I don’t think Barry’s getting enough credit here. It’s funny how perception works; I always thought that one of his greatest gifts was getting through a hole, and it was a talent that was largely wasted.
Here’s what I think: pull up a Barry Sanders highlight reel. Pause it before the first run; notice the 9 men within 3 yards of the line of scrimmage. Then play the tape. The long runs will be divided into two kinds of runs – the ones where he takes the handoff and comes to a full two-footed stop almost immediately, freezes a defender or two in the backfield, and then finds daylight, and then the ones where he gets a seam and just fucking runs into the end zone without anybody near him. They’ll be divided about 80/20 in favor of the former.
Now, given the number of runs he had where he’s flatfooting defensive linemen in the backfield, what do you figure is the more likely explanation for all the negative yards and short runs: that he was missing holes and dancing for no reason, or that sometimes he didn’t make those unblocked defensive ends miss (or made them miss and got tackled by the linebacker or the safety)?
I know that sounds really simplistic and rudimentary, but seriously – how can you take a career of plays where there were clearly defenders in the backfield immediately, and not come to the conclusion that, you know, he may have danced a lot, and almost certainly sometimes he did it too much, but jesus christ did he have to work hard for his yards? How could you not think that he would have had even better numbers than Emmitt Smith if he was in Emmitt Smith’s position? Obviously we’re just not going to know, but how can you hold the negative yards against Barry Sanders when he so obviously knew HOW to hit a hole? Just how stupid was he, if he was very often not getting a hole to run through (and he wasn’t), and yet when he did get a hole, he ignored it? It’s just an impossible comparison, but I don’t think it’s really fair to say that he definitely wasn’t as good as X, Y, or Z (except Jim Brown).
And, to bring it back to the topic, that’s kind of what I think about Brady. He certainly can’t be excluded from the greatest ever conversation, because what has he done to eliminate himself? But seriously, who the fuck knows how good the rest of the Patriots are, or how good his receivers are without him, or how good he’d be on another team, or how good another quarterback would be on his team? You can’t subject them to double-blind studies. It’s not anything like baseball, where you can isolate, to at least some reasonable extent, a player’s performance from his surroundings. When you’re comparing football players, the quarterback is the offensive line is the defense is the coaching. What would Joe Montana’s 2000-era Patriots have looked like? What would Tom Brady’s 90s-era Packers have achieved? Who the F knows, right? But there’s certainly nothing in Brady’s career that disqualifies his claim to the greatest. I think that’s the fairest thing you can say.
Which isn’t to say you can never compare anybody to anybody else, obviously, and arguing about it is sort of what we do, but I feel like there’s a lot of attempts in this thread to boil down a comparison between players to a factor, or a set of factors, and say that this fact or that number or this theme categorically excludes somebody from the conversation, when in reality we’re all just deciding who looks better to us and finding evidence to back it up. At a certain level of fine-toothedness, you’re just making shit up.
That was a really boring post.