The title pretty much says it all, but here’s an article that has some more details.
[QUOTE=ESPN]
Brady, 39, has mostly deflected all praise relating to his lofty standing.
“It’s a team sport. Individual awards and things like that mean that I’ve been a part of great teams with great coaches and great teammates,” he said after win No. 200 last Sunday. “I’ve had a lot of really great support over the years, so hopefully we can keep winning. It never gets old.”
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Brady passes Peyton Manning, who had eked out Brett Favre. The next closest active players are Drew Brees, Ben Roethlisberger and Eli Manning, none of whom will ever get close, so Brady will be hanging onto this record for a long time. And of course, he’s still adding to it.
Brady is a great quarterback - possibly my all-time favorite. It’s still debatable whether he’s the greatest of all time. Manning has gone to 4 Super Bowls with 2 different teams and 4 different coaches.
It is definitely debatable - it always will be, particularly with a team sport - but I think this milestone is one more piece of data in Brady’s favor, along with his win %, playoff record, etc.
I always had this argument during college/post-college/grad school because I lived in Indiana and Colts fans were, understandably, everywhere.
Manning’s Colts teams would very often be way up in the third/fourth quarter and he was still throwing 20-yard outs and passing for TDs. He didn’t need to be doing any of these, but he constantly did. He had multiple 5 to 7 yard TD games that could easily have stopped at 4.
Yes, Brady did the same thing. Once. Manning did this for multiple years.
It’s not that Manning isn’t a good QB, it’s just that he played the game in order to pad his stats moreso than he needed. He also was aided by multiple HOFs on his side of the ball.
Brady won his Super Bowls with much, much less behind him. He threw to the likes of Rece Caldwell and literally that’s the only name I remember. Troy Brown? I think he was there too. He handed the ball to Kevin Faulk. His only HOF players were on defense.
What I mean to say is, Brady won more with less. He was forced to do more because he didn’t have the surrounding cast around him making it easier for him. Both QBs are good, but Brady had to work so much harder at doing what he did that it makes his greatness lie beyond the stats.
(Just wanna say too. As a lifelong Packers fan, I have no dog in this fight from a pesonal/fandom point of view)
Brady IS great, and surely belongs on anybody’s short list of the best ever.
But he’s also very lucky, and he knows it. Unlike most young quarterbacks, he never had to play for a bad, rebuilding team. He took over for Drew Bledsoe on a team that was already championship caliber. He didn’t have to spend two or three years taking his lumps and going 3-13 while the team gradually improved.
Wins remain a silly way to measure individual’s skill in a team sport. It turns out football has a lot of players and they have something to do with whether you win or lose.
You got any evidence on this, because a cursory look at Manning’s career stats says it is nonsense. For example, Manning’s best numbers occurred in the first quarter and most games are relatively close then.
I think Brady – as Belichick said- is underrated for his situational awareness, which doesn’t always show up in stats.
But he shouldn’t get too much credit for the wins. Since he became the starter he’s got a winning percentage of 77%. Pretty good, but worth noting that in that sane time period, in games without him the Patriots are 14-6. If you throw out the game where the Patriots were playing with an injured rookie third-stringer at QB, their winning percentage is 74%.
74% vs 77% is not exactly evidence that Brady is the only, or even main, reason for the wins (particularly when you compare Matt Cassell’s record with the Patriots and elsewhere).
Whether or not Brady is the best quarterback of all time (Hint: He is) doesn’t matter. He is absolutely the winningest QB of all time. He has played for a great team and he couldn’t have done it without that, but give him credit for what he did.
He’s the quarterback who played in the most games his team has won. This both emphasizes the fact that the team was important (would he have done as well on any other franchise in the NFL? Doubtful.), and points out that he was involved in the process. (Would the Patriots have been as dominant over the long run without him? Doubtful.)
