This Just Might Be The Most Ridiculous Tom Brady Stat Of All Time
By Michael Hurley, CBS Boston
BOSTON (CBS) -- Tom Brady has been playing forever. As a result, football fans seemingly get bombarded every 15 minutes with a new accomplishment or statistic or feat that nobody's ever done in history. It's all impressive, but it can be a bit much.
Yet every now and then, a Tom Brady statistic comes across your eyes and stops you in your tracks. This is one of those stats.
During the Buccaneers' rout of the Bears on Sunday, Brady hit a bit of a rough patch in the second quarter. With the Bucs leading 21-0, Brady threw three straight incompletions. The Bucs punted, but they got the ball back three plays later on a strip sack of Justin Fields.
With the ball at the Bears' 25-yard line, Brady was looking to pour it on. But once again, he threw three straight incompletions. (The first one was a big miss, too.)
The Bucs settled for a field goal, and when the CBS broadcast returned from commercials, the screen displayed a downright shocking bit of information: With six straight incomplete passes, Tom Brady had just tied a career high.
That is ... astounding.
Let's put this into perspective.
Brady has played in 308 regular-season games. He has started all but two of those games. In his regular-season career, he has thrown 10,901 passes. It averages out to more than 35 passes per game. He's thrown 40 or more passes in a game 91 times, and he's thrown 50 or more passes 22 times.
It's a timeline that spans 22 years, five U.S. presidencies, and 10 Buffalo Bills head coaches.
In terms of weather, he's played in every extreme: boiling heat when fatigue is a factor, chilling cold, hellacious winds, driving rain, intense snow, and everything in between.
He's thrown a lot of passes in a lot of games for two different teams.
And through all of that, over 20-plus years ... he has never thrown seven consecutive incompletions in any game.
That is preposterous.
Even in his worst games -- a 7-for-19 performance vs. Miami in 2004, an 8-for-21 showing in a muddy affair with the Giants in '03, a 15-for-34 night against Bill Parcells and the Cowboys in '03 -- he managed to never do worse than the equivalent of two consecutive three-and-outs.
It's stunning. And in a world where Brady's reaching unparalleled levels of statistical achievements every other week, sometimes it's the simplest one that stands out the most.
