There was a holy trinity of horrifying Pats stats articles today. I thought about linking to all of them at one point or another because, while totally sobering and scary, they are pretty interesting too. I figured the best thing to do would be to put all three on one page and then leave it up to you if you want to look at them or not.
So proceed with caution from this point on. It ain’t pretty…
First we have this article from ESPN.com which is full of disturbing facts like:
In his past eight true road games, Tom Brady has a 50.8 passer rating in the second half compared to a 101.6 passer rating in the first half. The numbers get downright ugly in the fourth quarter, when Brady has a 29.3 passer rating courtesy of one touchdown and five interceptions. Quite simply, that makes Brady the worst quarterback in the NFL on the road in the fourth quarter since 2009. Not rookies Mark Sanchez (29.7) or Matthew Stafford (33.4). Not even quarterbacks who lost their jobs, such as Derek Anderson (33.4) and Kerry Collins (42.2). No one has been worse than Brady.
Or if that’s not bad enough, this:
In true road games, opposing quarterbacks are averaging 278.3 yards and a 103.9 rating, the third-highest in the NFL, putting the Patriots behind both the Oakland Raiders and Detroit Lions.
Then comes this little doozy about how bad Darius Butler has been through two games and change this year:
There’s a ton of stats to illustrate how bad Butler is, but this one blew my mind: Opposing quarterbacks have posted a 151.6 passer rating when throwing at Butler, the second highest mark among 88 qualifying cornerbacks. Let that sink in for a minute. 158.3 is a perfect score. So in essence, throwing at Butler has almost been like throwing at nothing.
Yikes.
Finally comes this one which is basically more of the same…
- Here are some of the statistics on throws outside the numbers against the Patriots this season: Completion percentage: 72.3 (NFL rank: 32nd) Yards per attempt: 8.3 (NFL rank: 31st) Touchdowns: 5 (NFL rank: 32nd) Passer rating: 123.7 (NFL rank: 31st)
So there you have it. The sky is falling according to these articles. For some reason it makes me think we’re gonna see a vintage Tom Brady performance and a shutdown of the Dolphins passing offense. Sometimes that just how the NFL works. We’ll see. But the numbers don’t lie. Luckily for us they don’t predict future performance, right?