Tom Brady Must Regain His Mechanics and Accuracy to Kick-Start Patriots Offense

Even in baseball, 4-for-24 doesn't cut it. In football, 4-of-24 would get mere mortals cut themselves.

Luckily for Tom Brady, he is the closest to a god as you'll get in the NFL. He put up those atrocious numbers against the Miami Dolphins on throws that traveled more than 10 yards, according to Pro Football Focus (subscription required). On throws traveling 20-plus yards, he was just 1-of-10. Many of Brady's problems—and possible solutions—come from his mechanics.

As told during a SiriusXM radio interview during the preseason (via Ben Volin of The Boston Globe), Tom House—Brady's personal mechanics guru—might not think that the issues will linger. New England Patriots fans would love for that to be the case:

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What is most impressive to me is these quarterbacks, they pick stuff up really, really quick. I think it’s because of the necessity of the game, they have to make decisions quickly and learn quickly. When you show them what they need to do, they fix it in a blink. It’s pretty impressive.

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With some help from House, here are some key points that Brady needs to work on.

When you first look at the following video, you see a 44-yard completion to Julian Edelman. Slow it down enough, however, and you'll see a perfect example of a small mechanical issue that Brady needs to work on.

Brady opens up his left shoulder far too early, getting a little "rotational" as House would put it. This leads to a break in the kinetic chain and, thus, failure to transfer all the energy to the throw. Brady should have plenty of arm to put the ball out in front of Edelman, but instead the ball dies in the air. Another 6-7 yards of power from Brady and Edelman has a touchdown.

Another problem that contributed to Brady's poor performance was the position of his front shoulder on deeper throws. The angle between the back and front shoulder is bound to grow as the distance expands, but this is to the extreme.

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With the offensive line struggling—Miami pressured Brady an astounding 27 times—I wasn't able to get a fair picture of Brady's footwork, base and stride. When Brady starts stepping a little early and a bit too long, the rest of the throwing motion struggles to compensate.

One spot where Brady is almost always perfect with his mechanics is his elbow spot. He has a picturesque delivery, getting right to "zero"—a concept described by quarterback guru Darin Slack (via SmartFootball.com)—whenever he has a clean window to throw in.

With the Minnesota Vikings and an 0-2 start looming on the horizon, his throwing motion is the only "zero" that Brady wants to be thinking about.

Brady mentioned his mindset going into next week after the Week 1 loss (via Patriots.com):

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It's a long football season and you've got to make improvements throughout the course of the season. Whether you win or lose you're not going to be playing really perfect football, especially in September, but you've got to try to win these games. ... We'll try to figure out the things that we did wrong, build on the good things, get rid of the bad things hopefully that will put us in a better place next week.

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As Brady works the rest of his motion to match his perfect "zero," look for his number of poorly thrown balls to approach that number as well.