Draw a conclusion on what? I don’t mean to be a dick but you did mention nerdy, so I’m just trying to be as semantically specific as possible since you’re trying to make a statistically-driven statement.
I was going to bring up Dan Marino because he is the poster child for this kind of discussion. I’m surprised it took as many posts as it did for someone to bring him up.
Marino was one of the best QBs in the history of the game, and has no super bowl ring.
End of discussion.
I certainly agree with the consensus that 4-1 is better than 4-0 for the same number of seasons.
The only question you could ask is if 4-0 in 4 seasons is a bigger acomplishment than 4-1 in 5.
For example, suppose a guy is 4-0 in his first 4 seasons and then retires or gets injured, and another is 4-1 in 5 before his career is similarly ended. Who is more accomplished?
On which quarterback is better. You can’t look at 4 or 5 games by each and decide on the basis of W/L which QB is better.
Hmm, I guess it’d be more accurate to say we’re talking about 4-5 seasons worth of games, since you have 16 regular season games plus at least two, possibly 3 playoff games to even be in the SB.
Probably not such a small sample size…
That wasn’t the question, though. It moots the original question to consider the seasons leading up to the Superbowls, since the question would then be which QB is better considering their body of work in addition to Superbowl wins.
And if we’re considering body of work, it’s much less important if you’re 4-1 or 4-0 in Superbowls. It presupposes (because Mike and Mike were trolling) that other than Superbowl appearances and wins, the QBs are otherwise pretty similar. And that’s almost never the case.
As noted, Dan Marino is still a better QB than the majority of QBs who have ever won a Superbowl or even simply appeared in one (except for himself - it’d be weird to be better than yourself). So, at 0-1, I’d put him above 2-0 Eli Manning. For purposes of this thread, though, that’s a nonsensical answer. I can only conclude the question itself is pretty flawed (as noted, Mike and Mike were trolling hard).
Roethlisberger is 2-1.
As an aside, I get the impression that several of the comments above are right in that this question is really about Peyton Manning and the whole argument about his legacy and his postseason/Super Bowl record, rather than as an actual question about specific people.
As a Buffalo Bills fan, I cling to this thought with all my might.
You aren’t even comparing the right apples.
We’re not talking about a quarterback who’s 4-0 versus one who is 4-1.
A quarterback who in five seasons has won four Super Bowls and lost none is somewhere between 12-1 and 16-1.
A quarterback who in five seasons has won four Super Bowls and lost one is somewhere between 14-1 and 19-1.
Every playoff game counts. At some point in Year 5, the guy who’s 4-0 in Super Bowls lost a game that caused his team to not win the Super Bowl.
Mike Golic is stupid.
Frankly, I think he’s smarter than Greenberg. Greenberg far too often takes the Skip Bayless/Murray Chass side of an argument.
True. I just mean his position on this particular argument is utterly illogical.
It’s not just 4 or 5 games in a vacuum. It’s a derived unit, cumulative of the efforts of an entire season’s worth of effort. As an analogy, I can claim that I’ve driven my car from the Atlantic to the Pacific only 4 or 5 times but that can’t be indicative of how reliable my car is since the sample is only 4 or 5 when in reality the trip is the accumulation of thousands of miles/minutes of driving.
You know that. I know that. 30 of the 32 people who voted in the poll know that. However, the remaining two, as well as Mike & Mike don’t know that (or at least pretend to not know that). For the purposes of M&M’s trolly discussion, they pretty much refuse to even consider the road that got that 2nd QB to the 5th Super Bowl. They make arguments like “1.000 is a better winning percentage than .800”, and stick their fingers in their ears when faced with the possibility of considering the dozens of other games that got those teams to those Super Bowls (or, god forbid, the dozens of other players on each player’s teams that significantly contributed to their success). In that vacuum, 4 or 5 games is too small a sample size to make any meaningful distinction.