Just a season ago, Tom Brady was in an uncertain position in the NFL. His New England Patriots had been eliminated on Wild Card Weekend, and some doubted his ability to continue playing at an elite level. Despite that, Brady will play in his tenth Super Bowl on Sunday, his first with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Let’s look at what changed for Tom Brady between 2019 and 2020.
The statistics clearly show Brady’s improvements on his new team
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that Brady is playing better in 2020 than the year prior. Some of his regular season statistics seem about the same: 4,057 passing yards compared to 4,633, 8 interceptions compared to 12. Then you look at his touchdowns, and the difference becomes startlingly clear.
In Brady’s first season with the Buccaneers, his total passing touchdowns increased from 24 to 40, his highest since he threw 50 back in 2007. Since scoring touchdowns is the primary goal of any offense, Brady nearly doubling his total makes an enormous difference.
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The obvious question, then, is why was he so much more successful this season? Part of the answer is a new offensive style and different skill position players. Both of those factors almost certainly played a role in his resurgence.
However, there is more to it than that. Looking at the data, we can see that Brady played a completely different style of football this season. To better explain what that means, let’s look at Brady’s Offensive Value Metric (OVM) grades from the last two seasons.
The OVM shows that Tom Brady became a different player from 2019 to 2020
The OVM is a grading system created by the (Bx) Movement to measure how much a player contributed to their offense’s success. It evaluates players not based on their box score statistics but rather by how effective they were within their offenses. In Brady’s case, his grades from the last two seasons show a clear difference in his level of efficacy.
In his final season with New England, Brady earned an OVM grade of 19.69, his worst in the last five seasons. During his first regular season with Tampa Bay, his overall grade increased to 29.34, a difference of almost 10 points.
To give some context, his grade this season ranks fourth among qualifying quarterbacks, while in 2019, he ranked 29th. Of course, it is worth remembering that these grades cover a wide range of sample sizes, so that isn’t a perfect comparison. Still, it gives you a rough idea of how much more effective Brady has been this season.
Examining the advanced metrics behind Brady’s OVM improvements
Looking at the advanced metrics involved in calculating a player’s OVM grade, we can see why the metric suggests that Tom Brady is having a more impactful season in 2020 than he did in 2019. To start with, he has thrown the ball further downfield by a significant margin in Tampa Bay.
In 2019, Brady threw the ball an average of 7.6 yards downfield in the air across all of his pass attempts and 5.6 yards on his completions. This season, both those numbers increased to 9.3 yards on his pass attempts and 7.0 yards on his completions. His average air yards on just his completions this season was nearly higher than all of his pass attempts from the season before.
Meanwhile, despite the increased difficulty of his passes, Brady’s completion percentage has actually gone up in 2020, rising from 60.8% to 65.7%. That is a significant increase, but it is actually even more impressive than it appears.
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The NFL uses historical data to calculate a player’s expected completion percentage each season. In the past two seasons, Brady’s percentage went from 3.1% lower than it should have been to 1.3% higher.
In short, Brady attempted passes significantly further downfield this season while simultaneously being a far more efficient player. It’s a remarkable turnaround from a player that many thought was no longer an elite quarterback.
Examining Brady’s weekly grades
Brady’s weekly OVM grades from each of the last two seasons give us more evidence of his resurgence. Below, you can see a pair of charts depicting his grades from each week of the 2019 and 2020 seasons. For comparison, the yellow lines represent the league average OVM grade for quarterbacks during those seasons.
The two charts show that, not only were Tom Brady’s grades higher in 2020 than in 2019, but also varied by a much smaller amount. In other words, not only has Brady generally been more effective this season, but he has also been far more consistent.
Another interesting detail we learn from Brady’s weekly grades is how starkly different his playoff performances are. In last season’s surprise loss to the Tennessee Titans, his grade was a measly 4.56. A grade that low indicates that he contributed almost nothing to the offense, something anyone who watched the game could probably have told you.
In these playoffs, though, it’s been a completely different story. So far in this season’s playoff games, he has earned grades of 34.57, 22.53, and 32.89. In both seasons, Brady’s performance from the regular season carried over into the games that mattered the most.
Brady is proving that there was more to his success than just the “Patriot Way”
One season removed from Brady’s departure from New England, the quarterback appears to be the better off of the two parties. He is playing better than he has in years and is about to compete for a seventh Super Bowl ring. Meanwhile, New England missed the playoffs for the first time in more than a decade.
Of course, writing Belichick and the Patriots off after a single poor season is obviously premature. That said, Brady’s success in Tampa Bay suggests that he played a larger role in New England’s success than his more ardent critics might claim.
Whether or not the Patriots will regret letting him go remains to be seen, but it appears that the most successful player in NFL history has held off Father Time for yet another season. All that’s left to do now is to see if he’ll add another ring to his collection.
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Lucas Ellinas is a writer for Pro Football Network. You can follow him on Twitter @Lucas_Ellinas.
