Oswlek said:
Actually, I do find fault in Brady's games so far. He most certainly has been off on some plays; Vs. Jets - a handful to Brown and the underthrow that should have been a TD to Watson. The pass to Gabriel was way underthrown. Vs. Denver - Underthrew a pass to Caldwell that would have been a long TD, overthrew the pass to Brown slightly (although Brown still should have caught it). Those are just the ones off the top of my head.
Can a case be made it is lack of comfort that is driving this, and I believe that firmly. However, Brady is definitely not above reproach for his play so far.
Agreed, Brady has had some bad throws, just as he had last season on his way to leading the league in passing yards. He's not beyond reproach, but to point to him as the one who needs to up his play is to ignore the problems of the other units.
Watson is dropping passes that hit him in the numbers, the OL is allowing Brady to get hammered way too often and not opening up passing lanes consistently. The running game being down in the Denver game meant that when the Pats got behind the defense just had to sit back and cover. The WRs not reading their routes the same way as Brady does most likely led to some of those over and underthrows.
I'll give you an example. If you go back and watch the DVDs from the "era" you'll see a replay where Givens ran a bad route and dropped a pass. In game-time what you saw was Givens having to stop, reach back for a ball that was apparently thrown behind him. Bad throw! we probably all thought at the time.
When you watch the DVD you find out that Givens read the coverage wrong and OVER RAN HIS SPOT ON THE FIELD. What looked like a bad pass behind the WR turned out to be a WR's mistake.
So all I'm saying is that to assume that an underthrow or overthrow is exclusively on the QB is both short sighted and incorrect.
I'm not saying that Brady's been perfect. What I'm saying is that knowing what we know about how the system works, and knowing what we know about Brady, we'd be crazy not to think that a new group of WRs are the problem.
Brady makes mistakes, but they are rarely mental in nature. Him throwing it away, while disappointing to us as fans, may have been the best option available to him. His over throws and underthrows may be because the WR or TE was not in the right place.
We'll probably never know, but all this Brady-bashing after one loss is crazy to me. I will postpone my judgements of his play until we see the whole WR set out there healthy and with some gametime experience under their belts.