Did I just walk by a franchise QB?
Posted: January 30th, 2008 | Filed under: Other Sports | 49 Comments »
Comparing football players from different generations is fun, I think, but it’s generally pretty pointless. Baseball has changed through the years. But football is a completely different game now that it was thirty and forty years ago. The rules are different. The equipment’s different. The technology’s different. The coaching’s different. The training is different. The players are different. Linebackers are 40 pounds heavier and four-tenths of a second faster now. Offensive linemen are 60 pounds heavier and trained to move their feet like ballet dancers. Defensive backs can barely touch receivers. Quarterbacks don’t call their own plays and have to memorize playbooks roughly the size of Bill Clinton’s autobiography.*
*As everyone knows, we try to avoid political commentary here, so I recommend you smart people who don’t want politics in your blogs skip this footnote. Still here? Let me be the 4,384,857th person on the Internet to pronounce that I’m officially sick of Bill Clinton and just wish he would shut the hell up. Hey, I appreciate a guy wanting to fight for his wife — especially a guy who publicly humiliated his wife on a few occasions through the years. But, geez, Bill, you’re a former two-term President of the United States. You forced millions and millions of your supporters and fans to do all sorts of morally dubious posturing on your depraved White House sex life (“Well, hey, yeah, no, the cigar thing wasn’t cool, but, hey, I mean, but, uh, the economy’s good …). Come on man. Go build some houses for the poor. Go on peacekeeping missions to Egypt. Write a few more boring and long books about how we have to be charitable. Go check out books out at your library. Do something, anything, except injecting your angry, racially charged, politically crass screeds into this election. Go away.
OK, sorry, I hope you took my advice and skipped that part. My point is that when comparing football players through the years — Jim Brown to LaDainian Tomlinson; Dick Butkus to Brian Urlacher — it’s really more about emotion than anything else. Football numbers don’t really cross generations. Old highlights don’t really tell much of a story. It’s an experiment of imagination to try and guess what Paul Hornung might have been like in today’s football world, or how good Sam Huff, Night Train Lane or Jack Lambert might have been when pumped up on today’s performance enhancers and four hours every day of weight training (not that they would have done anything illegal, of course).
Still, it is fun, and so today I want to make a point about the greatest quarterbacks. To do this, I have chosen four quarterbacks who I think have the strongest case to be called the greatest of all time. Before I get to the main point, I probably should say that I picked those four quarterbacks based on three categories:
1. Championships (had to win multiple championships).
2. Production (i.e. statistical dominance in their time).
3. Command (Based on one question: Were they, without question, the driving force of their great teams?).
Using those three categories, I eliminated numerous quarterbacks who have very strong arguments to be the best quarterback ever. That’s not fair at all, I realize that. But I wanted to get it down to three or four guys, and I thought those categories were as good as any other. Here are a few quarterbacks who, for one reason or another, did not make the Final Four.
– Dan Marino: Never won a championship, plus you knew he wasn’t going to get on the list in this blog.
– John Elway: Probably belongs on the final list, but obviously as an old Browns fan I could not put him on the list. Also his numbers are surprisingly bland — 79.9 career rating — and when he won the two Super Bowls, I don’t think he was the unquestioned force of the team. That was Terrell Davis.
– Terry Bradshaw: Won the championships, but threw almost as many interceptions as touchdowns and I don’t think he was viewed (until maybe the last year) as the driving force of those great Steelers teams.
– Roger Staubach: He was the last guy I knocked off the list — his career was pretty short; he only was a full-time starter for seven seasons. But he was a great, great quarterback; probably has become underrated through the years.
– Brett Favre: One championship eliminates him; I would say this isn’t fair but that awful interception he threw against the Giants pretty much clinched his dismissal.
– Dan Fouts: My favorite ever numbers quarterback — much more than Marino, of course — but zero titles.
– Troy Aikman: Three championships, very accurate, but again (and this is purely subjective on my part) I always viewed him as part of the package, not the dominant guy on those Cowboys teams. To me Emmitt Smith was more the driving force.
– Bart Starr: Deserves respect; he was a truly great quarterback who probably never got his fair due. But it’s very clear that the driving force of those great Packers teams was Lombardi.
– Slingin’ Sammy Baugh: The game pre-World War II was just too different to bring into the picture; but it’s worth point out here that Baugh blocked nine punts in his career.
– Steve Young: An early comment wanted him to be in the almost list, and he deserves that. Didn’t make finals because he only one one championship. Of course, poor guy didn’t become a full-time NFL starter until he was 31.
