Stop me if you've heard this one: the New England Patriots won the AFC East title, then won their home game in the divisional round to advance to the conference championship. Sound familiar? It should. It's been the norm for the past 13 years.I mean, this marks only the eight time the Patriots have advanced to the AFC Championship game. (That's literally more than half of the seasons with Brady and Belichick!) It's the third straight year they've made it as well.
But let's be honest: Tom Brady hasn't looked particularly hot this year. In fact, he hasn't looked particularly good in the playoffs overall since their Super Bowl wins. Yes, we remember his great game against the Houston Texans in the 2012 Divisional Round, where he completed 62.5% of his passes for 344 yards and three touchdowns to no interceptions. Then there was the ridiculous Divisional Round game in 2011 when Brady completed 76% of his passes for 363 yards and six touchdowns to one interception - most of it in the first half. Those numbers are always impressive, but one must take that with a grain of salt as it was against the hapless 8-8, Tebow-led Broncos who backed into the playoffs. Still, you can't argue those performances were anything other than great - the kind you expect from a Hall of Fame, classically considered clutch quarterback.
He followed up his 2012 game with a performance in the AFC Championship that saw him complete just 53% of his passes for (a deceptive) 320 yards. He threw for just one touchdown while throwing two interceptions. In the follow-up of his video game performance in 2011, he completed a more reasonable 61% of his passes for 239 yards while throwing for zero touchdowns to two interceptions. Granted, he QB-sneaked a touchdown, but otherwise, he wasn't particularly impressive.
In fact, Tom Brady's career conference championship numbers aren't particularly impressive even dating back to the successful Super Bowl runs! Of course, there's something itself tremendously impressive about having nearly half a season's worth of football games under one's belt of just conference championships. There is no other active quarterback in the league who has played in large enough pool of conference championships to do this kind of analysis for!
Still, let's just look at those numbers. In his seven AFC Championship games, he has completed 142 passes on 233 attempts (60% of his passes completed). He's thrown for a total of 1559 yards. So far, this doesn't sound too bad. It's fairly average actually - completing an average of 20 passes per conference championship for 222 yards a game. Nothing amazing, but it's not nothing. However, Brady has thrown just 7 touchdowns to 9 interceptions in AFC title games! The thing that makes Brady so great is that he makes smart reads and takes care of the football. He's got one of the best TD to INT percentages in the history of the NFL, yet when it comes down to the conference title game, he turns it over more frequently. In fact, Tom Brady has only thrown for more touchdowns than interceptions in a conference title game once (2004).
Of course, to be fair, Brady only played about half of the title game in 2001 before he was injured and replaced with Bledsoe. Perhaps his second half performance would have created more of a balance. There's no getting around it though. His passer rating in AFC title games is 74.7. Even if you account for quarterback sneaks for touchdowns, Brady still accounts for more turnovers than touchdowns.
This is not to downplay Brady's accomplishments. He is obviously one of the greatest quarterbacks of all-time (I tend to agree he is the best too!) However, if Brady fans' big knock on Peyton Manning is that the world sees him through rose tinted glasses (which they do), the fact appears that Brady lovers do the same thing with Brady. Of course, the ultimate statistic that matters is what separates the two in the first place: Brady is 5-2 in conference championships. It's the only genuinely impressive statistic related to Brady and conference title games. And really, it's the only one that matters.
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