Interesting questions about Tom Brady's career stats

Not huge NFL experts here, but we appreciate successful individuals who have pushed the envelope in a certain field. People who are constantly shaping the state of the art of something they are profoundly passionate about. Somehow, this is something that we strive to do at Latitude as well: changing how companies around the world interact with their data, going from zero to insight in a matter of minutes. And we believe that Tom Brady falls into that category too, so here we go.

We won’t keep debating whether Brady was the GOAT or not (Hint: he definitely is…). We will focus on using Tom Brady’s career stats to answer some questions. We probably came up with pretty basic questions, but we thought they were interesting enough to share.

Since Brady was a quarterback, we’ll focus on passing stats, because that’s the way QBs are normally measured. Anyway, if you have any more advanced questions you’ll be able to answer them in a couple of minutes using Latitude, more on this later on. Let’s see the questions we wanted to answer:

Exploring Tom Brady’s stats with Latitude

We have 2 tables with Tom Brady’s career stats: one for the regular season, and one for playoffs. The Superbowl? We guess everybody knows those by heart.

First things first: make sure that you have a free Latitude account. You can sign up here. It’s completely free. No commitment. No strings attached.

Then, the next thing to do is connect those tables as data sources in Latitude. You can connect +100 data sources and start exploring them in seconds. Just go to “Settings” -> “Data sources” and click on Add new data source. Complete the required information and you’re set up.

Cool, now we have Tom Brady’s career in our hands (sort of). The first questions we had in our minds were how many attempts Tom Brady averaged during the regular season, with which completion rate, and if those figures were different in playoffs. Let’s dive in.

We just need to drag and drop the two tables with our data for the regular season and playoffs to our new project in Latitude.

Cool, everything is ready so we can start querying right away: we have selected the fields we need to answer the first question and performed a couple of SQL queries.

And just like that, we can create a line chart so now we can see the level of consistency Tom Brady had during his whole career. Such a remarkable career.

Completion Rate Regular Season Chart:

Okay, the rookie year wasn’t great, but come on! Who do you know that has this level of regularity in their professional performance over 20 years? That’s awesome for sure, but we still wondered if when the moment of truth (aka the playoffs) came, this consistency was remaining the same. Let’s find out by exploring the rest of the data project we have created in Latitude.

Completion Rate Playoffs Chart:

It seems the pressure of “win or go home” also affected Tom Brady’s completion rate, proving he’s still a human being. We can see is slightly lower but still pretty good figures.

Cool, let’s talk about yards now: how many yards did Tom Brady average during his career, both in the regular season and playoffs?

Average Yards Regular Season Chart:

Mmm, interesting, what did happen in 2008 for Tom Brady to have so few average yards? We obviously didn’t know but he suffered a knee injury in the opening game and he missed the rest of the season. Luckily,  he had a successful recovery and he kept delighting NFL fans for so many years after that. What about the playoffs?

Average Yards Playoffs Chart:

Again, the playoffs can take a toll on everyone and the consistency we saw over the regular season decreased a bit, but quite close as we can see in the line chart.

Visualizing Tom Brady’s career stats with Latitude

No big surprise here, but nice to see it with data: Tom Brady’s consistency over 20 years of career has no equal and makes him join a selected group of athletes with the likes of Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, Muhammad Ali, or Roger Federer. It’s quite inspiring to visualize at once the 4 line charts we put together in our data project at Latitude.

As you can see, Latitude enables you to build low-code data apps, getting from zero to insight in minutes. If you are interested in having this data project with Tom Brady’s Career Stats so you can start querying your own questions, we’ll make it available in the upcoming weeks. Let us know by DMing us at @trylatitude.

In the meantime, you can sign up for free. We are always open to hearing your feedback and comments!

Oh, and by the way, until the end of February, we're helping companies to build their data stack for free. Please reach out to us here and we’ll be more than happy to help you.