YEA: Brady has lost his playoff edge

As we prepare to watch Ben Roethlisberger, Mark Sanchez, Jay Cutler and Aaron Rodgers lead their respective teams into the conference championship round, we must wonder why Tom Brady isn’t on that list.The question surfaced after Sanchez’ talkative teammate, linebacker Bart Scott, told the media a modern-day equivalent of Hans Christian Andersen’s “emperor has no clothes” story ? that Brady is a big flopperoo in the playoffs.”(What) Rex (Ryan) pulled out for us was his last three playoff games,” Scott said, “what his record was and what his rating was then. He had a 66 quarterback rating in his last four or five playoff games and you guys didn’t believe that.”It’s shocking but true. In his last three regular seasons, Brady has led the Pats to records of 16-0, 10-6 and 14-2, but New England has gone just 2-3 in the playoffs during that span. That includes one-and-done performances last year and this year.This year’s divisional-round loss to Sanchez, Scott and the Jets was perhaps the most puzzling. Brady entered the game seemingly having found his old mystique after the lost season of 2008 and the up-and-down campaign of 2009. This season, he had made an incredible 335 pass attempts without getting picked off – an NFL record. Yet Scott’s fellow linebacker David Harris intercepted Brady at the Jets’ 30 and returned it 58 yards, with only Alge Crumpler’s tackle preventing a pick-six.In a “Citizen Kane”-like way, that play was the motif that called us back to the beginning of Brady’s playoff struggles, in 2005. Recall what happened in the divisional-round loss to the Denver Broncos: Brady fires into the end zone ? Denver cornerback Champ Bailey picks him off and returns it 100 yards ? and only a heads-up tackle from Ben Watson prevents a pick-six. (That Broncos team, unlike this Jets team, ended up scoring off the turnover.)Plays like these illustrate Brady’s descent from invincibility to vulnerability. The three Super Bowl titles he won in his first four seasons as the Pats’ starting quarterback represent an achievement too high to surpass. As F. Scott Fitzgerald might say, “everything afterward” – even an undefeated regular season in 2007 – “savors of anticlimax.” It is up to Brady’s teammates, guys like Watson and Crumpler, to try to bail out their quarterback on the big stage.Perhaps this is too unfair; it has often been Brady’s teammates who have let their quarterback down, not the other way around. In that fateful Super Bowl against the Giants, the Big Blue pass rush resembled Manhattan commuters storming the subway at Union Square, with the Patriots’ D-line looking like a bunch of turnstiles. The same thing happened last Sunday against the other New York team. In fact, Brady was sacked five times in both the Super Bowl loss to the Giants and the divisional-round loss to the Jets.Yet just as the responsibility rose to Brady in the Patriots’ loftiest heights – think of the remaining moments of regulation against the St. Louis Rams back in the day – so does it fall to him in the valleys, too. Brady has brought the Patriots and their fans much joy over his decade-plus with the team, but because of his playoff woes lately, there is no joy in Mudville for yet another season.Rich Tenorio is The Item’s sports copy editor.