[VarlosZ]

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In many sports, stats give us a very accurate representation of an athlete's ability and value. However I believe that in football, significantly more than any other sport, stats are greatly influenced by a player's surrounding cast and the coaching philosophy and system. In the NFL, stats only tell a part of the story. While some groups(such as football outsiders) have attempted to give us more in depth stats that take some of this into account, I believe that for the most part they greatly fail and the stats are still very much skewed.

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FO's individual stats are just as susceptible to influence from teammates as traditional stats, but you can't really call that a "failure" because they haven't tried to correct for that. They frequently point out that when they say that Player X has a DVOA of Y, they mean that he has a DVOA of Y with his particular teammates and in his particular offensive scheme. DVOA and DPAR take lots of other things into account that traditional stats do not, but they only account for a player's teammates in the most limited way.

That said, your objection doesn't apply to a team's offensive and defensive DVOA. Keep that in mind when people (including myself) start posting those to illustrate differences in defensive quality that had a lot to do with some of those won/lost records you mention.

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Clearly I saw something in Brady before this season that let me know that he was capable of this. . .

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Not "clearly" at all. I mean, that's certainly one possibility, but it's also entirely possible that you basically got lucky. Every fan has a handful of players who he thinks are better (or worse) than they seem for one reason or another, and every fan is sometimes proven right and sometimes proven wrong, but frequently he's right or wrong for reasons completely unrelated to what the fan thought was going on with the player.

Now, I do think it's fair to say that Tom Brady is a better player than myself and most other stat-heads thought he was; i.e., that we underestimated just how bad his supporting cast had been all these years. OTOH, I think you're underestimating the extent to which Brady is (probably) playing better than at any time before in his career. I really hope Randy Moss doesn't sign with another team next year. If he does, all of the Brady-backers will point to that when he regresses somewhat to his mean instead of acknowledging the extent to which Brady's '07 is an outlier performance.

That's not to say that Brady's '07 isn't indescribably fantastic, or that Brady isn't phenomenal in general, but he's not this good. He's a great QB in the midst of a perfect storm: having the best year of his life, with a great WR with a chip on his shoulder, with one of the best #2 and #3 WR tandems in the league, and with a coach who has a big chip on his shoulder and is sending out his QB to run up the score on inferior and defeated opponents.

More to come.


P.S. -- Prediction: this thread is going to have 200 posts by Sunday. . .