it’s going to be hard for him to string together three or four consecutive games. We have them with about a nine percent chance to make the Super Bowl and about a four percent chance to win it.”
More troubling, perhaps, is Brady seems at odds with Bruce Arians regarding play-calling and offensive execution. In fact, Arians has publicly criticized the six-time Super Bowl champion.
“Football is so funny because division of credit has always been something that I think people thought was stewing in New England, but in reality, when you see Brady in another element, you realize how well they did in terms of winning, but also making sure that the other person didn’t get slighted so much,” Eager said. “He goes to Tampa Bay – and again, it’s the other side of the coin where they’re having a little bit of a lack of success, but you see some of the blame game being played. I don’t know. I have a hard time believing Arians didn’t want Brady, but I also think that Arians probably wanted Brady to acquiesce to his system more. Last season, I thought Jameis [Winston] did a really good job of playing that system. He threw a bunch of interceptions, but every single quarterback in the first year of that system throws a lot of interceptions. I think Brady wanted to be more like Brady.”
In other words, he wanted a reliable pass-catching running back to serve as his security blanket. He doesn’t have that with Ronald Jones and Leonard Fournette.
“Brady has always had a James White on his team,” Eager said. “The two running backs that play for Tampa Bay can’t catch a cold. I think there’s some frustration with Brady, like, why don’t I have a running back like I had in New England? And I think with Arians, he’s frustrated because he’s like, ‘You shouldn’t have to have one. I have receivers running wide open in the 10-19 range.’ So I think there’s a little bit of a disconnect there. I [think Brady probably] thinks Arians would have changed his system a little bit more for him, and I think Arians believes Brady probably should have approached the system as if it was his to begin with.”