Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady is on pace to absolutely obliterate the NFL all-time record for touchdown passes in a single season. It won’t even matter that the NFL added an extra game for the Buccaneers and everyone else for potential stat-padding.
A few months back, Pro Football Focus released their projections for the top ten passing yards leaders in 2021. Topping the list was Brady. They projected he would throw for 5,265 yards for the Bucs in 2021, which is an absolutely astronomical amount of yards, even for today’s pass-happy NFL. Of course, the extra game was also taken into account.
Historically, should Brady throw for this many yards, it would be a monumental season of epic proportions for both Brady and the league as a whole. It would be the third-most passing yards ever thrown in a season behind Peyton Manning’s 5,477 with the Denver Broncos in 2013, and Drew Brees’ 5,476 in 2011. For Brady, it would set a new career-high for him, topping his previous mark of 5,235 by a mere 30 yards, which also came in 2011, which is currently the third-most prolific passing season in terms of yards in NFL history.
While Pro Football Focus projected a historical season in terms of passing yards, it seems Brady will re-write the record books for touchdown passes instead.
To put it at its absolute simplest and obvious, Brady has been downright sensational in the first two games of the 2021 season, because of course. Through the first two weeks of the season, Brady has thrown NINE touchdown passes. That puts him on pace to throw for 76 touchdown passes on the season.
If you feel the need to re-read that no need. The number is actually 76.
Now granted, it’s highly unlikely he’ll throw for that many. However, if he keeps up anything remotely resembling this pace throughout the season, he will compeltely pulverize the single-season passing touchdowns record, set by Peyton Manning in 2013 with 54, which broke Brady’s previous mark of 50 in 2007. Both were seen at the time as being somewhat untouchable.
Tom Brady has done it all in his career, so what’s another record at the end of the day? He already has a very good shot at breaking the single-season passing touchdowns record, and he shouldn’t even need the extra regular-season game to do it. Heck, he may not even need 16 games to do it at this rate. Oh, and the wins should keep piling up for the Buccaneers as a bonus.