A few years ago, it would have been a ridiculous question to ask, but now, it's only appropriate: Can Tom Brady be trusted to win a game in the fourth quarter?
The mere mention of it is enough to fire up the most diehard Patriots fan, but when looking at his numbers in the fourth quarter this year, Brady simply has not lived up to his high expectations.
In analyzing the team's six losses, let's toss out the Week 17 game to Houston. Yeah, it counted, but anyone watching that game knows there was an air of "let's not get hurt" after Wes Welker left the field on a cart. Brady launched an interception to the anti-Patriot, Bernard Pollard, and Houston won the game, but to say that was Brady and Bill Belichick's best effort at winning in the fourth would be a stretch.
We can also throw out the New Orleans loss. By the time the fourth quarter rolled around, the Patriots were dead ducks. No quarterback could have led his team back against that team on that night.
Still, even without those games, the numbers aren't good for Brady in the fourth quarter:
- Week 2 at New York Jets: 5-for-14, 50 yards, zero touchdowns, zero interceptions (with an assist to Joey Galloway)
- Week 5 at Denver: 2-for-5, 15 yards, zero touchdowns, zero interceptions, one fumble lost
- Week 10 at Indianapolis: 9-for-12, 60 yards, one touchdown, zero interceptions
- Week 13 at Miami: 3-for-9, 41 yards, two interceptions
Add it all up, and it's not good: 19-for-40 (48 percent), 166 yards, one touchdown and two interceptions in four quarters of football. Each quarter was crucial, and in each one, every mistake proved costly.
That's not to say that Brady hasn't shown flashes of his former self — the Week 1 comeback victory over the Bills ranks among some of Brady's finest work in the clutch. And his six touchdowns against the Titans could have easily been eight or nine if Belichick felt like making a run at 100 points.
Yet the brilliance has somewhat given way to blunders, and the more surprising aspect is that it's not necessarily something new.
Since 2004, he's made some mistakes on some fairly large stages. He threw two picks in a playoff game in Denver, including the devastating Champ Bailey pick in the end zone, essentially ending the 2005 season. He threw what very well could have been the game-ending pick in San Diego in the 2006 divisional round, but Troy Brown bailed the team out with a strip of Marlon McCree on the same play. In that game, Brady threw three interceptions to just two touchdowns. One week later, Brady's interception did end the game in Indy, cutting short the '06 season and giving way to a Colts championship.
To critique Brady's performance in Super Bowl XLII would be downright inconsiderate, considering the likes of Michael Strahan, Justin Tuck, Osi Umenyiora and Jay Alford spent much of the night in Brady's facemask, but it added another check mark in the "L" column.
Heading into another postseason, Brady knows that those wins that used to seem to come so easily won't be a given.
"You’re playing the best teams [in the playoffs], so I think the biggest difference is there’s less of a margin for error," Brady said on Wednesday. "I think you go into these games and you’re playing teams that are the best in the league and have won the most games, so typically they are the ones that make the fewest mistakes and the ones where the yards are hardest to come by. So our execution has to be better."
Bringing up some of the more painful memories for Patriots fans is not meant to insinuate that Brady's reputation as one of the greatest clutch
quarterbacks to ever take a snap is a farce — far from it. What Brady
accomplished from 2001-04 was unquestionably one of the greatest feats
the game has ever seen, but that was a long time ago. Since then, we've seen the miscues nearly match the mastery, and the result is that a close game in the fourth quarter is no longer a sure thing with Brady under center.
