And Brady continued to distance himself from the pack with his postseason records. Brady now has 75 career postseason touchdowns (Joe Montana is next with 45). His 31 wins are nearly double the number of the guy in second place (Montana, 16). And Brady is now the oldest player in NFL history to throw a postseason touchdown pass, replacing the great George Blanda.
Brady has been on fire for the past month. Since the Bucs’ Week 13 bye, they are 5-0, and Brady has 14 touchdowns against one interception. The NFC is wide open, and Brady and the Bucs are playing as well as any team right now.
▪ The only problem is what comes next. The Bucs don’t know their Divisional Round opponent yet, but it won’t be good. If the Saints beat the Bears on Sunday, the Bucs will play in New Orleans next week. The Saints swept the season series, including a 38-3 pounding in Tampa in Week 9.
If the Bears knock off the Saints, then the No. 5-seeded Bucs would actually host next week’s game. But they would face the Rams, who beat the Bucs in Tampa, 27-24, in Week 11, and had an impressive win over the Seahawks on Saturday.
▪ We turned in for a playoff game, and a Disney movie broke out, starring Taylor Heinicke. Who? A 2015 undrafted rookie out of Old Dominion, Heinicke is on his fifth NFL team, spent two weeks on the Patriots’ practice squad in 2017, had one career start before Saturday night, and was a backup — not even a starter — for the XFL’s St. Louis BattleHawks last year.
And Saturday night, Heinicke, 27, went toe-to-toe with Brady on national television. Heinicke was poised, accurate (impressively so), and made great decisions, finishing with 306 passing yards, a touchdown and an interception, plus 46 rushing yards and a gutsy 8-yard touchdown run in the third quarter. Bucs defensive coordinator Todd Bowles brought a lot of pressure at Heinicke, and he handled it superbly, and did a great job of finding his receivers in single coverage. He looked like Tony Romo out there, scrambling around in the backfield, finding the throwing lanes, and making several really nice throws.
Plenty of quarterbacks have been good for a game or two — hello, Matt Flynn — but Heinicke is clearly good enough to be a backup in the NFL. He is a free agent after this season, and almost certainly has earned himself a legit roster spot for next year. It boggles the mind that he was not even on a roster from 2019-20 until Washington signed him last month. It shows that NFL talent evaluators are still mostly guessing when it comes to quarterbacks.
▪ We should have known Brady was going to have a big game when we saw that Washington’s defensive coordinator was Jack Del Rio. Brady is now 10-1 against Del Rio as a head coach (2003-11 Jaguars) or defensive coordinator (2012-14 Broncos, 2017 Raiders, 2020 Washington). In those games, Brady averages 282 yards per game with 28 touchdowns, 1 interception, and averages 30.3 points per game.
Brady is now 3-1 against Del Rio in the postseason, though the one loss was the 2014 AFC Championship Game.
▪ Despite the 31 points, and the big numbers from Brady, the Bucs certainly have some work to do on offense. Washington deserves a lot of credit, of course, with a defense that finished No. 4 in points allowed (20.6) and No. 6 in sacks (47).
But the Bucs were sloppy. Chris Godwin had at least three drops, after dropping just two passes all season. Brady continues to have issues being on the same page with Evans, who had big numbers (six catches for 119 yards) but miscommunicated a couple of times with the quarterback. And Brady’s infamous temper came out in the first half when he screamed his head off at a teammate — was it Cameron Brate? — after a third-down sack.
The Bucs also stalled in the red zone, finishing with a touchdown in five attempts. And while Brady is doing a good job of hitting some shots down field, the Bucs don’t seem to have much of a short, rhythm-and-timing passing game that helps move the chains. Brady doesn’t have a Julian Edelman or Wes Welker that he implicitly trusts to gain 7 yards on third-and-6.
▪ The Bucs are also fairly one-dimensional on offense. Excluding kneel-downs, the Bucs had 26 rushes against 43 pass plays, and even that was skewed by playing ahead for the entire fourth quarter. Leonard Fournette ran hard, with 19 carries for 93 yards and a touchdown, but the Bucs are far too reliant on Brady’s arm and should try to find more balance. For the season, the Bucs ran the ball just 36 percent of the time, third-lowest in the NFL.
▪ One factoid to tuck away — Brady was second in the NFL with 610 pass attempts this season, and he has never won a Super Bowl in a season in which he had at least 600 throws. The other seasons — 2002, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, and 2019.
▪ Brady played well, but took an unusual delay of game penalty in the first half. It marked the first time he let the play clock hit zero since a 2015 win against Indianapolis, according to records kept by NFLPenalties.com.
▪ Rob Gronkowski was invisible on Saturday night, finishing with no catches on just one target — a throw in the back of the end zone in which Gronk couldn’t tap his toes down. The Bucs didn’t need him, as Brate more than picked up the slack at tight end (four catches for 80 yards). But it was unusual to see Gronk not produce in a playoff game. It marked the second time in 17 career playoff games that Gronkowski was held without a catch, but the first time came in the 2012 game against Houston in which he broke his forearm.
But Gronk has played well in the second half of the season, and a light night on Saturday should serve him well next week.
Ben Volin can be reached at ben.volin@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @BenVolin.
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