Bledsoe was never the same after the pounding he took in 1998 and 1999. In 1998 he was sacked over two times a game (36 times total) In 1999 he was sacked over three times a game (55 times total) In 2000 he was sacked nearly three times a game (45 times total) He was beingin efficient with the ball after getting hit so much the previous three seasons. They went with the system that made Tom Brady when he became their QB.
In 2002 he was sacked at his second highest rate and he had his 2nd highest rated season of his career. I understand but NE didn't win anything. Would you rather go 11-5 like NE and miss the playoffs or 8-8 like SD and make it? I give Cassell tons of credit, he was excellent as he got things down during the season but people forget he was in that system learning behind the best for years and the amount of talent NE has on O is top notch now. He deserves alot of credit as does BB and the coach that's in Denver now. They all did a great job BUT w/ Tom Brady that team is a SB contender not a playoff contender. That he did but luckily for him it didn't cost Pitt. W/o him they don't make the SB so his teammates owed him one.
:rofl::rofl: They didn't have an undefeated season only the Dolphins have done that. The season is the season. Your entire argument regarding Manning discounts his regular season record which is superb. You want to have this both ways and your simply wrong now both ways. The Giants having two weeks to prepare for the Pats and shutting down Brady also presented the NFL with a blue print for defending the Pats that was very different from the bend don't break lack of pressure D that the Pats usually are defended by. This may well be why Brady went down? You also can't assume that a team will perform at the same level in a different season. As a Herm supporter you should be very aware that past performance has little to do with future returns. You also discount that Cassell didn't take any first team reps and came in cold and had a learning curve. The guy was outstanding down the stretch for the Pats. The year before man to man in at that point the biggest game of the year Manning was great and Brady wilted under the pressure. At the end of the last two season in the biggest games for Brady of the last two season Brady has been outplayed by not just one Manning but two Mannings. Your entire argument of why Brady is better than Manning is based on playoff performance yet you have consistently down played Mannings regular season performance. Last year was the only year that the Pats built their team around the QB and putting 30 points a game on the board to win and with two weeks to prepare a team that you call not that good shut the Pats O down. I have no issue with anyone saying Brady is better than Manning, I disagree but so what? There both great QB's. I think Rothlisberger is a great QB and I see some arguing that he isn't. I think they're dead wrong and don't get it just like I think you don't get it on Manning.
He had the ability and he helped lift Buffalo from 3-13 to 8-8, why was NE getting worse each year w/ him? The team was undefeated in the regular season, how can I compare cassell's playoff record when he didn't make the playoffs? I have to compare their reg seasons. Nice try though. Did I think NE would go 16-0 again? of course not but they would have been around 14-2. I think it's safe to say that. How did Brady wilt under pressure? In '06 he had a team that other QBs wouldn't have had in the playoffs and he reached the title game and in '07 he led an 80 yd TD drive to take the lead in the last 2 1/2 mins of the SB- where did he wilt?
Comparing a QB who was a late round draft pick who hasn't started at any level who put up an 11 win season and saying Brady would have won 14. 3 games when the QB is the most important guy on the team and you are arguing one of the greatest if not the greast in NFL History. :rofl::rofl::rofl: Nice try my ass your entire argument is mush. The Pats won last year with a mediocre D and an O built around the passing game scoring 30 plus points a game to win. In the SB that Pats O was shut down and put that mediocre D on the field. Brady's numbers sucked in that game he was outplayed by the opposing QB. He lead a nice drive but based on how that team was built and what he did in the 60 minutes, it was pure choke. The year before pure choke big lead and Manning brought his team back and Brady wilted head to head down the stretch.
Hit after hit after hit. He had one season in his final 8 where he was good and that was it. However in his first 5 to 6 seasons he was very good. He was getting hit a lot from 1998 on. Especially in 1999 and 2000. It affected his play. In 2002 he was motivated to prove everyone wrong, but then fell back to the way he had finished in NE in 2003.
Bledsoe was never really very good, he was a decent QB for a few years but he was not good in their SB run and he killed them in the SB. Parcells got the most out of him and BB could not. The bottom line is Brady is not a system QB just like Montana wasn't(that was the knock on him too).
Was Brady a late round draft pick? 14-2 would have given them homefield in the AFC and they would have rolled their way to another AFC Title. Do you think that is different than missing the playoffs? You are king of reaches. So the Giants had a great D and he led them to 14 pts while the Pats had a medicore D and Eli led them to 17 yet Brady was badly outplayed by Eli? What world do you live in? Brady's #s sucked in that game? he had similar #s to manning except he threw a few more passes and didn't have an INT like Eli did. I would LOVE to see Manning w/o elite WRs to throw to. Imagine him w/ Reche Caldwell and Jabar Gaffney, he has stunk w/ the elite players around him just imagine what he'd do w/ the crap Brady had to work w/ in '06.
Great coaching is a tremendous giant huge factor in football, but it's not the be-all end-all of anything. The Patriots "system" would be markedly less good without an elite QB like Brady (which would account the 189 point drop-off last season), just as the Giants "blueprint" for stopping the Patriots probably won't work for many teams who don't have 3 elite-level pass rushers like the Giants did in that game.
