Quote:
Originally Posted by wilsowilso
Look I agree that the best QB ever debate will never really go anywhere, but the Brady V Manning debate is a really good one. I don't and never did state Brady is the best QB in the NFL simply because his team accomplished the ultimate goal.
There are plenty more arguments that have been made, but I have to go somewhere and this will have to continue later.
Here is one of those arguments. Brady has made at least three average receivers that played for the Pats and left very very rich and when they leave his guidance they are back to what they were all along. Average. Givens, Branch and Patten. Look at Caldwell. He is average at best and Brady made him look much better than that. He makes players around him better. Tom Brady won three titles with an average offense. Yes a big part of the Pats is the coach and the D, but nonethless Brady wins with less firepower. I remind you this is only one of many arguements so don't give me this Brady won some rings big deal is that all you got assessment.
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Perhaps one of the reasons that the debate never went anywhere is because no one ever moved past the ridiculous rings argument. And this was hardly ever your issue, because you do seem like a person (as most of us are) with legitimate responsibilities that take far more importance over mindless internet bickering. So maybe that's why the Manning v Brady debate never got past the "rings" sillyness.
I've been re reading the old "Iceman" thread, and I must say that it's possible that my message have had some effect on the general Warpath populus because the arguments for Brady in this thread are 150 times stronger than in that old thread. Perhaps a lot of people opened their eyes when the guy known as "choker" beat "iceman" and won the superbowl, but in the grand scheme, that is all irrelivant.
Your argument in this post is something I will respect, and is totally legitimate in terms of building a case for Brady being better than Manning. It is many, many times more sensible than anything dealing with championships, which of course measure "fufilledness", not "skill".
That doesn't mean I don't have an explination for it.
What you have mentioned is the principle commonly known as the ability for great quarterbacks to make their receivers look better than they are. In football, there is an assumption that a completed pass is 50 % the skill of the quarterback, and 50 % the skill of the receiver.
However, all quarterbacks can maintain proven levels of production with different levels of receiver quality, and systems. Recievers simply can not produce when the quarterback is bad. If the quarterback is bad, the offense can't sustain, and even great receivers are totally irrelivant.
Think Moss on Oakland. Or Welker in Miami. Now pair them with Brady, a legitmately good to great quarterback, and you have historically awesome production. Clearly, Brady's job is easier when he's got Moss and Welker, but Brady was great (statistically) before he had them. Moss was nothing without Culpepper, and Welker was sometimes promising, but never had consistent production.
Put Reggie Wayne on Oakland. Does he become a bad player? No. Does the production go away? Yep.
Based on this, I can say that passing effiency is highly weighted to the talent of the QB. Being generous, you could say at least 70-30, but I would argue that it's more like 80-20.
That's why Manning's passing number's are legitimate. As a quarterback, he is in control of roughly 80 percent of his conventional statistical output. Prior to 2007, his numbers were more than 120 percent of what Brady's career numbers looked like. Therefore, if you deemed that Brady was playing with total scrubs, you'd still have to say Manning was better. Brady wasn't playing with total scrubs though, he had some elite tight ends.
Brady's numbers were way, way, way, way better this year. Surely you must have realized it. You can look at it as if he finally got the help at receiver, but based on the previous conclusion that Brady is over 80 percent responsible for his own statistics, there's no way Brady would have played as well as he did this year if he didn't make a big personel improvement.
Which is why I've come to realize my error in the Manning debate. My error wasn't anything I said about Manning being better at the time. It was my ignorance of Brady being a year and a half younger and having two fewer years of NFL experience. I didn't account for the fact that Manning was in his prime, and that Brady was potentially still improving.
Still, I find it hard to believe that Brady's 2007 is an accurate representation of how good he really is. If it turns out to be, then we can almost certainly agree with you that Brady is the best ever. I would bet my house though that he's going to decline a bit next year.
There were some good pro Brady arguments, it's just that no one bothered to make them because
they were too wrapped up in what he did over 13 playoff games, which is roughly equivlent to having a single good season.