Is Tom Brady the greatest QB in NFL history?
Patriots pivot can move into class of his own with a fifth Super Bowl championship
HOUSTON — “Australia?,” Tom Brady said. “My surf instructor’s Australian. His name’s Mick.”
“Brazil?” Tom Brady said. “Yes, I have been there a lot. So many beautiful cities.”
There are a lot of unusual questions asked of players at the Super Bowl, the one time all year where most of the media covering football is not all that interested in coverages and schemes, but Brady’s podium sessions are unlike any other.
He is this Super Bowl’s only true celebrity: the handsome longtime star whose wife, model Gisele Bündchen, is on a global scale more famous than he is. We know about his friends (famous), his diet (weird) and his devotion to his body (pliable). And his politics (sigh).
Amid all that, with so much attention on Tom Brady, celebrity, it’s easy to forget the football side of things. But with Super Bowl LI about to kick off on Sunday night, you remember: oh, right, he’s on the cusp of becoming the most accomplished NFL quarterback ever. There’s that, too.
This has been the most bizarre of Brady seasons and yet it was also perfectly fitting. The hallmark of the New England Patriots over their 16-year run of dominance has been their ability to keep winning even as the roster was in a constant state of churn. While Brady has piled up more than 61,000 passing yards in New England, more than 30,000 yards ahead of the next closest passer in franchise history, he has never had a skill-position player next to him for long enough to join him in the record books. The Pats’ leading career rusher, Sam Cunningham, retired in 1982. Their leading receiver, Stanley Morgan, was finished in 1990, or 11 years before Brady joined the team. Brady has accomplished all he has accomplished by working with the same coach, Bill Belichick, and whichever players the coach happens to give him.
This year, though, took the Pats’ replacement-level success to a different place entirely. Brady disappeared for a quarter of the season, all because commissioner Roger Goodell oversaw an investigation into soft footballs in the 2014 AFC title game that ended with a ginned up report that didn’t prove the quarterback didn’t anything wrong, but suspected he did anyway.
Then the Pats went 3-1 without Brady, and 11-1 with him, and rolled to another Super Bowl appearance, their seventh under Belichick. This wasn’t even particularly surprising, even in a league that forces parity that makes teams very susceptible to the loss of a star player. There is a grim inevitability to the Patriots and no fan of a rival team wouldn’t admit, under truth serum, that they knew the loss of Brady for four games would only make the resulting AFC East title that much more annoying. It was like the Patriots were playing with a golf handicap: they spotted everyone in the AFC four strokes and then went out and shot 65.
For good measure, they lost Rob Gronkowski to injury mid-season, which created just a sliver of doubt about the team but the Patriots have gone 7-0 since he was shut down in early December.
Whatever happens on Sunday, Brady’s place in football annals is assured.
“He’s certainly one of the greatest of all time, for sure,” Atlanta’s Matt Ryan said this week. “There have been some great quarterbacks, and Tom’s in that one, two or three category. He’s in the mix — 1A, 1B, 1C — and I’ve got a ton of respect for him.”
That seems about right. It is folly to try to rank players from different eras definitively, not when there are so many competing factors outside of their control that influence their results on the field, but Brady is absolutely in the conversation with Montana, Elway and Manning. Brady, meanwhile, is 24-9 in the playoffs, which almost perfectly translates to two 12-4 seasons against a no-easy-games schedule. Montana was 16-7 in the post-season, Elway was 14-8 and Manning was 14-13.
With a win on Sunday, Brady would get his fifth Super Bowl ring, breaking a tie with Montana and Terry Bradshaw among quarterbacks. It would be a pretty decent trump card in the best-ever debate. No pun intended.