Cellar-Door said:I don't know that 2 and 3 are correct. Do you have anything to back that up?
The Patriots have nobody high on the passes dropped and drop rate charts. Meanwhile according to ESPN Brady leads the league in off target passes (over or under thrown). Now some of that could be routes and communication, and some of it is no doubt rushed throws because of pressure. A lot of it is on Tom though, he isn't even giving his WR the opportunity to make plays on over 25% of his throws.
http://espn.go.com/blog/statsinfo/post/_/id/96276/top-stats-to-know-patriots-at-chiefs (that is the off target stat, before the Chief's game, but having watched that game I doubt it went down significantly.)
No offense intended, however I reject the premise that "stats" are informative about whether it's Brady, the offensive line, or the receivers. If you dig back into the archive I explained using two-sample tests and confidence intervals for small samples why all drop stats do nothing but capture random variation*. And there is so much covariation between poor offensive line and poor route running and poor QB performance that the ESPN numbers are likely to be bunk too.
I'm telling you what my eyes show me.
I think there's some more interesting discussion to be had here about receiver consistency, but it probably needs to wait a few days for everyone to enjoy the Bengals win, and probably needs to go in another thread. When it gets picked back up-- note that in tonight's great win the main receiver was Gronk, then Edelman and then Wright had a few nice catches. I was on a slow stream so I may have missed some -- though I didn't see the guys with worse hands (again, to my eyes) like LaFell or Dobson getting a lot of burn.
* at extremely high or low drop rates there may be something useful to be said about that player. Even so multiple-comparison issues may make even that invalid.