We still don't know if Tom Brady's NFL career is actually over. And we're a bit unclear how he feels about the New England Patriots. But there's no denying the massive impact Brady left on the franchise over two decades in Foxboro.
How can we quantify that impact? The Athletic's Bob Sturm has a formula. Every year since 2002, Sturm has rolled out his "Super Bowl-era franchise rankings," which objectively rate each franchise's overall success using a pretty basic point system: 11 points for winning the Super Bowl, five points for losing the Super Bowl, three points for reaching a conference championship game and one point for making the playoffs.
Sturm just released his 2022 franchise rankings, and the Patriots rank second with 115 points, a hair behind the top-ranked Pittsburgh Steelers (116). Sturm joined our Tom E. Curran on a new Patriots Talk podcast to explain how remarkable New England's position is given where the franchise was 20 years ago.
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"New England, the first time I did this, was at 34 total points in the year 2001 -- so the start of Brady's career," Sturm recalled. "They were at 17 points in 1996. So, that would probably put you about 20th or 22nd in the original list. And then they shot straight up the list, as you can imagine."
So, Brady and head coach Bill Belichick helped transform the Patriots from a bottom-third NFL franchise into the league's second-best franchise over a span of just 20 years.
New England Patriots
If you count Brady as his own NFL franchise, though, the numbers are more eye-popping. Thanks to his extra Super Bowl title and five postseason wins in two seasons with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Brady has averaged 5.2 points per season under Sturm's scoring system.
That means in any given season, you can expect Brady's teams to perform slightly better than reaching the Super Bowl.
Could Brady become part-owner of the Dolphins in retirement?
"To really make it silly, which properly puts this into context: The No. 1 franchise in these 56 years is barely the Pittsburgh Steelers. They average 2.07 points per year," Sturm said. "So to have Brady basically at 5.2, it's beyond double, it's two and a half times the most successful franchise."
There are plenty of ways to quantify the success Brady and Belichick enjoyed during their 20-year Patriots tenure, as well as Brady's personal success over 22 NFL seasons. But Sturm's rankings do a good job of highlighting how consistently great the GOAT was over a remarkable span of time.
To hear more of Sturm's conversation with Curran, as well as Curran's discussion with Phil Perry on the state of the Patriots' offensive line and JT The Brick sharing a Raiders point of view on Josh McDaniels, subscribe to the Patriots Talk Podcast or watch on YouTube below.