The Tom Brady edition.
I've seen a ton of talk about Tom Brady as a early first round, and sometimes 1st overall pick in fantasy drafts. It's dumb. It's painfully dumb, it hurts me to see it so much so that I am going to try to kill the chance I see it in a Stampede Blue league even though it would help me if someone did it.
Brady had an amazing season last year. He took me to the last years Stampede Blue league championship game (got him by autodraft since I was at work). But the reality is that Brady is going to come back down to earth. Brady's 08 was the 5th QB in the history of the league with 40+ TDs here are the totals the next year with their 40+ season total in parenthesis and the drop in brackets.
Manning 2005: 28 (49) [-21]
Marino 1985: 30 (48) [-18]
Marino 1987: 26 (44) [-18]
Warner 1999: 21 (41) [-20]
The least anyone dropped off was 18 Touchdowns. It's a small sample, but the result is very intuitive. Teams will gameplan to stop or limit the QB to an even greater extent after a record season. How often did Manning see safeties shallow or single coverage on the outside after his 49 TD season? Combine that with regression to the mean and you get 20 TD dropoffs.
Lets up the sample with 10 more great seasons. Here is every season with at least 35 TDs with the following season and drop off.
Brett Favre 1996: 39 (35) [-4]
Dante Culpepper 2004: 39 (6) [-33] no, those numbers aren't flipped around he threw 6 TDs
Brett Favre 1995: 38 (39) [+1]
George Blanda 1961: 36 (27) [-9]
Y.A. Tittle 1963: 36 (10) [-26] not flipped around, only 10 TDs
Steve Young 1998: 36 (3) [-33] only 3 TDs
Steve Beuerlein 1999: 36 (19) [-17]
Kurt Warner: 2001: 36 (3) [-33] again, not flipped around 3 TDs
Tony Romo 2007: 36 (?) [?]
Brett Favre 1997: 35 (31) [-4]
Steve Young 1994: 35 (20) [-15]
Only Brett Favre maintained a high level of TD passes for more than one year. Interestingly his INT % increased each of the years after the 35 TD performance. From 2.3 in his first 35+ season to 2.4 then 3.1 and finally 4.2 following the third 35+ season, suggesting he did a bit of gunslinging to keep the TD total up.
The odds are very very strongly against Tom Brady coming close to repeating last season. So chill on him for a second. I will not draft Brady in the first round in any league that doesn't start multiple QBs (I'm not in any at this time). He more the likely won't even come close to last season's marks. Only Favre hasn't had a significant dropoff in TDs after a 35+ TD season and only Favre and Blanda didn't drop by 15 or more TDs.