– Peyton Manning: Has just the one championship so far.*
* Now, let me preface this by saying I really like Peyton. My wife loves the guy. I think he’s probably a great guy, and he’s a fabulous quarterback, and I put no qualifications on that. A point I want to make, though, is how quickly we will shift our thinking in society. Two years ago, Peyton Manning was pretty widely accepted to have a powerful loser gene in his DNA. He couldn’t win a championship in high school. He couldn’t beat Florida when he was at Tennessee. He kept losing playoff game after playoff game in the NFL. The image wasn’t entirely fair to Manning, but hey, when you play quarterback in the NFL that’s just the deal. Everybody piled on. I thought Jim Rome had the best line on Manning — basically said that while Manning never seemed to do anything too tragic, he was at the scene of a lot of accidents.
Well, then last year, Manning brought his team from behind against the Patriots, led the Colts to the Super Bowl victory, and he was transformed. Suddenly he was the complete package, a brilliant passer and tactician who had won the big game. He always had done a lot of TV stuff, but now he was in every other commercial (he had been great in commercials, but those Manning pep talk commercials were Lame-O). Now he was America’s quarterback. All of the “Peyton can’t win the big one†talk was flushed down the toilet and good for him.
So what happened this year? Manning was at home in the playoffs against a wounded Chargers team, he had two chances to win the game at the end, and he failed miserably both times. My point? Two years ago, Manning would have gotten torched by everybody for failing yet again. Instead, because of one Super Bowl run, I think Manning more or less made it through more or less untouched. It’s amazing how perception works in society.
– Bob Griese. Didn’t put up stats — those Dolphins ran the ball 60-plus percent of the time — and was viewed, I believe, more as a caretaker quarterback.
– Joe Namath. He only won the one championship, so he’s eliminated anyway, but I bring him up here to point out two points I love pointing out about Joe Namath.
1. His stats are HORRENDOUS. I realize the game was very different then, and you threw the ball downfield more so everybody threw a lot of interceptions, and receivers got mugged and all that. Even so, Namath’s career stats are startling. He completed 50.1 percent of his passes and never once completed even 53 percent in a season. He threw almost FIFTY MORE interceptions than touchdown passes and even in his great 1967 season, he threw more interceptions than touchdowns. Believe me, I am not trying to diminish Namath in any way — he’s a monster figure in football history, and his career was haunted by injury. I’m just saying, his statistics are shockingly bad.
2. After he led the Jets to the guarantee victory in Super Bowl III, he beat exactly one team with a winning record: the 1974 Miami Dolphins.
* * *
OK, so that brings us to the point. To me the four quarterbacks who right now, at this moment, have the strongest case to be in the Greatest of all Time photograph are:
1. Otto Graham. Dominant statistical passer (led his league in passing yards five times, passer rating four, and was All-Pro every single year), who led the Browns to first place in their division every year he was quarterback. And though you could argue that Paul Brown was really the dominant figure, players from those teams all point to Graham as a god.
2. John Unitas. Dominant statistical passer (led league in passing yards, four times and touchdown passes four times) who led team to three championships, including the “Greatest Game Ever Played.†As for command, if the NFL had its own currency (it’s only a matter of time), Unitas would be on the $1 bill.
3. Joe Montana. Dominant statistical passer (led league in completion percentage five times, rating and touchdown passes twice) who led 49ers to four Super Bowls and was a big part of changing the way professional football offenses are played. Bill Walsh was obviously a huge figure for those 49ers teams too, but Montana was the man, as he proved when he went to Kansas City as an old man and led Chiefs to the AFC Championship game.
4. Tom Brady. I know, you Jets fans are groaning, and it’s too soon to have him challenge any of the previous three. But there’s no denying a guy playing in his fourth Super Bowl who just set the NFL record with 50 touchdown passes in a season and had an obscene 117.1 quarterback rating. If he retired tomorrow, he’d be going to the Hall of Fame. If he keeps playing at this high level for another five or six seasons, he will be prominent in this greatest-ever discussion.
OK, now that we have the four I can FINALLY make my point. Look at those four — well, actually let’s leave off Graham for the moment since he played in a very different environment (and spent about half his career in the old All American Football Conference). Look at those big three — Unitas, Montana, Brady. What do you see?
How about three quarterbacks who absolutely did not fit the mold of what a quarterback was supposed to look like? How about three quarterbacks who were more or less ignored by the NFL geniuses? Unitas was taken in the ninth round (after George Shaw, Ralph Gugliemi and Dave Legett) and was playing on the sandlots of Pittsburgh when he got the call to the Colts.
Montana was taken in the third round (after Jack Thompson — the Throwin’ Somoan! — Phil Simms and Steve Fuller) and was viewed my many to have too weak an arm and too fragile to be an NFL quarterback.
