By Nate Sullivan
Guest Columnist
Nov. 6, 2007

Let’s say you’re the Washington Redskins. Your depth chart at receiver - not your strongest position, mind you - looks something like this:

1. Santana Moss
2. Antwaan Randle El
3. James Thrash
4. Brandon Lloyd
5. Someone named “S. Bodiford”
6. Kenneth the Janitor
7. Joe Gibbs

Knowing this, where would you say you’d plug in the top wide receiver from a playoff team who caught 61 passes for 760 yards and 4 TDs last season? Before or after “S. Bodiford”?

Pencils down. The receiver in question is Reche Caldwell, and although he’s best known now for a few egregious drops in the AFC Championship game, the guy was nothing less than solid all season. In the offseason, he was unceremoniously dumped, and picked up by the Redskins. Last week, he was inactive (again).

What the hell happened to Caldwell?

I’ll tell you. It’s the same thing that happened to Deion Branch and David Givens, only with less money involved. They left the New England nest, along with Tom Brady, the adoring mother bird, and promptly fell out of the tree and died, statistically speaking.

(Of course, in the cases of Branch and Givens, they both made a ton of money, so non-statistically speaking, they could buy and sell me fifty or sixty times. Even Caldwell will make enough cash - just for riding an exercise bike and using his gigantic eyeballs to find things other players lose in the locker room - to purchase most of my organs. Just wanted to be clear about that.)

Alright, “statistical death” is probably too much of a stretch with Branch, who’s still a good receiver, and had a decent season last year. But Givens had all of eight catches last season, and Caldwell might be working in the parking garage at FedEx Field before the end of the 2007 season. You know who I bet isn’t surprised by all of this? David Patten. He had 800 yards and seven scores in his final year chasing Brady’s deep ball, only to end up in… yes, Washington, where he immediatly ceased to exist — in fantasy football terms, at least.

What’s the underlying factor, then? It’s the Tom Brady Effect, and it’s something that people have been trying to figure out since he became the starter for a perennial championship contender in 2001. Until this season, the conventional wisdom had been that Tom Brady was actually kind of bad for a receiver’s stats — after all, no one on the team caught more than 70 passes for the Patriots since Brady took over, with the exception of Branch in his final year, who caught 78, and even that failed to net him a thousand-yard season. Brady simply spread the ball around too much, used his tight ends and backs, and didn’t go down the field enough, at least to any one guy consistently. Daunte Culpepper’s “oh crap, I’ll throw an 80 yard bomb towards Randy Moss in double coverage” tactic might not win any Super Bowls, but it made for more than a few 25 point fantasy games, and was probably fun for Randy.

When the Patriots acquired Moss, a friend of mine was on the fence on whether to keep Drew Brees, or Moss, in our upcoming keeper draft. The guy had just sat through two disapointing seasons of Moss in Oakland, including a BRUTAL one last year. If you thought it was hard for Raiders fans to watch him rot, try starting him as a fantasy receiver and watching his stat line slowly update online. It was like watching paint dry - only the paint was on your forehead, in the form of letters that read “I’m an enormous dumbass”.

So I was honest with him. I told him that I thought Moss was still very good, and that nobody was going to do anything in Oakland and thus to cut him some slack. But then I shifted into the Tom Brady Effect conventional wisdom, and gave my bold prediction - if he had a great season, I could see him grabbing 10 touchdowns and giving the Patriots their first 1,000-yard receiver in years. But no more. After all, “they spread the ball around too much”.

He kept Brees. Moss has 10 touchdowns.

It’s week 9.

Oops.

I’m not here to be negative, though, or else I’d stay on the subject of Drew Brees. Instead, let’s focus on what we can learn, because now it’s all starting to finally become clear.

The Tom Brady Effect didn’t make slightly-above-average receivers mediocre, statistically; it made adequate or bad receivers look slightly above average, which, particularly in the case of Caldwell, is lead-into-gold incredible. In the case of the new, star-studded Patriots receiving corps (Moss especially), the new guys didn’t simply regress to the mean. Instead of dividing up a good quarterback day (250 yards, 2 tds) amongst 8 guys, they simply increased the size of the pie they were sharing; Brady’s on pace to throw an absolutely absurd, Tecmo Super Bowl-like 60 touchdowns and he throws for 300 yards nearly every game. He threw for five touchdowns against Miami, for instance, but it should have had seven. It didn’t even look like work.

So here’s the real Tom Brady effect; he’s the best quarterback in the game. He’s so good, in fact, he literally convinced me that his below average, undersized, pass dropping core of receivers were actually quite good, though unconventional; he also convinced the Redskins, Titans, Seahawks, and the Redskins again, in that order, although I think by now Washington had a pretty realistic idea of what they were getting in Caldwell.

But don’t let Tommy trick you. When Donte Stallworth heats up over the last six weeks of the season (he’s already started) and finishes the year with 1,000 yards and double digit scores, and then bolts for the Jets, don’t think for a second that now, as “the number one guy”, he’s going to tear it up, or even match what he was doing in New England. He’ll be fine, just like Branch is fine.

But he won’t be the same.

After all, if there’s one thing we know about the mysterious Tom Brady Effect, it’s this: it only happens when Tom Brady’s around.