Smith did play 134 games in the NFL, which is a long career, so he was doing something out there. It’s hard, as others have pointed out, to compare defensive players.
Smith played really well for the Raiders after he left Seattle, but then he got hurt/
Ironic given that he was part of the so-called “No-Name Defense”. He had 5 Pro Bowl seasons, note, and I saw the bugger play, he was pretty good.
Fair. He was good just before I started following football, so that might explain it.
Gotta be the worst to win 2 SB MVPs?
I do think it’s interesting that he and Jay Cutler have extremely similar stats but one if a punchline and one is future HOF, as you mentioned.
yes, amazing what a couple super bowl wins (including one over the best team ever) will do for your legacy. To be fair to Cutler, while he did catch a lot of flack, he was also usually recognized as having great talent as well.
I can’t get behind any votes for Doug Williams given how much weight he had to carry for a shitty Tampa Bay franchise, one he helped turn around shortly after it entered the league.
Now Mark Rypien, he’s tempting, but at least he had two good seasons before he tanked.
Here they are by number of MVPs and then alphabetically:
5 Tom Brady
3 Patrick Mahomes, Joe Montana
2 Terry Bradshaw, Eli Manning, Bart Starr
I think in terms of being accomplished, you have to put Eli third with only two championships compared to four for Bradshaw and five for Starr. If I had to pick a guy in their prime to lead my team in the modern era, I would absolutely pick Eli over the other two. But that’s not the same question. So I guess it depends on how you define “worst.”
EDIT: Starr won five championships, not three.
You’d also pick any current QB at random over them too i.e. it’s an era thing not an Eli thing.
IMHO, the mockery of Eli Manning is unjustified. As a Cowboys fan, I saw him repeatedly shred Dallas’ secondary and he was one of the most formidable opposing QBs during his Super Bowl period. (Of course, though, Dallas’ pass defense just sucked.)
I mean, it doesn’t quite feel like the 2010s were a previous era, but in another few years, yes, 100%. Your larger point that it isn’t an Eli thing is spot on.
As a Giants fan back then, I have to disagree. There was no defeat that he somehow couldn’t pull from the jaws of victory. He was like the opposite of Brady and Rodgers back then – with them at the helm, you knew the team always had a chance. With Manning, you wondered how he would screw it up this week.
Of course, I now yearn for the stressful days of Manning at QB considering the last few lost years.
Well, I mean, he did beat both Brady and Rodgers in the playoffs.
Yeah, somehow. Man, it was stressful to watch the Giants back then. Much easier to watch now, when there’s no hope.
Interesting take, and I think every fan of every franchise in every sport can relate. When your team is bad, each loss is expected, and each win is cause for mild celebration. When they’re good, each win is expected, and each loss is cause for deep despair.
Yes, exactly. Except this year, I suppose, when the Giants couldn’t even tank properly and won a game near the end of the year, losing them the first pick.
Anyway, back to the worst Super Bowl MVP! I’m on the Nick Foles train for this.
Errrr…even four years before his Super Bowl season, Foles had a season (2013) where he threw 27 touchdown passes and only 2 interceptions. The guy was solid indeed.
He was good even without the Lombardi.
In 2015, Manning completed 62.4 eprcent of his passes. He threw for 35 touchdowns, was picked off only 14 times, and had a passer rating of 93.6. The Giants went 6-10.
I mean, if you did that in, say, 1978, he’d have been the greatest QB who ever lived and his team would have gone 15-1. It’s bizarre to me how radically the standards changed.
Foles was amazing that year but injuries kinda laid him low.
Most of the (short, Google-guided) reading I’ve done lately on the topic point to three main factors:
Rule changes to protect quarterbacks and hinder defensive backs, thus making passing plays easier to connect. Woody Hayes’s maxim that there are two bad things that can happen on a pass play for every one good thing becomes less compelling when your “good thing” is happening 2/3rds of the time.
Cultural change centered around Bill Walsh’s West Coast offense, throwing the ball downfield less frequently and focusing on short routes which use the entire width of the field to free up space outside of the tackle box. In a sense, it is an innovation borne of the realization that the ball can move faster being passed than by being carried (also an adage in soccer, btw).
Improved player development, particularly of QBs, looking at footwork, training in complex reads and progressions from one option to another, but also improving line play with pass blocking technique and more precise route running by receivers, including tight ends and running backs.
I also almost wonder if the development and use of passer rating has contributed to its own rise, based on the adage that “you optimize what you measure”.
Out of curiousity, I watched a youtube video of Lynn Swann’s four SB X catches. In those plays, Bradshaw’s footwork isn’t near as precise as a league average modern QB’s, he only starts his reads after his dropback (and that alone is a major difference - I think the shotgun formation is used a lot more these days in passing situations to allow the QB to get his reads in faster), he fixates on Swann for what seems like a huge amount of time, he and Swann have to deal with much more downfield contact, and - schemewise - they keep running backs in on passing downs, who stay in the backfield to block rather than providing options in the flat. It’s not a representative sample, of course, but it shows how the game changed a lot between then and 15-20 years later, and kept changing up until 15 years or so ago when I stopped keeping up with football.
My vote is for Joe Flacco. He is an experienced and solid backup but, when compared to the other QB MVPs such as Brady, Mahomes, the Manning brothers, etc, he is pretty weak career wise.