Is Tom Brady Playing The Best Football of His Career Right Now?

Many specialists and sports analysts, throughout last season and after Tampa Bay won the Super Bowl, are in agreement that Tom Brady continues to improve as he heads into his age 44 season. Furthermore, a number of these individuals argue that Tom may have just had his best season to date with Tampa Bay last season. Being a long time Patriots fan, I’m very curious with this subjective narrative going around the sports world right now. So I plan on assessing this question:

Question: Did Tom Brady have a higher quarterback rating, more yards and more touchdowns on average in his 20 seasons with the New England Patriots compared to his quarterback rating, yards, and touchdowns in his lone season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers?

How Will I Answer This Question?

I used Tom Brady’s Career Statistics from ESPN. ESPN is a reliable source that always keeps the performance statistics for players across all sports up to date. Since the data was included on a website, and within two tables, I utilized the XML, tidyverse, httr, and rvest packages to ultimately convert the two tables within the ESPN website into a functional dataframe. Within this new data frame, I used the RTG, YDS, and TD variables to perform my analysis to answer the question. Ultimately, I will be comparing the average of these three variables when Tom Brady played in New England to there respective averages in his first season as a Tampa Bay Buccaneer.

Summarized Results in a Data Table

Data Wrangling / Transforming The Data

I decided to utilize 6 bar charts to perform my analysis to answer my question. I first wanted to compare wanted to look at the quarterback rating variable (RTG). I started off with grouping by the Team variable. Next, I filtered out the row containing Tom Brady’s total stats throughout his entire career. I then used the summary function to calculate the average quarterback rating and created a ggplot bar chart to display my results. I followed these steps for the the next two bar charts for the yards and touchdowns variables.

For my last three bar charts, I repeated the process above, but I also decided to filter out Tom Brady’s 2000 and 2008 seasons to get more reliable results. Brady was a backup quarterback in the year 2000 and he tore his ACL in his very first game of the 2008 season, so removing these two seasons would provide more realistic statistical averages for his time in New England.

Analysis

Results: Even after removing Tom Brady’s 2000 and 2008 seasons, his average quarterback rating, yards, and touchdowns in New England were all lower compared to the same three variables in his first season with Tampa Bay. Tom Brady’s quarterback rating in TB exceeds 100, while his adjusted NE average quarterback rating (excluding the years 2000 and 2008) is slightly below the 100 rating mark. For passing yards, Tom Brady threw for more than 4,600 yards in TB last season, while his adjusted average passing yards in NE was relatively lower at around 4,100. Lastly, for touchdowns, Tom Brady threw 40 touchdowns with TB last season, while his adjusted average touchdowns thrown in NE was significantly lower at 30.

When looking back at the original question I posed earlier, Tom Brady did have a higher quarterback rating, more yards, and more touchdowns in his lone season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers compared to his average quarterback rating, yards, and touchdowns during his time with the New England Patriots. In conclusion, one could make the case that Tom Brady arguably had the best season of his career with the Buccaneers last season.

Validating My Findings

Since Tom Brady has only played one season with Tampa Bay, the results from this analysis may be interpreted as being somewhat misleading since one season is being compared to 20 seasons. With that being said, we know that Tom Brady’s quarterback rating last season with Tampa was higher than his average quarterback rating in New England. Many different variables are utilized to calculate the NFL quarterback rating, and this is viewed as the main statistic to gauge the quality of a player’s performance per week/season. To validate my findings from above, I would want to run a regression to determine the strength of the relationship between quarterback rating (dependent variable) and passing yards and touchdowns (independent variables) to confirm that I selected the other two variables (besides quarterback rating) that would help me best determine whether Tom Brady performed better in his lone season in Tampa Bay compared to his his overall time spent as a Patriot (instead of other variables within the data set).