Tom Brady has had a remarkable career, and it doesn’t appear that he’s done adding to his legacy. But for now, I’d like to analyze Brady’s passing performance for each season of his Hall of Fame career.

Every season is different, and some stats do a decent job of describing a player in some years, but fail in others. Passer rating, total yards, touchdowns, and interceptions sometimes work, but can also paint very misleading pictures. But if you want to use one stat consistently, I always suggest using Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt, which is the best basic metric to measure a passer’s performance. ANY/A is simply yards per attempt with a 45-yard penalty for interceptions, a 20-yard bonus for touchdown passes, and appropriate inclusions for sacks and yardage lost on sacks. And if you want to measure ANY/A in different seasons, it’s best to compare a player’s ANY/A average to league average, to get his Relative ANY/A in each season.

I went ahead and calculated Brady’s RANY/A for each season of his career. For example, in 2007, playing with Randy Moss and Wes Welker, Brady averaged 8.88 Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt, the best of his career. The league average ANY/A that year was 5.52, giving Brady a Relative ANY/A of +3.36. Meanwhile, in 2002, a still green Brady averaged just 5.54 ANY/A when the league average ANY/A was 5.35. That gives Brady a RANY/A of +0.19, the worst of his career — which, by the way, was still above league average. Yes, Brady has been a starter for 17 seasons (all analysis today discards his ’00 and ’08 seasons, when he combined to throw 14 passes) and has had above-average passing stats in each year. Remarkable.

The graph below shows Brady’s Relative ANY/A, plotted on the Y-Axis from -4.0 to 4.0, in each season of his career. The first thing that stands out to me is how all of the data is plotted in the top half of the graph: that’s because every season is above average. The X-Axis shows season, with a gap around his injured ’08 campaign. Finally, I have plotted the graph in Patriots red and blue, but placed gold circles around his six Super Bowl-winning seasons: ’01, ’03, ’04, ’14, ’16, and ’18.

Let’s break Brady’s career down into three mini careers:

The Early Years

From ’01 to ’04, Brady played 4 seasons, won 3 Super Bowl rings, and had a Relative ANY/A of +0.60. This, of course, was the beginning of the Brady narrative as a clutch player who was the ultimate winner. You can understand why that narrative emerged out of three facts:

• During the regular season, Brady was a good but far from legendary passer. This is not meant as a knock on Brady — after all, he was a relatively inexperienced player during much of this run and his wide receivers were generally unheralded. And while he led all players with 48 wins during this era, he ranked just 13th in ANY/A — far behind Peyton Manning, a run below Trent Green, Chad Pennington, Rich Gannon, Brett Favre, and Steve McNair, and nestled in a tier with Jeff Garcia and Matt Hasselbeck. Being 13th isn’t bad — hey, it’s above-average! — but it also isn’t particularly noteworthy. What follows next is.

• Brady went 9-0 in the postseason during these 3 years, missing the playoffs one time.

• Statistically, Brady was basically the same quarterback in the regular season and in the playoffs. He averaged 6.15 ANY/A in those 9 playoff games — albeit in pretty rough, wintry conditions in four of those games — compared to a 6.10 ANY/A average in those same regular seasons. Other quarterbacks — including Manning — posted better numbers, albeit usually in better climates, but nobody was more consistent or won more often than Brady.

Brady built the foundation of his legacy during these three postseasons: he was an above average quarterback each regular season, a very good playoff quarterback each postseason, and also was a key factor in the Patriots winning all 9 games. But he was far from a one-man crew: New England’s defense also allowed just 17 points per game, averaged 3 takeaways per game, and had 4 return touchdowns during these three postseasons.

The Star Wars Numbers Era

From 05 to ’13 (excluding ’08), Brady played 8 seasons and had a RANY/A of +1.75. He won 2 AP MVP Awards. Along with Manning and Aaron Rodgers, he was one of 3 clear superstar passers in the NFL, even noticeably ahead of extremely efficient passers like Drew Brees, Philip Rivers, and Tony Romo. He went 100-29 during these three years, nearly perfectly mirroring Manning’s 101-27 record. He also had a lot of playoff failures.

And I mean a lot.