Brady had the best recieving corp in years in 07 maybe the best ever assembled in the NFL. Take a look at his SB numbers vs. his regular season numbers they took a dive. Take a look at his regular season numbers against the Giants and his SB numbers. Was it pressure? When Brady didn't have the WR he had great defenses and a big back who could carry the load when the D wasn't keying on stopping him he was great. When it was on him to put big points on the board with the best team in years he simply failed to do it. Eli did outplay Brady in the SB when the moment counted which is basically your entire argument against Manning and for Brady. He failed to put up the big points in the big moment and the season was a complete failure. You're a freaking Yankee fan, winning 125 games and lossing the WS is not a good season, it's a choke. Being up by over 20 at half time and lossing is a choke for a big time QB which he did the year before. Being in position to win on the road with a veteran Championship quality team and throwing big time picks and lossing to a team that's not as good as you is a choke which he did the year before that. If you're arguing that Brady's greatness is he lifts his game in big moments, the more big moments he has the more he is dropping back in the pack at delivering in the big moments. Last years loss in the SB was the single biggest choke in NFL history. It was a historic failure the eclipsed the Baltimore Colts failure against the Jets and it was squarely on Brady's shoulders. He also has the taint of delivering in big moments when he probably had the defensive plays in his helmet. Interesting that his numbers in big games are comming back down to earth.
Just to play devil's advocate here: Brady drove the team down the field to get the go ahead score with 2:52 remaining for most of the game. Anyone watching the game would also probably say that the offensive ineptitude was more on the o-line than anyone else. If Asante Samuel holds on to that ball on the final drive, if any one of the 5 guys on Eli hold on, or if the ball doesn't stick to David Tyree's helmet, people probably overlook the mediocre performance and view the 2007 as the best season by a quaterback ever, and on top of that, his go ahead drive is viewed as yet another accomplishment. I feel like this discussion has also became a bit one sided in that people are only arguing about how good Brady is and how much of his success has been helped by things out of his control. In a year that counts as a "choke" Brady comes within one stop of winning the super bowl. Manning fucked up, badly, in early round games on more than a few seasons. The '03,'04, and '05 seasons are the real difference between the teams and the quarterbacks. If Manning wins some or all of these games the discussion is thrown on its head.
Brady in the top 5 All Time? Are you drunk? He's lucky to break the top 15. I didn't put anybody ahead of anybody. I was naming names. But since you brought it up, Brady doesn't even sniff Favre's farts in this list. Favre top 7, Brady...somewhere in the 15-18 range. http://www.pro-football-reference.com/blog/?p=3378 Go check that out. It even includes playoff numbers. Suprisingly, Brady is nowhere to be seen in the top 10.
What happened in that game is the Giants with a very mediocre secondary sold out on the pass rush and put pressure on Brady. He was terrible throughout that game in making the correct call. The Pats have a great O line probably the best overall pass blocking OL in football that year. What happened is the Giants sent numbers leaving guys open and Brady just didn't get it done under the pressure. He drove the team down for the go ahead score but the fact is the Pats went 16 and 0 by averaging close to 37 points per game, Brady throwing for almost 300YPG, 70% clip and making big passes down field. Under pressure the machine crumbled his % went way down, his yards went way down, the scoring went way down. Effectively by putting only 17 pts on the board he put his team in position to lose. The Pats played about 3 meanginful games that year and in the big one he underperformed. I would say what really happened is the Giants made a decission to take the big play away from Brady and he failed misreably to adjust until late in the 4th quarter and by than he had already put the greatest team in NFL history in position to lose.
Having Moss and Welker is great and makes the O much better. However, the idea they had the best receiving corp in years or maybe of all time is ridiculous. Harrison, Wayne, Clark, Pollard Carter, Moss Rice, Taylor, Jones Irvin, Novacek, Harper Stallworth, Swann... and that's just off the top of my head.
Randi Moss is simply the greatest weapon at WR to every play the game. The IND WR corp while very good is mostly a product of Payton Manning. They also had Stallworth and one of the great backfield recievers around along with an outstanding TE in Watson. None of those guys you mentioned came close to the point production of Moss, Welker and the rest of a very deep group. You simply can't ignore how great Moss is. I can't think of any WR who opens up the field and puts more pressure on a D that ever played. By the way Welker lead the NFL in receptions with Cassell throwing to him. Stallworth and Swann also won SB every time they were in them together as did two other groups you mentioned up there. Agree the combinations were all great but Moss, Welker and Stallworth were as potent as any of them and Moss and Welker didn't need Brady throwing to them to lose a SB on the greatest Offensive team in the history of the NFL.
Worthless. I read the article years ago when it came out. Do you know who writes the articles for that site? It's the equivalent of backing up liberal opinions with dailykos posts. They could hardly be more biased. They're big Patriots fans. But hey, keep reading that site. It aligns with your viewpoint.
They generally do have a New England slant but thanks for informing me. Never would have picked up on that by myself. That's sort of an ad-hominem way of looking at it anyways, "oh they love the Pats so what they say is garbage". Maybe their arguement is crap and you can then say they are just wearing blue and red glasses, but as long as they bring in some facts and sound logic their favoritism doesn't matter. Bias doesn't make a difference when you say something like "In five playoff losses during the Manning era, the Colts have scored just 10.0 PPG." Mostly what I was referencing that was for the point about Manning generally being a disappointment in the playoffs. This breakdown is worthless? Anyways, I wasn't citing it as gospel and I said I didn't think the actual gap is as great as they make it out to be. It was just something relevant to the subject that I thought did a decent job of breaking down their playoff histories, and something written by people outside of a message board.
