Bruce Arians Wants to Know Who the Hell Made Up This 'Dropped Passes' Stat
By Kyle Koster
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are tied with the Dallas Cowboys and Detroit Lions with nine dropped passes this season, a stat that Tom Brady would like to see improve a bit but is ultimately helpless to change. A wise person once explained that Tommy cannot throw and catch the balls, no matter how advantageous such a situation would be.
A reporting covering the NFL asked Bucs coach Bruce Arians about the extremely normal and not-at-all obscure category during media availability today, as one would do if they were preparing a story for the next day's paper on all the butterfingers out there.
Arians reacted this way:
"I don't know who the hell makes up these stats," Bruce Arians says when told his team leads the NFL in dropped passes this season.
— Greg Auman (@gregauman) October 14, 2020
Hmm. Good question. Who would make up such a thing? What insane person saw an incompletion and deigned to determine if it was the quarterback or wide receiver at fault for the missed connection? What Renaissance man or woman took a thing they do in baseball — assigning errors on missed opportunities — and was brave enough to apply it to football?
Well, perhaps it wasn't a person it all. Maybe it was gravity. It very well could have been the powerful force itself demanding recognition for bringing a hurled pigskin down to Earth despite the best-laid plans of the offense. Gravity has long been a ME-FIRST GLORY BOY dating back to Isaac Newton. That whole apple on the head thing? That's like high-stepping into the endzone for style points.
Anyway, Arians is 68. He started as a graduate assistant at Virginia Tech back in 1975. He, like all football coaches, enjoys letting everyone know how long and for how long he works. So it's a bit odd he's treating dropped passes like some sort of space rock that landed in his back yard. Especially considering his penchant for throwing the ball around.
The only logical thing to now is for media members to ask him about increasingly complicated stats and metrics until a fuse short-circuits. Someone mentions Tom Brady's adjusted net yards per attempt and Arians just wanders off into the sunset aimlessly.