I'm not among those who think you have to win four or five championships to be considered the best ever at the most important position in the game, but I can't put Manning, today, over Otto Graham, Joe Montana and Tom Brady.
Which suprised me a little, because I don't know that I'd put Brady or Graham anywhere near Montana. Brady's one claim to parity has been - postponed...
But why would you even put those guys ahead of Marino, the man who held the career passing record until Favre broke it? Well, apparently because Marino didn't win any championships. But if winning a championship is the criterion, where are Favre and Elway? And why are we focused on championships? Guys like Fran Tarkenton and Jim Kelly had a great deal of success everywhere but the Super Bowl. Not really fair to leave them out of the conversation just because there was one better team in the NFL.
I agree with the instinct to not put too much weight on regular season performance. I don't think anyone seriously thinks Warren Moon is comparable to Tom Brady just because he passed for a lot of yards in the regular season. So maybe we should be looking for something in-between the two extremes. How about quarterback performance in the playoffs? I ran a sort on Football Reference's Game Finder of quarterback playoff performances from 1960-2010, ranked by Passer Rating.
Well, there you go. It turns out there have been 11 perfect passer ratings (158.3) in modern playoff history. And only one man has done it twice.
Don't hate me because I'm perfect
Now haters and pedants might observe that one of Krieg's perfect games came on a 1-for-1 (1 TD, 0 interceptions) performance. Others might argue that perhaps we should assign some weight to less-than-perfect performances, such as Kurt Warner's 33-attempt five-touchdown outing (passer rating 154.1) against Green Bay last year.
Well...I reluctantly acknowledge that these points might appear valid to some. So I re-ran the screen to exclude games in which the quarterback had 15 or fewer attempts. Since all of the names under discussion (except for Graham) are from the modern era, I shortened the time frame to 1975-2010. I then took the top 100 games (cutoff passer rating: 112).
At this point you might ask why I did not employ my favored IAYPA technique. The answer is that these games are too good for it to offer much discriminative value. In 99 of these performances, the quarterback threw either zero or one interception. The only exception was Kerry Collins' 1/14/2001 performance against the Vikings, in which he threw two. But, since he also completed 72% of his passes, threw for five touchdowns, and the Giants scored 41 points, I have resisted the impulse to discard it as unworthy.
Now a third of these games were one-offs - that is, it was the only time his career that the quarterback performed this well in a playoff game. I don't think there's much chance we're going to name one of those guys - say, Pat Ryan or Jeff George - as one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time.
No, we're looking for consistently superior playoff performance.
Seventeen players had two exceptional playoff games. The list is roll call of skilled performers on well-coached teams: Elway...Plunkett, Theisman, Stabler, Roethlisberger, Marino, Brees, Gannon, Hasselbeck, Eli Manning. And a few lesser lights who got hot - Culpepper, Pastorini, Woodley, Collins, Delhomme, even Pennington. And my old favorite, Frank Reich - yes, he had two - he beat Pittsburg with a fine effort after the Houston comeback game.
Even though these are superb performances, no one we've mentioned so far, except possibly Elway, really has a claim to be among the top quarterbacks of all time.
There are 43 games left - and 11 quarterbacks.
Three playoff performances (1975-2010) with quarterback rating > 112
Bradshaw, T
Rodgers, A
Hostetler, J (one for the Giants, two for the Raiders for the big West Virginian)
Well, ok. Most of these guys were very good quarterbacks on very good teams - guys who executed well but did not (or have not yet) reached the pantheon. Bradshaw has the rings, but not the respect - but however I look at it, he clearly raised his game in the playoffs (IAYPA of 8.7 in 4 Super Bowls). Rogers is off to an awesome start, and I'd be very surprised if he didn't move up into the next group...although I'd have said the same thing about Brady a few years ago. What do you call a quarterback who leads the league in passer rating, then can't get it done in the playoffs?
That leaves five guys, and I would argue that these are the people who we have to put in the elite class. They put up amazing numbers in four or more playoff games:
Name (games, TDs, INTs)
Peyton Manning (4, 15, 1)
Brett Favre (4, 11, 1)
Kurt Warner (4, 17, 2)
Troy Aikman (5, 12, 1)
Remember Troy Aikman? You could say he benefited from having a great receiver in Irvin, but all of these guys had good receivers. His career was shortened by the head injuries, but he did an awfully good job when he was on the field.
A few of the players on the top 100 list took advantage of the Passer Rating's tendency to reward short passes. Stabler, for example, makes the top 100 list with two games where his IAYPA was under seven (average for the 100 games is 9.4). Aikman doesn't have that problem, with an IAYPA of 9.2. I wouldn't have much trouble saying Aikman was one of the top five or ten quarterbacks of the modern era, given his outstanding performances in meaningful games against the League's toughest defenses.
But he's not #1. There's only one guy who can be #1.
Joe Montana (6, 19, 0)
Surely the short passing game helped his passer rating? Nah, his IAYPA was 9.8, well above average even in this elite company. And three of those games were Super Bowls. Manning and Favre don't have any Super Bowls on this list - nor Brady, for that matter. Aikman and Warner each have one. Montana has three.
I never rooted for him, not once in my life. But in high stakes games - he was the best there ever was. I don't think anyone else is even close.
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