I don’t hate the Patriots, or even really dislike them (as a life-long (50 years +!) Packers fan, don’t even get me started on the 'Boys). They have been impressive for 16 years now. There’s been no real ups and downs. Instrumental in this effort has been the leadership of Tom Brady. The comparable run by the 49ers was 18 seasons, of which Joe Montana was at the helm 10. In that time frame, Montana managed four Super Bowl wins with no Super Bowl losses. The comparable Brady/Patriot period would produce three Super Bowl wins and two losses. But even over that 11 year comparison, Brady’s Patriots won more games (123 to 118).
Comparing stats is meaningless; the game in the 80s was different than the game was in the 2000s. The NFL was just learning that passing could be entertaining. The total wins stat, though based more upon team effort than personal accomplishment, does tend to suggest that Brady is a cut above even Joe Montana.
Do you have anything tangible to back this up? I’m not about to crawl through his entire career stats to try and prove/disprove it. I did scope out his 2003 season, to see if what you said was true. I looked for games that were decided by more than 10 points, where Manning was still chucking away late in games. What I found: Week 2: Colts 33 Tennesseee 7 - Manning throws for a whopping 173 yards. Week 4: Colts 55 Saints 21 - Manning taken out after the 3rd quarter, Brock Huard takes over. Week 7: Colts 30 Texans 21 - Manning throws for a whopping 10 yards, as the Colts run the ball 23 times in the 4th quarter. Week 14: Colts 38 Falcons 7 - Manning rests the entire 4th quarter as it turns into Huard time.
Now, I know those are a small sample size, but if you’re asserting he’s somehow padding stats when the game is over, I think these examples clearly indicate the opposite. This was his MVP year, where he put up great stats, and still he was taken out for the 4th quarter twice, and the Colts ran the ball the rest of them. I’m not about to go through his entire career, but I see nothing at all to support your recollections, and in fact all I found tends to disprove it.
Sure. Just once.
Umm, defense is kinda a big thing in winning football games, especially in the playoffs. Manning had to carry his team for years, because by and large, his defenses weren’t that great. Brady usually had a solid, if not elite, defense. That’s not to take anything away from Brady, he’s clearly one of the greatest QB’s of all time. But this whole denigrating Manning thing that tends to happen when discussing Brady simply isn’t accurate.
As a Packer fan yourself, I think you’d know that, though Aaron Rodgers is one of the best QB’s in the NFL, the Packers have only won one championship, mostly because their defense has been lacking, or collapses late in games, or a special teamer fucks up. Rodgers, so far in his career, has often had to carry the Packers to victories, just like Manning had to.
Nope, no stats to back anything up and I don’t have enough care in the argument to really dig up and make my point.
Credit where credit is due, Manning did have to carry a lot of the team during those years and did so very well. But he did have a high powered offense behind him. In the days that his defense let him down, he could make up for it. The days that Brady’s defense let him down it became much more of a burden to overcome.
Just curious: Did you change your mind at all with what I provided? Are you still convinced your recollection is correct despite actual evidence to the contrary? Will you continue to disparage Manning as a stat - padder unless someone goes through every single game he played to show you wrong?
Brady has never won a Super Bowl without a defense that was ranked worse than 8th in scoring defense for the year (1st, 2nd, 6th and 8th). Manning won his one with the Colts with a defense that was ranked 23rd.
Which really doesn’t matter, because Super Bowl wins are an incredibly stupid way to measure QB play. But you don’t have disparage Manning to recognize Brady’s greatness.
GOAT discussions are entertaining but it’s like debating which flavor of ice cream is best. There are a lot of great quarterbacks, including some who don’t have championship rings. A quarterback doesn’t win super bowls by himself. Arguably the single most important player, but he’s nothing without an offensive line to protect him, a backfield that forces the defense to respect the run, and receivers who can get yards after the catch – oh and a defense that keeps the other teams from scoring.
Beyond that, coaching is also relevant to the discussion, particularly when quarterbacks come into the league and are trying to develop and gain confidence against better competition. Brady would have likely been a good quarterback anywhere but would he be as ‘great’ if he had started his career with the Arizona Cardinals or Cincinnati Bengals in 1999 or 2000? Hard to know.
