The Brady vs. Manning Conundrum
A Flawed Football Comparison Translated To Real Life
One debate topic guaranteed to spark a furor with almost all sports fans: who was the best? Wayne Gretzky or Gordie Howe? Babe Ruth or Willie Mays? Michael Jordan, LeBron James, or Kobe Bryant? Name the sport, you’ve got fuel at the ready for a spirited discussion.
As a sports fan, I’ve been far more wary of American football comparisons than perhaps all other sports, especially when it comes to quarterbacks. Perhaps more than any other position in the sport, the quarterback gets undue blame and excessive credit when things go wrong or right for their team. The latter also changes the perceptions in relation to team championships. Some of the most talented quarterbacks who ever played such as Dan Fouts, Dan Marino, and Warren Moon never experienced that ultimate moment of hoisting a Super Bowl trophy with their teammates. On the other hand, less heralded players such as Trent Dilfer, Mark Rypien, and Brad Johnson all got to proclaim themselves as a Super Bowl winning quarterback.
One of the most talked about quarterback debates of recent memory resides in Tom Brady versus Peyton Manning. Looking at the raw numbers, one would probably conclude that Brady is by far the superior player. Brady’s teams bested Manning’s teams 11–6, Brady has seven Super Bowl rings compared to Manning’s two, and in most statistical categories, Brady is ahead of Manning.
Often, the advertising before their clashes would go something like this: “A Rivalry Renewed! Two of the greatest quarterbacks of their generation — Brady vs. Manning, coming up next!”
However, this is not a Mixed Martial Arts tussle with Tito Ortiz squaring off against Chuck Liddell, nor is it boxing like Muhammad Ali versus Joe Frazier. To hear the hype, you’d think Brady and Manning were going out to midfield, bare-chested and donned with trunks and gloves, ready to bash each other silly.
In reality, Brady has his own offensive personnel, as well as a defense and special teams unit he has little to no control over. He also has a coaching staff that directs all of those aspects. Manning has a similar setup on his side.
Now let’s say we flip-flop the two quarterbacks. Does Brady go 11–6 against the same Bill Belichick defensive personnel and scheme Peyton Manning often struggled with? I did some informal checking via Pro-Football-Reference.com from the first year Tom Brady was a starting quarterback 2001–02, when he won his first Super Bowl, to 2015–16, Manning’s last year as a player. In that span, New England had a top ten defense in terms of points allowed 12 of those years, including 6 as a top five.
Likewise, could Peyton Manning have gone 11-6 against teams that didn’t necessarily have the best defense? The Colts defense was basically a 50/50 proposition in terms of being at the top- or bottom-half of the league while Manning was there. And one could easily argue it was the Denver Broncos’ defense (Manning played for Denver the final three years of his career) that did more to help Manning secure his second Super Bowl more than what the quarterback did himself in his final year of play. In fact, in the last game between the two greats, the AFC Conference Championship game to punch a ticket to the Super Bowl, Brady did pass for more yardage than Manning (310 — 176), but was intercepted twice and sacked four times by Denver’s defense, a unit that ended up fourth in points allowed and first in total yardage allowed that year.
The answer? Who knows. But that’s the important part of this conundrum: Brady and Manning’s circumstances were very different, and the comparison of the two will always be flawed because of this. The true test would be something like this: given the same coaching staff, teammates, and support personnel and teams opposed, would Tom Brady outperform Peyton Manning?
This could be applied to anyone really. How about any of the quarterbacks previously mentioned (Fouts, Marino, etc.) — how would they have done with the same setup that Brady had? Or how about the father of Peyton, Archie Manning, who despite the immense promise out of college spent his prime years stuck on some notoriously awful New Orleans Saints teams?
Likewise, how about Peyton’s brother Eli Manning and his perfect record (2–0) against Tom Brady-led teams in the Super Bowl, including the 2007–08 edition that was considered a shoe-in to dethrone the 1972–73 Miami Dolphins’ for the ultimate undefeated season. Does this make him the superior quarterback over Brady, or for that matter, his brother Peyton?