Brady was taken in the sixth round (after Chad Pennington, Giovanni Carmazzi — gotta love ‘dem Hofstra quarterbacks — Chris Redman, Tee Martin, Marc Bulger and Spergon Wynn) and was thought so little of that (people forget this) the Patriots and Bill Belichick specifically signed Damon Huard to a fairly high-priced deal to be Drew Bledsoe’s backup quarterback going into the 2001 season. Now, Brady impressed Belichick enough to beat out Huard for the backup job, and then eventually Belichick stuck with the kid even after Bledsoe got healthy. Belichick deserves all the credit in the world for that. But don’t let anybody tell you the Patriots had any inkling what they had.
So there you go — three of the greatest and most successful quarterbacks in NFL history, and none of them were viewed as anything close to can’t-miss guys. None of them fit their era’s conventional ideals of what a quarterback should look like, throw like, run like, whatever. Going back to World War II, there have been 24 can’t miss quarterbacks coming out of college — those quarterbacks selected with the first overall pick in the draft. Some turned out to be all-time greats (Elway, Bradshaw, Aikman, P. Manning) some turned out to be spectacular busts (Couch, George, Terry Baker, King Hill) and there is a wide variety in between (Bledsoe, Plunkett, Vick, Testaverde, Gabriel, E. Manning).
But it seems to me that if you want a transcendent quarterback, one for the ages, you might find him on your bench. One of my favorite NFL stories ever is how Kurt Warner went from Hy-Vee Grocery stock boy to Super Bowl MVP. But my favorite part of it is not the rags to riches part. It’s the fact that all along, the Rams had a truly great quarterback — one who for three seasons was as good as anyone, ever — and they didn’t even notice. The shrewdest minds — men who get paid millions of dollars to know what’s counterfeit and what’s real, men who will spend hours watching films of PRACTICES, men who sleep on their couches in the office — just kept on playing Tony Banks, la la la, and they went out and got Trent Green, and they were in sheer panic mode when injuries forced them to play Warner.
How do you miss that sort of talent? How do you cut John Unitas? How do you watch Joe Montana play at Notre Dame and decide he can’t make it in the NFL? How do you decide Spergon Wynn has a better shot than Tom Brady?
It goes back to my theme these days. Nobody knows nothing. Teams plan and scout and study. They use knowledge built up over lifetimes. They break everything down to the minutest detail. And in the end, they can walk right by the greatest quarterbacks of all time in order to get some 6-foot-5 guy with a bazooka arm.
In the end, the Cardinals have reached two World Series and won one in large part because they took a flier in the 13th round on a junior college hitter in Kansas City, liked what they saw enough to call him up after one year in the minor leagues and then watched Albert Pujols become the greatest hitter of his generation. In the end, the Patriots are here in the Super Bowl again, and Bill Belichick is viewed as a super genius, and New England is viewed as the model franchise in sports in large part because one day eight years ago they took a flier in the sixth round on a part-time quarterback at Michigan, liked what they saw enough to eventually make him the backup, stuck with him after the starter got hurt. It’s fun to predict what will happen in sports — it’s fun, for instance, to go round and round on this Santana deal*. But the best part of sports is that no matter how hard you’re looking, you rarely see the big punch coming.
* A lot of people are saying that the Twins should have made one of the better deals that were on the table from Boston, New York or LA, but I am hearing from people in the game that those deals were never REALLY on the table …
Let me clarify here because I see a couple of comments about this. I’m certain these deals were discussed, and there may have been a time when the Twins indeed could have had Ellsbury or Phil Hughes or whatever. I don’t think the reporting was wrong at all. What I think — and again, I’m getting this from people in the game — is that, depending on where you get your information, you will get a slightly skewed view.
For instance, I remember a couple of years ago when it leaked out that a team had made a hefty offer for the then-in-demand Mike Sweeney. I got a call from then GM Allard Baird who is as honest as they come, and he swore up and down that it wasn’t true, that no offer had ever been made, and that the team had only leaked out that information to make itself LOOK like they were making a serious effort to get Sweeney. I suspect that the truth was somewhere in the gray; people hear what they hear and don’t always say what the mean and so on. But once it gets into print, it’s black and white.
Like I say, I don’t know. I’m just passing along what I’m hearing from folks in the game who might know. It’s quite possible that, as everyone suspects now, the Twins were offered Jacoby Ellsbury, were offered Phil Hughes, and simply held out too long and got caught with a subpar deal. It’s also possible that those names were discussed, were sort of, kind of offered and then the Yankees and Red Sox pulled out without ever REALLY putting those guys on the table. It’s also possible the Twins are not as high on Ellsbury or Hughes. There are lots of possibilities. Heck, anything’s possible.