Taken in the abstract, Brady from ’05 to ’13 can look a lot like Dan Marino or Dan Fouts for their entire careers. We have an 8-year stretch where Brady played like Hall of Fame passer during the regular season and then in the playoffs, his seasons ended as follows:

• Loss in Denver in the Division Round, in a game where Brady threw 2 INTs, including one at the goal line, and New England scored just 13 points.

• New England embarrassingly blows an 18-point lead in the AFC Championship Game; season ends with Brady throwing an interception in Colts territory with a chance to lead the game-winning drive in the final minute.

• Following a perfect regular season and an MVP award, Brady’s Patriots choke to an epic degree as 12.5-point favorites in the Super Bowl, falling 23 points shy of their regular season scoring average.

• At home, Brady throws 3 interceptions and passes for only 154 yards on 42 pass attempts, as the Patriots get blown out 33-14 to the Ravens.

• Projected Super Bowl favorites following an MVP regular season, Brady’s 14-2 Patriots are 9.5-point favorites who get upset by the Mark Sanchez-led Jets. New England’s first 7 drives end in 4 punts, 1 interception, 1 field goal, and 1 turnover on downs, before New England adds some points at the end of the game to make the final total respectable.

• Facing a 9-7 Giants team that ranked 25th in points allowed, the Patriots fall 15 points shy of their regular season scoring average and are upset 21-17 by the Giants.

• At home in the AFC Championship Game and favored by 7.5 points, Brady completes just 29 of 54 passes, throws 1 TD and 2 INTs, and his offense is held to just 13 points by the Ravens, who stomp New England, 28-13.

• Against his arch-rival in the AFC Championship Game, Brady is again defeated by a Manning-led team, this time 26-16 in a game where New England’s offense never put up much of a fight. The Patriots are limited to just 3 points after 3 quarters, before a pair of late touchdowns make the final score respectable.

Now, is that a fair characterization of Brady’s playoff run from ’05 to ’13? That’s in the eye of the beholder, but it doesn’t take much strain to turn ’05-’13 Brady into the whole careers of Marino or Fouts, or much of the career of Peyton Manning. Brady was a legitimate Hall of Fame candidate based on his regular season performances during this stretch — 2 MVPs, record-setting seasons, 8 years of regular season dominance — but he ranked 16th out of 30 passers in Adjusted Yards per Attempt during these playoff seasons. It is a good thing that this section of his career was sandwiched around some gold bread.

The Revival

This represents the modern Patriots teams, headlined by Rob Gronkowski and Julian Edelman and featuring better defenses. Brady was better here than he was in the beginning of his career: he has produced a RANY/A of +1.45 over the last 5 seasons… and he also and won 3 rings. Here is the money stat: Brady leads the NFL in ANY/A over the last 5 years. That may be a surprise to you, but Brady has been very good each year, while Drew Brees and Aaron Rodgers have had their down seasons, and Matt Ryan and Ben Roethlisberger haven’t been quite as consistent. As a result, it is Brady who has an NFL-best 7.56 ANY/A average since ’14. This is a significant statistical improvement in the regular season, of course, over the early years Brady.

He’s also been very good — but not as good as he has been in the regular seasons — in the playoffs. Brady has averaged 7.12 ANY/A in 14 playoff games over the last 5 seasons, and his sample size dwarfs just about everyone else. He has 639 pass attempts, and nobody else has even 300. Still, and for what it’s worth over much smaller sample sizes, a number of other quarterbacks have been more efficient, some significantly so.

Conclusion

There is *a lot* to be taken from Brady’s career. At the simplest level, he’s basically been a good quarterback, a very good quarterback, or an elite quarterback for all of his 17 seasons. He’s been surrounded by a lot of talent and great coaches, and all of those factors have put him in position to play in and win a lot of playoff games.

But it is also true that his Super Bowl success doesn’t quite match up with his regular season success. During his 6 Super Bowl years, Brady had a RANY/A average of +1.10. During his other 11 seasons, his RANY/A has been +1.55. Perhaps the best way to characterize Brady’s career is someone who has had unparalleled longevity and a ton of success: He was a little bit Bob Griese during his early years, a little bit Dan Fouts during his middle years, and a little bit Joe Montana during this last run. That’s pretty darn good.

Finally, for your reference, here is all of the source data: enjoy! Please leave your thoughts and respectful comments below.