Modern miracle.

Joe has shown using stats that one can argue Tom Brady is actually improving at 44 when every other former player that reached his mid-40s was trying to improve his golf game.

Well, here is another example.

You would think defenses would blitz a 44-year old man time and again. Per Aaron Schatz of Football Outsiders, typing for BSPN, that would be a mistake.

In recent years Brady, as old quarterbacks do, slip when it came to throwing against blitzes. That script has been flipped by the Ageless One, Schatz points out.

It used to be that the book against Brady was the same as the book against a lot of the league’s top quarterbacks: Don’t blitz. Play coverage and make him check to run plays or throw underneath. That was the way to at least keep your team in the game against Brady’s New England Patriots.

Around 2018, that started to change — maybe not the strategy opponents used, but the strategy that worked. In 2018, Brady ranked 16th in the league with 66.6 QBR against the blitz. In 2019, his last season with New England, that dropped all the way down to 43.4 QBR, which was 28th in the league against the blitz. Even in Tampa Bay last season, Brady rebounded against the blitz but not to the levels he saw earlier in his career when he would destroy opposing blitzes. In 2020, he had 75.2 QBR against the blitz, which ranked 13th in the NFL. And overall, he was dismal against pass pressure, ranking just 30th with 4.8 QBR when pressured.

This season, Brady has fully come back against the blitz. He has a QBR of 82.6, which ranks eighth in the league. And he’s up to 52.7 QBR when pressured, which is seventh. Those rankings are much more in line with how well Brady plays against a standard pass rush of just four. Since performance against pressure is a lot less consistent than performance against a clean pocket, it makes a lot more sense that Brady will continue to be a top-10 quarterback against the blitz going forward, because he’s a top-10 quarterback overall.

When Brady some day passes away long after Joe does — Brady is human, right? He will die at some point, right? — someone should stuff this guy and place him in the Smithsonian.

What Brady is doing simply defies logic. Joe’s just damn glad he’s doing this playing for the Bucs.

How freaking lucky are we as Bucs fans right now?