The Mets, in any case, came out great. Nobody likes giving a 30-year-old pitcher a seven-year deal, which is what it might take, but I’m telling you now that Santana will win the NL Cy Young Award this year — there’s my first baseball prediction of 2008.
And I also want to say that as a guy who has watched Royals do this very pennies-on-the-dollar trading thing with Johnny Damon, Jermaine Dye (sort of) and Carlos Beltran, I feel real pain for Twins fans today. The money thing has been hashed, rehashed, covered and smothered but there really are days when it just sucks to be a fan of a small-market team with an insanely rich owner who won’t spend his own personal wealth. Even if this trade turns out great for Minnesota — even if Gomez becomes a star and those pitchers pan out — this trade is pure business, and it’s just no fun when business gets injected like sodium pentathol into your baseball bloodstream.
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Well, this is obviously an exercise with no right answer, but I am not sure I even agree with your basic criteria. For example, if a quarterback didn’t win multiple championships, he is automatically out?
This gives certain quaterbacks a lot of credit for having great teammates and better luck. For example, was Elway automatically better than Marino because in Elway’s decline phase he found himself on a team with Terrell Davis and a good defense, things Marino lacked? I think for most of their careers Marino was considered better than Elway, or at least equals, and I don’t think playoff success is a great tiebreaker.
Conversely, you are downgrading other quarterbacks (Bradshaw, Aikman) for having teammates that were actually too good. You’re left with that small group of quarterbacks that had good enough teammates to win championships, but not so good as to outshine their quarterback.
“I didn’t ask who gave the order. Because it had nothing to do with business.”
Regarding Graham, he was drafted as a running back by the Lions (albeit very high) and it took the genius of Paul Brown to make him a QB. And talk about command. He played one year for Rochester of the NBA and they won the title.
I’m surprised Steve Young didn’t even make the list of guys you cut.
Joe,
If those Red Sox and Yankees deals really weren’t on the table, aren’t you essentially telling us that every reporter at the Winter Meetings was simultaneously duped? Everyone in your profession was saying the only question was which deal the Twins would like more, and which of those teams would up their offer. NO ONE was saying those weren’t real deals. There were, at best, hints that maybe one of those teams was only in it to keep the other’s price high, but there was no suggestion that both teams were making offers just for show.
I guess, if they were all wrong, it does blend nicely into your “nobody knows nothing” theme for the day.
I just gotta point out that the Twin Cities are not a small market. They have the 16th biggest market in the country. Bigger than San Diego, bigger than Phoenix, bigger than St. Louis, bigger than Denver and just a bit smaller than Seattle. (source: http://tinyurl.com/ydser5). All those teams have significantly higher payrolls than the Twins have and less wealthy owners than the Twins have (only one close is the Mariners owner). Please spare me this whoa is me small market talk for the Twins. They have a crappy stadium that generates little revenue and a tight-wad owner who won’t spend on his team. That’s why they have a small payroll. It’s not because they’re in a small market!
Scratch that bigger than Phoenix comment. They, in fact, are smaller than Phoenix (13th), but not by a huge amount.
Regarding the QB’s, I’ve got no problems with your premise or your list, Joe. But not even a mention of Bobby Layne? Here’s his resume:
QB of 3 NFL champions in Detroit (‘52, ‘53, ‘57)
6-time All-Pro
Twce led the league in passing yards, led once in TD’s and completion percentage
Ran for almost 2500 yards, with a 4-yard average, and 25 TD’s
Even served a kicker a couple of years, and led the league in FG accuracy one season.
Hey, maybe he’s not one of the four greatest ever, but he’s got to be mentioned with those considered.
Baltimore is much smaller as well.
Also deserving mention – Norm Van Brocklin.
Joe—don’t you ever sleep? Between writing your Star columns, working on your book(s), putting out loooong daily blogs, and raising a family, you may want to take a day off. Not complaining, just wondering how you do it.
I am a VERY casual football fan (I only watch the SB and read sometimes if there’s something interesting in the news), I have only attended one game in my life (Browns-Ravens in Cleveland 2 years ago). Yet when I see the people in the Pro Football Hall of Fame I feel that there are no standards, other than “fame.” Namath would have never made the Baseball Hall of Fame with those stats, in essence he’s Jack Morris, a guy who played a great game and was sort of average in his career. Sure, Morris could make it someday but it won’t be an easy path as Namath’s.