So what does this speculation have to do with real life, you might ask?
No One (Right) Way To Get To Your Destination
I remember a Twitter poster several years ago arguing against government assistance programs like welfare, unemployment, and similar programs based on her own experiences. She claimed that as a single mother, she had worked out arrangements to have various friends and relatives babysit whenever she was at work, and asked to live with her parents to avoid monthly rent. Relatives and friends were also able to help with things like transportation, which eliminated car-owning costs. Through various contacts, she was able to made arrangements which exchanged services versus money, and she picked up the occasional odd job. Finally, she was able to save enough to take classes at their local community college, which she used to get herself out of poverty. This she claimed was done without needing one cent of assistance from the government.
Her final conclusion? If she can do it without government assistance, everyone can do it like her.
In a way, she is right. Anyone could do it like her. But who has the exact same circumstances as she was blessed to have had? It’s not like her exact support system and circumstances can be loaned whole hog like a library book and utilized by millions of others in a similar situation.
I have found that people have a very specific “I” filter based on our experiences, upbringing, etc. that often clouds judgment on these issues. I don’t count myself as immune from this effect either, and I regularly try, to paraphrase rapper Ice Cube, check yo’ self before I wreck myself.
We humans often do a poor job of considering other people’s perspectives because we have our own often flawed version as our main guide. In the poster’s mind, her way worked for her, so not only is it superior, but also it should be the only way anyone should pull themselves up from their bootstraps.
But that’s not how reality works: no one is really going to care if you took partook from the government or not (whether that be assistance from a government-sponsored food assistance program for a few months, took advantage a zero-percent loan program during COVID-19 days, or had to go on unemployment for a substantial amount of time) if the end result is getting yourself to a better economic place in life.
Rags To Riches
There are plenty of rags to riches stories in sports in general. The NBA’s LeBron James and NFL’s Michael Oher (whose life led to the movie “The Blind Side”) are just two of the more familiar to the public people who had to rely on the government at some time in their lives. Anyone who might claim they didn’t do it the right way (by NOT taking government assistance) probably would earn a puzzled smirk at best from these athletes as well as most people.
The very few athletes who have been fortunate enough to lead a Super Bowl winning squad have taken very different paths to get there. Sure, you can compare Brady and Manning all you want, but you boil it down, they both achieved the ultimate prize from far different places (Manning as an extremely hyped overall number one pick, and Brady as an unheralded 6th round pick (the New England Patriots draft bio on him wasn’t all that promising either.))
You can be next man up and pick up the pieces after injury and earn the ultimate reward, as Jeff Hostetler and Nick Foles did for the New York Giants and Philadelphia Eagles respectively. Heisman Trophy winner Jim Plunkett not only doubled up that feat with the Oakland and Los Angeles Raiders, but he also extricated himself from a sad-sack team (the early 1970s New England Patriots) to do so. You can take the reins from a legend and succeed in your own right, as did Earl Morrall (for Johnny Unitas) and Steve Young (for Joe Montana.) Or you can do it during a time when your race wasn’t considered good enough to be quarterback material (Doug Williams, for the 1986–87 Washington Redskins (now Commanders.))
Or maybe you can have perhaps the most improbable story of them all in Kurt Warner, who somehow went through family turmoil (a household beset by marital discord and divorce,) a stint at a lower division college (Northern Iowa,) remained undrafted after graduation, spent a few years in both the Arena Football League and NFL Europe, took a job stocking shelves at a grocery store, and then subbed in as an injury replacement (Trent Green) to guide the then St. Louis Rams as a first year starter to their first Super Bowl championship in 1999–2000.
Unlike the poster though, I seriously doubt you’d hear Mr. Warner proclaim, “If I can go from a divorce-ridden household to being undrafted out of college to taking a grocery store stocker job at Hy-Vee to Super Bowl Champion, you can do it too!”
