Patriots feasted on bad quarterbacks, but also had to face tough defenses to get this far

The Patriots are still Super Bowl favorites, but at least one All-Pro thinks Tom Brady’s road to the AFC Championship has been smoother than warm butter.

Seahawks safety Earl Thomas took to Twitter last week to voice his concern with the New England quarterback.

It turns out, he’s got some good reasons to be salty. A front-loaded schedule and a weak AFC East left New England with few challenges along the way to the conference championship. The team’s recent eight-game winning streak came against six teams that missed the postseason.

The seventh, Houston, was the NFL’s weakest division champion thanks to a deficient offense. The Texans rolled to the Divisional round of the playoffs in part because of Derek Carr’s season-ending leg injury that stripped the Raiders of their MVP-caliber quarterback.

Here are the quarterbacks the Patriots defense has faced in that span, along with their passer ratings for the year:

Colin Kaepernick, 90.7
Ryan Fitzpatrick, 69.6
Jared Goff, 63.6
Joe Flacco, 83.5
Trevor Siemian, 84.6
Bryce Petty, 60.0
Matt Moore, 105.6
Brock Osweiler, 72.2

The best passer they saw was Moore, a backup who hadn’t started a game since 2011 before Ryan Tannehill was injured in December. Six of the eight quarterbacks listed placed 23rd or lower in league rankings.

The streak of bad passers goes beyond New England’s latter-half schedule. The Patriots beat the Steelers in Week 7, yet that quality road win was marred by the presence of Landry Jones behind center in Ben Roethlisberger’s stead. A Week 1 victory over the Cardinals looked impressive at face value, but Carson Palmer’s quarterback rating dropped by more than 17 points from 2015 to 2016.

In terms of traditional success, the best quarterback the Patriots beat this fall, outside of Joe Flacco, was either Tannehill or Andy Dalton.

This is not New England’s fault. The team only faced three Pro Bowl passers in 2016 — Russell Wilson, Palmer, and Dalton — and beat two of them. Unfortunately for the team’s end-of-year evaluation, that pair happened to start for teams that went a combined 13-17-2.

The Patriots didn’t just beat bad teams to get to 14-2; they took advantage of the games they had against top competition, as well. Brady’s team went 4-1 against playoff-bound opponents, although that number drops to 2-1 when you scratch teams starting backup quarterbacks from the list.

But none of that directly impacted Brady on the field. Thomas’ criticism of the four-time Super Bowl winner ignored the defenses he faced on a weekly basis. While the Patriots may have run through an underwhelming schedule dotted with putrid offenses, they also faced some pretty good defenders.

All but two of the teams New England faced in its eight-game winning streak had defenses that ranked in the top half of the league in terms of yards per play. Half ranked in the top 10.

Though he struggled against elite pass rushers like Denver and Houston, he also had a rating of 114 or better in four of those Patriots victories.

The New England defense may have gone without a challenge over the last two months, but that weak schedule doesn’t apply to both sides of the ball. The Steelers are the strongest team they’ll have faced in months, but their 13th-ranked defense won’t be anything new for Brady and his offense.

Brady was the target of Thomas’ Twitter tirade, but the safety may have been better served directing his ire at Devin McCourty and a Patriots secondary that’s seen a steady diet of best-forgotten quarterbacks like Bryce Petty and Brock Osweiler since facing the Seahawks in November.