And speaking of Johan in that footnote, he was originally in the Astros system but then was left open to the Rule V draft…as you were saying, nobody knows.
Not even a mention for Fran Tarkenton? Sure, he’s another four-time loser like Jim Kelly, but even getting to four Super Bowls looks like a real accomplishment–and his numbers, as I recall, were pretty impressive… 57% completion rate, 47,000 yards, 342 TD/ 266 interceptions. Come on, Joe!
I agree with Paul- if those Sox and Yanks offers were never on the table, even at the beginning, the entire baseball profession was duped. There is validity to saying that maybe those offers were largely posturing and that if the Twins had accepted one, that team might have taken a step back to reconsider. That being said, I think there’s a lot of validity to the claim that those offers haven’t really been on the table for quite some time. As Minnesota refused to accept the offers and time passed, both teams likely began to realize that they didn’t need to make the deal and that the other wouldn’t make it as well.
Minnesota thought that by being patient towards the Sox and Yanks, they would force some manner of panic. In retrospect, considering that those two clubs could easily afford to miss out on Santana and still contend, while Minnesota only increased their chances of getting nothing for Santana as time passed, it was an idiotic strategy.
Speaking of teams that didn’t know what they had, how ’bout them Cowboys? I realize that Tony Romo has now lost two playoff games that they really should have won (*), but come on. The guy is a very, very good QB, and those playoff wins will come. Whether he’ll ever win a Superbowl is anybody’s guess, but he’s going to be one of the top QBs in the league for the next ten years.
He sat on Dallas’ bench for what. Four years? Never got a shot. They preferred to play the corpse of Drew Bledsoe over him.
Then when he finally got his chance to start, he starts slinging TDs, making great plays outside of the pocket, and my brother-in-law and I (who are forced to watch many, many Cowboys games by dint of where we live) keep exclaiming to each other “Why the hell didn’t this guy play before??!”
It’s really unbelievable.
* I always have to rant whenever I think back on that Seahawks-Cowboys game where Romo shanks the hold on the potentially game-winning field goal.
Sure, it was a bad play, whether or not you believe the popular conspiracy theory that Seattle had put a slippery new ball into play or not. And nobody commits a blatant holding penalty and Romo tries to run and gets nailed, why didn’t he try to pass, etc etc etc.
But why is nobody ever complaining about the fact that it is insanely STUPID for a QB to have to be the holder for the field goal kicker??? I know that Bill Parcells like to assign that job to his backup QB. And we’ll debate on whether that’s smart or not some other time.
Romo had been starting for… five games at that point? So why wasn’t Bledsoe assigned as the holder? Why wasn’t some other schlub from the bench assigned as the holder?
How in God’s name does it make sense for your QB to be the freaking holder? The ONE hand on the team that you do NOT want to get injured is ~ 2 inches away from someone’s FOOT that’s kicking with a fair amount of power. What if the kicker slips and hits the holder’s hand with his foot? Breaks a few bones, gone is your QB.
Bill Parcells should have received a boatload more flack for that stupid play than was heaped on Tony Romo.
As for greatest QB ever. Joe Montana. But if Brady keeps going, it won’t even be a discussion anymore in five years.
Has a holder ever gotten injured the way that Creston suggests could have happened to Romo? I mean, kickers sometimes miss the goalposts, but do they ever miss, you know, the ball itself and kick their holders? And do the guys blocking the field goal ever go after the holder?
Brilliant post, but now I’m obsessed with the image of Charlie Brown giving Lucy the good kicking she deserved.
Sid Luckman was all about the championships. Still the best QB in Bears’ history, and probably always will be.
Explain how Troy Aikman’s 81.6 lifetime QB rating makes him that much better than John Elway’s 79.9? Aikman is not an ‘all-time’ great – he was merely a very good quarterback who happened to be surrounded by great talent. Elway never had a Michael Irvin, and until late in his career, lacked an Emmitt Smith too.
Also explain how Jeff George’s lifetime 80.4 QB rating makes him a bust, yet Elway and Aikman who played around the same time are shoo-ins for Canton?
Good article – though you started out with solid criteria, then went on to ignore them. The game *is* totally different. You also make a terrific point about forgotten men – though I maintain that Montana is more of a system quarterback than either Unitas or Brady, but who can really say?
About this passer rating thing. Let’s start with the obvious. Football is much more of a team game than baseball. So when you talk individual stats if football, it’s not the same as baseball. A guy with a low ERA or high OBP is not relying as much on his teammates as a guy with a high passer rating. Let’s just use one glaring example.
