I think the worrying thing is that he hasn't looked good despite a really unsustainably low pressure rate.
Last year Mac (per Football Reference) was pressured 18.4% of the time (3rd lowest rate in the league). If you regress ANY/A against pressure rates you'd expect him to have had an ANY/A about 0.5 higher than he actually achieved. Ok, so there's lots of noise there, and he's a rookie and blah blah blah. I don't think it was a particularly big deal last year and I think we were, appropriately, pretty happy with how he played - particularly when looking at what the other rookies did.
But through two games this year his pressure rate has been only 7% which is super low. Last year Brady led the league at 11.1%, a full 5 points lower than the next lowest rate, and the median was around 23%. This stat suggests that Mac has had the time to pick his passes this year and you'd want to see a corresponding step up in performance.
That hasn't been the case - his ANY/A has been 5.9 this year v 6.2 last year & to my amateur eyes at least the numbers have been a reasonable reflection of what we've seen. Some bad luck (TD interference game one), some good (how did he not catch that INT? Agholor's TD catch). I don't think it's unreasonable to be disappointed with how it's gone so far.
Obviously way too early to be writing him off, but I for one was hoping to see him step up from a roughly average guy last year to a (bottom of the) top 10 guy this year, and I didn't think that was crazy optimistic. So far so not the case.
Last year Mac (per Football Reference) was pressured 18.4% of the time (3rd lowest rate in the league). If you regress ANY/A against pressure rates you'd expect him to have had an ANY/A about 0.5 higher than he actually achieved. Ok, so there's lots of noise there, and he's a rookie and blah blah blah. I don't think it was a particularly big deal last year and I think we were, appropriately, pretty happy with how he played - particularly when looking at what the other rookies did.
But through two games this year his pressure rate has been only 7% which is super low. Last year Brady led the league at 11.1%, a full 5 points lower than the next lowest rate, and the median was around 23%. This stat suggests that Mac has had the time to pick his passes this year and you'd want to see a corresponding step up in performance.
That hasn't been the case - his ANY/A has been 5.9 this year v 6.2 last year & to my amateur eyes at least the numbers have been a reasonable reflection of what we've seen. Some bad luck (TD interference game one), some good (how did he not catch that INT? Agholor's TD catch). I don't think it's unreasonable to be disappointed with how it's gone so far.
Obviously way too early to be writing him off, but I for one was hoping to see him step up from a roughly average guy last year to a (bottom of the) top 10 guy this year, and I didn't think that was crazy optimistic. So far so not the case.