So Tom Brady won his fifth Superbowl. In case you're wondering, he's the first to do it as starting quarterback, but the second person to have five rings as a player, after Charles Haley.
In a sane world, we'd now be talking about Brady's place in football history, and debating whether he is the greatest ever. But of course he was already crowned greatest ever in the hype leading up to the game, and now have moved on to debating whether he is the best player in the history of team sports. Personally, I haven't bought the best-ever-in-football concept yet.
Discussing best-evers in sports is frustrating: it's a debate that can be looked at many different ways, and yet it usually gets derailed by people conflating team and individual achievement. They would say that Brady is the best ever just based on having five Superbowls. But by that logic, Trent Dilfer is a better quarterback than Dan Marino.
But beyond that, the simplistic who-has-the-most-rings argument reveals how arbitrary most of our sports talk is. Take Lebron James; when he and his Cavaliers won the NBA title this year, it seemed to cement his reputation as one of the all-time-greats. It was his third title, and more importantly, his first carrying the team himself, thus silencing people like me who didn't really count his success with the loaded Miami Heat teams.
But the win over Golden State was close, with the score tied in game seven with only a few minutes to go. Had those last few minutes gone a little differently, the Cavaliers would have lost, and instead of talking about Lebron the legend, we'd be pointing out that he's been to the finals seven times and only won two, and we'd be labeling him a choker.
Similarly, in this Superbowl, it kind of got lost in the comeback, but Atlanta got into field goal range late, but got pushed out by a holding call and a sack, forcing them to punt. If either of those things hadn't happened, they could have gotten three more points, the Patriots' comeback would have come up short, and we'd now be talking about a changing of the guard among NFL quarterbacks. Of course, by the same argument, the Brady-Belichick Patriots's two Superbowl losses were following improbable comebacks, so you can also point out that Brady is a couple of minor changes of history from being a seven-time champion, at which point we'd be ready to start a new religion around him.
So that's why I'm not ready to put Brady ahead of Montana yet: I don't really give any credence to one more championship, and Montana was a more integral part of his team's success. Or to look at it another way, In the parallel universe where Peyton Manning was drafted by Belichick and the Patriots, I think they could have won as many or more Superbowls.
Having said that, one of the ambiguities of best-ever arguments is that you can only ever judge athletes in team sports against their contemporaries. Really, better training, scouting, tactics, etc. mean that the quality of athletes increases over time, though it's hard to say how much. I've always suspected that we'd be pretty shocked at how much better todays teams would prove to be if they could go back in time and play a team from, say fifty years ago.
The other problem with judging athletes against their contemporaries is that you don't know if a great athlete is simply ahead of his time. If you're the first to discover a new tactic or training regimen, you could appear to be better than you are, because you have that window when no one else has copied you or adapted to your style. Again, I've always suspected that a lot of the generational talents in sports are such cases, getting the attention while they wait for the world to catch up.
So is such an athlete really "the best?" You could say yes, because tactics and innovation are a part of sports. Though it's also hard to say they are the best when their success is partly due to timing. And that's a good argument for Brady as best-ever, since you could chalk-up Montana's success as being ahead-of-the-curve on passing-based football.
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