Do you know who had the highest single season passer rating prior to 1989? Johnny U, you say? No Norm VanBroklin? Nope. How about Sammy Baugh? Not him either. No, it’s was Milt Plum. That’s right, Milton Ross Plum, the pride of the Cleveland Browns and the terror of the National Football League. How is possible that a journeyman like the Milton could put up the best, up til then, QB rating? Simple, in 1960 when Plum put up a QB rating of 110.4 the Browns hadda coupla running backs named Jim Brown and Bobby Mitchell. Many of Plum’s passes were high percentage dinks and screens to Mr.s Brown and Mitchell that they would turn into 40-50 yard TDs. Your Aunt Tillie coulda thrown these passes. To this day that season is the fifth best single season QB rating of all time – of all time for god’s sake.
So I take the QB rating thingy with a grain of salt – just like the NFL title thing. In football, unlike baseball, you need the horses around you if you’re gonna succeed.
I agree that Football is much more of a team game than baseball. Baseball is a team game based primarily on the individual match-ups of hitters and pitchers. Baseball defense is one of the only spots were team play can really affect statistics (aside from of course hitting counting stats like R and RBI).
I know they’re “Grey Cups” but Warren Moon won 5 of them. (In a row) And his pro career was not too shabby. I loved watching that spread “run and shoot” offense he had and feel he’s worth mentioning on anyone’s also ran “greatest QB’S EVER”. After all, if the NFL wanted him as a QB and not a tight end – forcing him to Canada – who knows? 58.4 career completions, 50k passing yards and yes, only an 80.9 rating but his prime was in Canada.
I may agree that nobody knows anything as a premise. Unfortunately, it never seems like the Royals or Chiefs benefit from this logic.
It could have worked out where John Buck hit 30 homers and Mark Teahen consistently hit .320 with 25 homers in exchange for Beltran, but it never seems to work for them.
Same with the Chiefs. Mike Elkins, Matt Blundin, Todd Blackledge and Brody Croyle could have been sleepers, but it never works out that way.
Here’s another puzzle for you hyper intelligent sports fans out there. Best African American QB’s of all time. Here’s the short list (apologies to whomever I left out – I’m only putting in “modern era” guys)
Warren Moon
Randall Cunningham
Michael Vick
Doug Williams
Rodney Pete
Vince Evans
Andre Ware
Kordell Stewart
Steve McNair
Donovan McNabb
Duante Culpepper
Aaron Brooks
I’d take. 1) Moon 2) McNabb 3) Williams 4) Cunningham 4) McNair
Watched the Rams-Pats Super Bowl on NFL Net last night and my wife (huge Brady fan and new to football) was SHOCKED by Tom Brady’s physique. He was a little bit chubby in his photo and a little awkward at times in the pocket and lacked a strong arm. She decided to launch her own HGH rumor…….. After seeing his draft combine photo there might be something there.
Do you think that maybe, just maybe, the offensive line is more important than who you throw in at QB? Comparing game film (in my mind) between, say, the 2004 Detroit Lions and the 2007 Patriots and the immediate thing that I notice is not that Brady is far better than (first round draft pick) Joey Harrington, it’s that Brady has so much more time in the pocket to find an open receiver.
People make that comment a lot about the Patriots, but Brady’s probably the best at the game in moving around inside the pocket. He deserves much of the credit for the time he gets to throw.
Was Brady really the driving force between the championship Pats teams? In the first one, he was a rookie (Bledsoe actually played most of the AFC Championship game). And t0 me he looked more like the supreme game manager than the undisputed focal point of the team – the Pats D sure gave him a lot of short fields.
Statistically, Brady isn’t even close to Manning. As impressive as Brady was this year, Manning’s 2004 was better – Manning’s rating was 120-something.
Regardless of the criteria used to pick the top QBs, Joe’s theme of “Nobody knows nothing” is well taken. Well worth keeping in mind as we will soon be inundated with NFL combine and draft stories.
K-State beats Kansas for the first time in ages. I sense a new blog entry coming very soon ….
rj, Brady was a caretaker and game manager in 2001 – he avoided mistakes instead of trying to make plays.
In 2003 and 2004, he was the unquestioned leader of the team, on and off the field.
2007 obviously speaks for itself – I just hope it ends with a win Sunday.
Joe, you write about Namath:
“After he led the Jets to the guarantee victory in Super Bowl III, he beat exactly one team with a winning record: the 1974 Miami Dolphins.”
Can that possibly be true? I looked at just one season at random — 1974 — and discovered that he beat the 9-5 Buffalo Bills on the second-to-last game of the season. Are there are victories against winning teams that we aren’t counting?
Joe, I think you missed an important point: your four greatest QBs came from teams that:
1) picked up a superstar player for peanuts
2) won multiple championships, which is more indicative of a strong, deep organization that one amazing player.
