Tom Brady put his stamp on the 2009 season so quickly that he could get a job processing passports at Terminal E if this quarterbacking thing doesn’t work out.
New England’s signal-caller overcame a year of rust, a shaky three quarters and a surprisingly spirited effort from the hard-luck Bills to spark one of the average, ordinary inexplicable victories that have defined his career.
You know the story from Monday night: Brady, with the help of a critical special teams turnover by Buffalo in the final two minutes, fired a pair of gorgeous late touchdown passes to Ben Watson to spark a 25-24 win over the Bills.
Brady has been on the winning end of improbable victories since the very beginning: In his very first NFL start, he helped deliver a stunning 44-13 win by the 0-2 Patriots over the 2-0 Colts that instantly changed the complexion of the 2001 season and, well, the complexion of an entire decade of pro football. Four months later, at the end of his very first season as an NFL starter, Brady led the only walk-off scoring drive in Super Bowl history.
Ho-hum. Little has changed since then, and Week 1 of the 2009 season provided another example.
While Patriots fans both celebrated the wild victory and mourned the fact that an expected blowout was so tightly contested, I stepped back to ponder the big picture.
Why do Brady’s Patriots win more often than any team in history — his 102-27 (.791) record as a starter (including playoffs) is easily the best ever — and why do they so often win in unexpected fashion like they did Monday night?
I found two reasons:
1. Brady generates big production with few mistakes
Brady produces points while limiting mistakes better than any quarterback in history.
As of Monday night, when he tossed two scores and one pick, Brady has thrown 199 touchdowns against just 87 interceptions in his career — a ratio of 2.28 TDs for every INT. It’s the greatest ratio of TDs to INTs in the history of football, and it’s critical to New England’s success under Brady.
In fact, few players are even close to this ratio. To cite some notable legends, here’s how Brady stacks up:
Brady — 2.28 TDs for every INT (199 to 87)
Steve Young — 2.17 TDs for every INT (232 to 107)
Peyton Manning — 2.01 TDs for every INT (334 to 166)
Joe Montana — 1.96 TDs for every INT (273 to 139)
Dan Marino — 1.67 TDs for every INT (420 to 252)
Brett Favre — 1.5 TDs for every INT (465 to 310)
Joe Namath — 0.79 TDs for every INT (173 to 220).
The benefit of throwing touchdowns is obvious: You put points on the board. Even Jets fans or our own Mike Adams can figure that out. The benefit of not throwing INTs is less obvious, but it’s so important that it deserves a bulletproof limo and Secret Service protection.
For example, over at Cold, Hard Football Facts, we’ve conducted an annual study of every playoff game in league history and found that every INT that a quarterback throws reduces a team’s chances of winning by about 20 percentage points.
Passers who throw 0 INTs win about 80 percent of the time.
Passers who throw 1 INT win about 60 percent of the time
Passers who throw 2 INTs win about 40 percent of the time, and so on.
Get the picture? There is no single play in football — and few plays in all of sports, period — that have such an obvious and immediate impact on a team’s ability to win like interceptions.
Brady has generated a lot of criticism in his career from ignorant football fans and pigskin “pundits” for what’s described as his “dink-and-dunk” style of play. But the truth is that Brady helps the Patriots pull out improbable victories every time he eats the ball or throws it away or dumps it off to Kevin Faulk rather than make a Brett Favre-esque risky pass downfield into triple coverage in a futile quest for the big payoff.
It’s this ability to swallow his pride and avoid mistakes rather than take wild risks that’s so critical to his historic success.
Remember the game-winning drive against the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI? It was a classic example of the Brady style in action. Under a heavy pass rush and with the game riding in the balance, he dumped the ball off
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