First an explanation:
Tom Brady is the most capable fullback among the 1,036 men who have made another comeback as an NFL fullback. He won six Super Bowls. On Sunday, he plays in his tenth, which is the most unlikely one since his first, which was 19 years ago, and at a time when most people still regarded him as a placeholder for Drew Bledsoe.
For the next hundred years – maybe for the next thousand, maybe forever – it will be impossible to write the history of the NFL without including Tom Brady’s name in the first few paragraphs. Even if Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs win this one, and Mahomes gets a third of the way to Brady, and even if Mahomes will one day match or surpass the number, Brady will be a memorial to excellence and the ultimate goal of anyone who play football, coach or care: win championships.
There is a problem with that name.
MATE does not have a cute hairy emoji like BOAT has. Most complete, all times do not – never – have the same ring as the greatest of all time. And this is the thing: it’s easy to confuse the two of them, or to think of synonyms. They are not. The fact is that most of the men who played the position would rather be remembered, as Brady will be remembered.
Even if the guys were or were better backs.
(For the 18 years before this one, the next thing I had to do was prepare for the influx of emails from Fairfield and Springfield, Montpelier and Providence, Bangor and Manchester and hundreds of other charming towns in New England – to say nothing of Boston itself – which would fill my email with rage over the next few days.Unfortunately they took a short (if temporary) sabbatical to deify Brady.Instead we will surely be on time heard from both Buccaneers fans.)
“You saw what he did this year,” Tampa coach Bruce Arians said earlier this week. ‘You’ve seen what he’s done his whole career. You saw what he did in Green Bay [to win the NFC Championship]. What else can I add to that? ”
Yes, Arians have been learning all year what Bill Belichick knew (and can even admit if he threw a pint glass full of sodium pentotal) for every day since September 23, 2001, the day Mo Lewis almost broke Bledsoe, the day Tom Brady jogged for the first time. old Foxboro Stadium for the first time as a QB1: you want to win a football game, give the keys to Tom Brady. He will win the football match for you. He has won 230 of 299 games as an NFL quarterback. He is 33-11 in the playoffs. This is a winning percentage of .767.
Most capable quarterback, all time.
But is he the best?
Is he better than Aaron Rodgers, who has the best quarterback of all time (104.3), who throws spirals so beautifully that they look more like art than athletics, who can run a little, who has done so much of his damage? the relentless dirty weather of the NFC North, and who’s a non-terrible 126-63-1 as an appetizer?
Is his career, pound for pound, better than Peyton Manning, who has won two titles, won four Super Bowls for four different head coaches, has five MVPs in the regular season for Brady’s three, who is recognized as a savior of the position and spent 15 years as an undisputed darling among fantasy football owners and who sits just behind Brady in fourth place on the QBR list, 96.62-95.71?
Let us also dust off the archives for this argument. Before Brady, Joe Montana was the undisputed delegate as the PARTNER, and he could make an equally convincing case for the BOK since he was 4-for-4 in Super Bowls, as he was the undisputed king of his generation (and, no coincidence not). , served as a hero and idol for a certain child who grew up in San Mateo, California, named Thomas Edward Patrick Brady). Brady overtook Montana in the one category; would you rank him higher in the other list?
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 big backs regularly scored completion percentages below 50 percent and chose more than TDs, Unitas had some awful modern figures: 54.7 percent completions, a rate of 287-246 TD-INT. His QBR (78.20) is 71st at all times, 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 record of five titles that broke Brady. Starr was the most important Packer, even though it was Green Bay’s running game that deserved its mythology. Jerry Kramer, who has been blocking Starr for years, once said: ‘If the old man’ – that would be Vince Lombardi – ‘invented something called’ Packer Aerial Attack ‘instead of’ The Packer Sweep ‘, Starr had set records that no one could touch. ”
Also receiving votes: Drew Brees… Dan Marino… Steve Young… Otto Graham… Sonny Jurgenson… Staubach… John Elway… YA Tittle… Terry Bradshaw… Dan Fouts…
A few others, perhaps. And maybe, if we could put together a Point, Pass & Kick competition for centuries, we could judge it better and judge it better. But of all 1,036 fullbacks who made a turn in the NFL, only one won six titles, with number 7 on the deck. Only one is the SIZE. Is he also the BOK? Probably not. Ask him out well if he is no longer absorbed in the connection.