Purdy: Is Tom Brady better than Joe Montana? Yes and no.
Tom Brady is almost there. If he and the New England Patriots win the Super Bowl in 12 days, he will own five Super Bowl rings. That will be more rings than any quarterback, ever, and one more than Joe Montana.
You’d think this would settle the argument about which man was the greater NFL player. It will not. Here in the Bay Area, where Brady was born and where Montana won his championships, the argument will never go away. Nor should it. If someone brings up one man’s name on the all-time best list without mentioning the other, a referee should blow a whistle. More than any two other men in history, both had the power to make millions turn on their television sets just to watch them throw a forward pass.
Sorting out the particulars is easy, too. Should Brady indeed beat the Falcons in Super Bowl Roman Numeral 51, he will undeniably have achieved more than any quarterback in history. Winning the Super Bowl is the NFL’s ultimate report card. Tommy Brady has the best grade card ever. The fact that he’s playing in his seventh Super Bowl is probably more impressive than the four titles he’s won. It means that more than 40 percent of Brady’s seasons have ended in the championship game. Montana won all four of the Super Bowls he started. But my guess is, Joe would have loved to have had three more trips to the game and three more chances to win, even if he lost them.
So, yes, Brady will be the greatest if he wins. He is arguably the greatest already. But
that doesn’t mean he is the finest or best.
My own position on this issue is well documented. I am neither a Brady man nor a Montana man. Otto Graham was the best pro football quarterback ever. Anyone who says otherwise should have his or her head ... um, deflated.
Check the record book. Graham played 10 seasons, from 1946 to 1955, for the Cleveland Browns. In all 10 of those seasons, he reached his league’s championship game (before the Super Bowl existed) and won it seven times. Graham still holds NFL records for career average yards per pass attempt (9.0) and highest career winning percentage (.814) as a starting quarterback. But my favorite Graham stat? In 1954, he led the champion Browns in both touchdown passes and touchdown runs.
So, in my view, Brady and Montana will always be fighting for second place on the all-time list.
But, wait, you say! Graham played in the 1940s and 1950s! It was a different football landscape, a different football era, with no face masks and no sophisticated defenses and no TMZ or Twitter. Making comparisons to later eras can be folly. Exactly. Brady threw his first professional pass just six years after Montana threw his last. But they might as well have played in different centuries. Which, of course, they did. Brady’s career began in 2000. Montana played exclusively in the ancient 20th century. And while the equipment was largely the same, the game and context were different. So were their roles. The other four-time Super Bowl winning quarterback, Terry Bradshaw of the Pittsburgh Steelers, had his own context and deserves his own praise. The difference is, those Steelers teams were frequently carried by their defenses, while the 49ers and Patriots were quarterback driven.
In that sense, Montana was the finest I’ve ever seen running a two-minute offense and the finest improvisational leader on a football field at any time. When I covered those 49ers teams that he quarterbacked for coach Bill Walsh’s offense, it was like watching a symphony orchestra with screen passes and go patterns. I’ll never believe Brady could have done it better.
Montana will also always be superior in one category: romance. By that, I don’t mean hearts and flowers. I mean the way that he lifted a formerly woebegone franchise to its first Super Bowl appearance during a decade when television networks were moving away from strict play-by-play scrimmage camera shots into personal close-ups, combined with NFL films mythmaking. It layered a golden sheen onto Montana’s permanent record.
Brady, on the other hand, has gained his dominance during a time of cynical social media and full-press mainstream coverage that relentlessly examines every element of a player’s life, plus and minus. The fact that Brady has been touched by Spygate and Deflategate, two overblown-or-not-overblown-take-your-choice scandals, does not help matters. But his career will never be considered as dreamy as Montana’s.
Instead, Brady is superior in other ways. He’s succeeded with a revolving door of receivers, who, with the exception of Randy Moss, will not sniff the Hall of Fame. However, Brady’s most underrated quality is his durability. Montana, who was smaller in stature, was nagged by a chronic back issue that led to some shortened seasons and ultimately led to his retirement at age 38. Brady is 39 years old. But he has already played 55 more games than Montana, including playoffs. And Brady shows every sign of sticking around for another season or two.
In the end, though, this is like comparing Elvis to Justin Timberlake, or comparing Aretha Franklin to Beyoncé. In each case, terrific talents in their own eras and contexts. You can prefer one to the other, but why start an argument about it? Just cue up the performances. We’re lucky to see Brady give another one.
To start one game to save my life, I’d choose Otto Graham. To start one game to impress a football skeptic with the game’s competitive beauty, I’d choose Joe Montana. To start one Super Bowl in 2017, I’d choose Tom Brady. He doesn’t need to prove anything against Atlanta. My hunch is he will.