Here’s a little nugget from Pro Football Focus that I found interesting:
Frankly this appears to be getting to the point of obsession for some Pats fans. Who comes up with this stuff? “no pressure should get through on a 3 man rush”. Why? One person is always single blocked and for any line-man to hold a 1 on 1 block for more than 4 seconds is good.
Let’s look at the raw numbers: Brady was pressured on only 18% of his drop backs (9 of 50)Of the 512 games played by QBS this year how many times do you think a QB dropping back 40 or more times was under less pressure? 11; that’s right just eleven times! So this was in the bottom 3% of pressure anyone had all year.
Of the 9 plays in which he did get pressure only one in my book did come on a 3 man rush; that was the second and here the thing which caused Brady to step into Ellis (who was reasonably well blocked) was Light 1 on 1 with Taylor off the edge.For the remainder every pressure came from 4 or 5 man rushes against a single player block and even some of those (in hindsight) were harsh. The only really sub-optimal pieces of Protection were Crumpler’s block on Pace (1 on 1) which allowed the sack, the first sack where Ellis badly beat Connolly outside( 1 on 1) and a later pressure by Ellis (through Connolly 1 on 1) which led to a sack.In my view, all of the o-line, other than Connolly, did a great job in pass protection and to blame them really is clutching at straws the purpose of which I couldn’t even guess at.