Tom Brady experiment failing and it’s not even his fault
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers made a decision to move on from their No. 1 overall pick at quarterback earlier this offseason in favor of six-time Super Bowl winning QB Tom Brady.
Tom Brady, who elected to leave New England after 20 seasons, signed with the Buccaneers on a two-year deal worth $50 million earlier this spring and that automatically made Tampa Bay one of the premiere choices for Super Bowl dark horse candidates.
Fast-forward several months, and we are 12 games into the season and the Bucs hold a 7-5 record.
Now, some may be saying: What’s wrong with a 7-5 record? After all, Tom Brady and the Bucs are still on pace to make the postseason- though that wouldn’t necessarily still be the case if the NFL hadn’t extended the wild-card bids to three for this season- and there have been times where this team has looked really good.
Despite the positives (and there are a few), the overarching observation that anyone who has watched this team objectively is that they are failing.
There’s simply too much talent around Tom Brady for that offense to not be clicking in late November, but yet here we are
Everyone expected that chemistry would take a while to build coming into a season where there were no preseason games. There was even a little grace given when the Bucs brought in Antonio Brown midseason.
But now we’re 12 games into the year and this offense has played together for nearly three full months. Brown has been around for nearly a month now.
When you have Brady mixed with Chris Godwin, Mike Evans, Rob Gronkowski, Scotty Miller, Brown, and then you add in rushing options like Ronald Jones II and Leonard Fournette, there should be nothing stopping this bunch from being one of the top attacks in the league week-in and week-out.
Instead, we’ve had to watch the Bucs defense bail out the offense time and time again.
Many will be quick to blame Brady for the lackluster offensive performances this season- and he certainly shoulders some of the blame-but the truth of the matter is that the failing experiment to this point is a result of the coaching staff’s stubbornness.
Give Sean Payton this offense and he’s competing for a Super Bowl. The same can be said for Andy Reid, Jon Gruden and even Bill Belichick.
We’re not saying that Bruce Arians needs to become one of those coaches. But what we are saying is that Arians and Offensive Coordinator Byron Leftwich shoulder much more of the blame than what we can even begin to explain.
Both guys had an opportunity this offseason to develop an offense that would play to Brady’s strengths. Instead, they’re running the same offense with the same schemes and attack points that Jameis Winston– who was much more mobile and had a stronger arm in the deep passing game- ran.
If you weren’t going to make changes, what was the point in bringing Brady in to begin with?
We can blame Tom Brady all we want- and yes, he has areas in which he can improve and take the blame- but the truth is that it all comes back to Arians and Leftwich, who knew what they had for several months before the season began and never had the imagination or creativity to make changes to play to their strengths.