Whereas your “almost made it” guys were well-hyped guys that anyone would have taken.
So what you’re finding is that teams that win multiple championships tend to be smart at picking up cheap talent, not just at QB but over the entire roster.
It’s generally agreed that the Patriots are one of the best-run teams out there, constantly finding low-draft talent and bringing in players that can fill a role cheaply. Brady is the best product of that system. I’m curious as to whether the other teams were known for their excellent scouting.
Regarding Paul’s and Greg’s comments — essentially, “if those Sox and Yanks offers were never on the table… the entire baseball profession was duped” — we must be reading different publications. I read quite a bit of speculation that those offers by the Sox and Yanks were mere gamesmanship. What’s more, the rumors coming out of Nashville were so various and so scattered that it was hard to take any of them too seriously. I’m not claiming I’ve got perfect foresight — at one point I thought Santana would actually start the season with the Twins — but I never thought the Yanks would deal Hughes, nor did I think the Red Sox were very serious suitors.
(I didn’t read the political rant, and I absolutely agree with it)
I disqualify myself for quarterbacks pre-Montana. I haven’t paid much attention since then. It’s also true that Unitas and Starr and Baugh (much less Otto) were pretty much myths by the time I got around to it.
But I did pay a lot of attention from ‘71-86 or so.
If I had to pick one quarterback, for an afternoon, to keep space aliens from getting at earth women or claming the White House, or whatever, it would undoubtedly be Joe Namath. And not just because of his proficiency with women (“I have just as much sex as him,” quoth Staubach, “it’s just all with the same woman.”) Namath was incredible when the stars were right, and he was a LEADER like no one else I’ve ever seen. No one’s been close, before or since. (he could also be absolutely unbelievably terrible) Then Bradshaw-who really knew how to work with what he had and could throw it a mile if it came to that, and Montana.
If we were playing an underdog team, Neptunians for example, Bob Griese knew how to work his advantage without blowing it, Montana also.
For a career of consistency I’d put Len Dawson ahead of Unitas and Montana… He was incredible every year, and although Otis Taylor was world class Lenny more often had to throw to guys like me and you. And he still completed ‘em!
for just the fun of watching Marino wins easy and only Namath’s anywhere close.
I’m sorry, I just read my own post and it’s woefully inadequate.
in terms of leadership stuff, however capitalized
Joe Willie Namath was the guy who united the most bizarre group of football champions ever -Wahoo McDaniel, Johnny Sample, Emerson Boozer, Maynard & Sauer…guys who probably would have been drummed out of the game if they’d showed up in the post-Duane Thomas era…
…and a lot of people think they beat the living crap out of the Colts…
In his book, “I Can’t Wait Until Tomorrow…Because I Get Better Looking Every Day,” – the best sports book I’ve ever read including Tug McGraw and Satchel Paige, there’s a beautiful chapter about hanging out with a hottie and watching Colts films. The greatest defense ever, everyone said. “I only hoped that they wouldn’t do anything different,” Joe wrote.
The game chapter title is “Who’d They Think They Were Messin’ With, the Rams?”
Rep. Kucinich has just announced that he supports sending Bill Clinton on an intergalatic peace keeping mission to Zelnorm in order to prevent the type of carnage we witnessed in Cloverfield. Also, Ron Paul has declared that Cloverfield was an “inside job” and that if we’d have simply abolished the Federal Reserve that everything would have been fine.
Are they going to put an asterisk by the Patriots title? Not because of Spygate but because Rodney Harrison admitted to HGH.
I can’t put anybody in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in this era of steroids. We can’t believe any of the records. How do we know the Pats aren’t juiced?
I am sure Congress plans to subpoena Shawn Merriman, John Welbourn and Sean Rogers to get to the bottom of performance enhancing drugs in the NFL, right?
The real keys to being a great quarterback on the pro-level are leadership and decision-making, qualities that are impossible to determine while a guy is on the bench. Tom Brady wasn’t just a 6th round pick, he was on the bench in college! Yet I tell you honestly from the very 1st game I saw after Drew Bledsoe was hurt, I knew he was better than (#1 pick franchise qb) Drew ever was… sure, his ARM wasn’t as strong, but he was SMART. He stayed calm in the pocket and made good decisions, and that’s a lot easier to get behind than the nervous nellie Bledsoe had become.
Also, let’s face it: to display your greatness according to these standards, you have to have a great team around you. When you invest in a “franchise” QB, that becomes the team’s focus, and all the other players are just window dressing. By settling for “game managers” these teams struck gold!
