I found a site where you can find advanced stats on offense and defense per year with filters. One of these stats is EPA - expected points provided by defense or offense per game and per play. For offense positive EPA is good and negative EPA is bad and for defense it's the other way around.
One of
@MAC10's posts on this topic gave me an idea so I did some research about all of Brady's Super Bowl defenses and found some interesting facts.
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Conclusions
- Not really seeing evidence here that Brady carried by a great dominant defense to the Super Bowl. His defenses were good, but being Super Bowl teams that shouldn't surprise anyone.
- The red numbers show the defenses were actually a liability in the playoffs that year (positive EPA which is bad for a defense) and they won the SB anyway
- The 2004 defense was #1 in EPA per play in the playoffs but that's offset by the fact the 2004 Patriots OFFENSE was also #1 in the same category.
- Our 2003, 2014 and 2018 defenses in the playoffs weren't nearly as dominant as we think they were, being responsible for allowing more points than the other way around. So that totally nullifies the idea that Brady was carried by them to the Super Bowl
- Looked up the numbers for the 2011 and 2017 Patriots defense, two of the worst Super Bowl defenses. Both of these would be red numbers (positive EPA) in the in the chart above. So that shows Brady carried them to the Super Bowl even if they didn't win it.
Here are the top 5 QB's who were really carried by their defense playing great in the playoffs and look at the difference between these numbers and the ones above:
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Brady is nowhere to be found in the top 5 but guess who appears twice?