First, an explanation:
Tom Brady is the most accomplished quarterback of the 1,036 men who have ever been an NFL quarterback in the blink of an eye. He has won six Super Bowls. On Sunday he plays at age 10, which is the most unlikely since his first, which was 19 years ago and at a time when most people still considered him a placeholder for Drew Bledsoe.
For the next hundred years – maybe for the next thousand, maybe forever – it will be impossible to write NFL history without including Tom Brady’s name in the first few paragraphs. Even if Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs win it, and Mahomes gets a third of the way to Brady, and even if Mahomes one day equals or exceeds that number, Brady will stand as a memorial to excellence and to the ultimate goal of everybody. who plays, coaches or cares about football: win championships.
There is a problem with that indication.
SIZE doesn’t have a cute furry emoji like GOAT does. Most Accomplished, All Time has not – never will – get the same sound as Greatest Of All Time. And here’s the thing: it’s easy to confuse the two, or think of them as synonymous. They are not. The fact is, most of the men who played the position would rather be remembered as Brady will be remembered.
Even if those guys were – or are – better quarterbacks.
(For the 18 years before that, the next thing I should do would be to prepare for the influx of emails from Fairfield and Springfield, Montpelier and Providence, Bangor and Manchester, and hundreds of other charming New England towns – not to mention from Boston itself – which would fill my email with anger for the next few days. Fortunately, they took a short – albeit temporary – sabbatical to deify Brady. Instead, we’ll definitely hear from both Buccaneers fans in due course. )
“You’ve seen what he’s done this year,” Tampa coach Bruce Arians said earlier this week. “You’ve seen what he’s done throughout his career. You saw what he did in Green Bay [to win the NFC Championship]. What else can I add to that? “
Yes, Arians have spent the year learning what Bill Belichick knew (and might even admit if he poured a pint glass full of sodium pentothal) for every day since September 23, 2001, the day Mo Lewis nearly broke Bledsoe, the day Tom Brady for the first, old Foxboro Stadium trotted like QB1 for the first time: you want to win a soccer game, hand over the keys to Tom Brady. He will win you the soccer game. He has won 230 of the 299 games as an NFL quarterback. He is 33-11 in the playoffs. That’s a winning percentage of .767.
The most successful quarterback of all time.
But is he the best?
Is he better than Aaron Rodgers, who has the best quarterback rating of all time (104.3), who throws spirals so perfect they look more like art than athletics, who can run a bit, who does so much of his damage in the relentless bad weather of the NFC North, and who is a not-so-terrible 126-63-1 as a starter?
Is his career, pound for pound, better than Peyton Manning, who won two titles, made four Super Bowls for four different head coaches, owning five regular season MVPs from Brady’s three, who is recognized as a savant of the position and spent 15 years as an undisputed darling among fantasy football owners, sitting just behind Brady in fourth place on the QBR list, 96.62-95.71?
Let’s dust the records for this argument too. Before Brady, Joe Montana was the undisputed appointee as the MAAT, and he could make an equally compelling case for the GOAT since hitting 4-for-4 in Super Bowls, as he was the undisputed king of his generation (and not coincidentally, served as a hero and idol for a particular child growing up in San Mateo, California, named Thomas Edward Patrick Brady). Brady passed Montana in one category; would you put it higher in the other?
Two more names from the history books:
John Unitas has won three championships (two in the NFL, one Super Bowl) spanning 14 seasons. He was 118-63-4 in 176 years as Colt. At a time when even great quarterbacks routinely turned in completion rates below 50 percent and had more choices than TDs, Unitas had some very modern looking numbers: 54.7 percent completions, a 287-246 TD-INT percentage. His QBR (78.20) is 71st of all time, but of the 70 before him, only Fran Tarkenton, Roger Staubach and Bart Starr were his contemporaries; he was decades ahead of his time.
And what about Starr? It was his five-title record that Brady broke. Starr was the most essential Packer, even if it was Green Bay’s running game that deserved its mythology. Jerry Kramer, who’s been blocking for Starr all these years, once said, ‘If the old man’ – that would be Vince Lombardi – ‘invented something called the’ Packer Aerial Attack ‘instead of’ The Packer Sweep, ‘Starr records that no one could touch. “
Also get votes: Drew Brees… Dan Marino… Steve Young… Otto Graham… Sonny Jurgenson… Staubach… John Elway… YA Tittle… Terry Bradshaw… Dan Fouts…
Maybe a few others. And maybe if we could put together a Punt, Pass & Kick match for all ages, we could better estimate and judge this better. But of all 1,036 quarterbacks who have taken snaps in the NFL, only one has won six titles, with No. 7 on deck. The only one is the SIZE. Is he the GOAT too? Probably not. Ask him if he cares.