First, let me say that I am supremely biased regarding John Elway; he was the only quarterback I knew for my favorite team from the time I was aware of football until he retired when I was 19. Still, I think you’re underrating him for all the wrong reasons. Elway, more than any other quarterback in the Super Bowl Era, CARRIED an entired team. Those 80’s Broncos teams were, to be perfectly honest, not very good. They had receivers that wouldn’t have had careers without Elway (Elway didn’t have an even borderline Pro Bowl receiver until the mid-90’s), backs that would have had trouble making special teams for most of the other great teams of the era, and a defense that was at it’s most, passable. Karl Mecklenburg, Simon Fletcher and Dennis Smith were reasonably good football players, but no one was going to confuse them with Singletary, Dent, or Lott. And yet, three different times in the 80’s (and at the expense of your Browns, Joe, for which I am as mildly sorry as I could possibly be), Elway led those bunch of mediocre football players to Super Bowls they truly had no business being in. I’ll admit that Elway’s statistics aren’t the flashiest, and he certainly had his Favre-like moments, but he did win more games than anyone else until Favre broke his record somewhat recently. Call me crazy, but I think doing more with less should count for something.
“nobody knows nothingâ€
Indeed. But it’s true elsewhere as well. Look at the economy and subprime disaster. Really bright folks paid lots of money and the subprime mess came out of nowhere (I realize there were people that knew, but no one was saying much and a lot of bright people did miss it entirely). The same is true in almost every line of work. Bright people decide that because they’re bright, they must be right. It almost never works out that way. Global warming, the election, the economy, how cancer works….I promise we don’t know everything we need to know and much of what we “know” will prove to be wrong. In some cases we’ll benefit, in some we’ll get screwed, but this principle goes far beyond the QB sitting on the bench. And I think it’s great that a really talented writer is writing about it. It needs to be screamed from the rooftops. There is far too much certainty in today’s reporting.
Rebecca, though Brady sat behind Brian Griese when Michigan won a share of the title in 1997, he was 20-5 as a starter his last two years. Everyone thinks he was benched for Drew Henson, but that wasn’t the case – Lloyd Carr brought Henson in for a few series (serieses?) each game but Brady ultimately won out and started every game at Michigan in 1998 and 1999, with his last game being a come-from-behind victory over Shaun Alexander and Alabama in the Orange Bowl.
I’m surprised Joe referred to Joe Namath’s stats as “shockingly bad” without considering the context more closely.
The game was much different. Until 1975, with the exception of 1970, Joe Willie’s QB rating was annually 20-25% better than the overall league rating. In 1968, for instance, while his rating of 72.1 looks ordinary, the entire AFL had a rating of 59.5; JWN was 21% above the league rating.
Referring to his stats as bad as shockingly bad without putting them in context is like saying hitters in the 1960s were bad because they were hitting .270 instead of .300.
Added point for emphasis – this past season, Peyton Manning’s QB rating of 98.0 was, by coincidence, 21% better than the league rating of 80.9.
“Added point for emphasis – this past season, Peyton Manning’s QB rating of 98.0 was, by coincidence, 21% better than the league rating of 80.9.”
Which makes Milt Plum’s 110.4 in 1960 even more outstanding.
QB ratings are useless, unless you consider who the QB’s supporting cast is.
Hey, I appreciate a guy wanting to fight for his wife — especially a guy who publicly humiliated his wife on a few occasions through the years
I know nothing about football and less about politics, but I’d like to comment on the above statement.
You can’t really humiliate someone else by behaving badly. You can only humiliate yourself. I guess if you’re incapable of feeling shame, you can’t even humiliate yourself.
Sal, Congress will get to Harrison, Merriman, et al. just as soon as they get done investigating the organizational PED usage of the Carolina Panthers. (What ever happened with that story?)
The NFL’s response to PEDs: “What PEDs? Look, cheerleaders!”
I don’t know, Mike. I think cheating on one’s spouse is pretty humiliating to the spouse. I’ve never known one who felt good about it.
You could be right. According to the dictionary definition (as I read it) humiliation is a pretty subjective emotion. It’s how you feel, no matter the cause. I guess you could be humiliated because it was raining if it affected you that way.
Okay. Last time.
Pay the players based on performance. Small market teams. All Star Game. Playoffs. World Series. Hall of Fame. Fantasy Leagues – I’ve got the leading money winner at shortstop on my team… Or, my reliever is really cleaning up this year… Make the League a bigger part of the equation in Baseball. Then maybe kids would have a better chance to watch a team like Bench, Rose, Perez, Morgan, Griffey, Foster, Concepcion, etc., together during the years of their youth.