Is Brady now the greatest ever?

LOL. No offense taken. With me and Jack around at least this place doesn't become an echo chamber. Maybe it's just the pastor in me but I've never been able to simply preach to the choir.

 

Don't lie you know you were just wanting him to lose so you could add to your gif collection. LOL.

 

Ah yes the old "poor Tom Brady has had fish to throw to all his life" while Manning has had the best receivers to ever grace the field. You lose the point. I said Brady has had a better team of 22 guys around him. I would also like to make this very key point that people lose sight of with Brady's receivers. Brady has a player to throw to that fits the bill for every scenario you need on the field. And he has those guys that are provided to him by management and probably with some legit feedback and say from Brady as well because my guess is he is a smart guy. And furthermore they through the years have often had a run game too. In fact the problem with that 16-0 team was they were pulling out a lot of close games at the end of the year and when it got to the playoffs they were too one-dimensional and that Giants front seven exploited it.

For all the talk about PGH having the best receivers, I still think NE does a better job of covering all the bases with theirs. Do they have Antonio Brown, no but they also have a Shane Vereen, they have Amendola and Edelman which are essentially interchangeable, they have LaFell who they kicked the tires on and it turns out he is a pretty good deep threat. And of course Gronk.

Don't even get me started on the defense, because the SB winning Patriot teams have all been good defenses including this one - the first three were either very good or outstanding.

I am not criticizing Brady for playing dink and dunk - if it can get you a championship, go for it, I wouldn't complain either. But the point of this thread is the question is he the best ever and in my opinion no because I have a lot of doubt whether he could have near the success somewhere else because a critical portion of his success is the system he plays in.

 

Steel, not sure of your age or if you had opportunity to see Joe Montana play during his career, but they used to say the exact same thing about him, that he's a "system" quarterback. Now he's regarded by many as the greatest quarterback of all time.

 

I saw Montana plenty growing up - he was a system guy...but he was also a guy who could scramble, he could throw on the run (witness his most highly regarded play when he took out the Cowboys with the throw to Clark). I do not think Brady could make a throw like that in a million tries.

 

Also - since everyone likes to weep for Brady about his receivers, how about what Wilson had to play with. It isn't like Kearse, Baldwin, some guy who was working at Foot Locker, and Lucas are on anybody's short list of best receiver combo in the league yet that guy went vertical plenty in the game. I just think it kind of squashes the idea that a QB can't throw vertical if he doesn't have the receivers.

In fact when the Giants took out the 16-0 Patriots one of Brady's big problems was the pass rush was stout enough that the little short passing lanes were disrupted and clogged. The routes that were open were the 10-20 yard routes. Moss was wide open multiple times in that game, but Brady simply cannot zing a pass the way someone like a Rodgers or Marino can. Brady is someone who usually has to have perfect follow through to get some oomph on his passes - when he does he can throw a very nice ball and deep routes as witnessed by what he used to do with Moss. But he is not the type of guy who can flick his wrist and throw the ball on the rope - just doesn't have the physical ability to do it.

 

your my boy and all but that's not entirely true. I think troy brown and terry glenn were both pro bowlers.lol

 

LOL. I am not a homer. I am just honest that they are a well ran team. I would never root for them over us no matter what. It is absolutely hilarious that STILL no one has told me whether Brady was throwing it to the only open guy or not.

 

Troy Brown went the year Brady took over. Glenn went before Brady took over and only played one year with him. He didn't go to the pro bowl when Brady was his qb.

 

We seem to have three different threads basically on the same topic: the debate on Brady.

Let me jump in and address the Brady has/had no talent around him argument:

If memory serves, Brady had Moss, Welker, and Stallworth...played his worst Super Bowl game with them.

He now has Gronkowski, Edelman, and Amendola.

BUT...

The Patriots' success is predicated on the play of the o-line. Great line play can make Doug Williams and Mark Rypien look like HOFers. Good line play can make Jeff Hostetler and Jim Plunkett look like HOFers. And Hostetler and Plunkett, at least, played with receiving corps worse than Brady's.

Furthermore, when we talk about the QBs of the past, like Montana and Bradshaw, and discuss the talent they played with, guess what? They also played AGAINST tremendously talented defenses. Bradshaw had to deal with the Minnesota, Oakland, and Dallas defenses, littered with HOFers. Look at the Bears, Giants, and Redskin defenses Montana had to contend with.

Free agency has changed everything. And no team has managed to navigate through the yuckiness of free agency like Belichick. NOT Brady. Belichick. This kind of long-term success doesn't stem from the QB; it stems from the brilliance of the head coach. Because talent is one thing, but knowing how to coach the talent you have/don't have is now what makes the difference. The Pats won a Super Bowl because a rookie, undrafted free agent from a college nobody heard of was ridiculously prepared. Heck, ten years ago, Belichick won a Super Bowl by converting a WR to CB, a position he had never ever played. Go figure.

 

Nevermind....poor reading comprehension.

 

What I'm saying is that people keep talking about how he didn't go downfield and all that but who's to say that downfield wasn't covered? I'm saying do you think he went through reads or just looked instantly for the outlet? It just seems like people think that he needs to prove something but we've criticized Ben for years for not taking what the defense gives him. Then Brady does it and gets criticized for it. It just doesn't seem consistent to dog on one guy for not doing it but then dog on another for doing it. I'm critical of the Steelers because I love them. I have an emotional attachment to them. They can play an almost perfect game and I'm still thinking about the plays that kept them from being perfect. I'm just that way by nature. With other teams I can see more of what's good about them than what is bad. After that Chiefs game where the pats got stomped I went to see what their fans say and it was pretty much exactly the way things are around here. People calling for Belichick and Brady's head and talking about how their drafts were horrible and so on. I also like this Seattle team and as far as I'm concerned I only see how good their d is but I'm sure they've got fans that aren't satisfied too. It's just the nature of the beast. We've praised Montana but I bet there were 9er fans that wanted his head sometimes. I mean he got benched at one point but he overcame that. Brady is 37yrs old and seems to still be at the top of his game. That's a phenomenal feat if you're being fair. He doesn't look nearly "done" to me. Does he to you?

 

Brady and the Pats are so well coached and have a such a game plan that he doesn't need to go through his reads and find the open man. They create the open man especially in this particular game. As Blast said they attacked Lane's replacement all game. Brady would look at his presnap read and if they covered Gronkowski with a LB that was the throw if not right back to Veeren on the clear out. They create the open man, Brady is told who to throw to and when to throw it. The pats create plays to get specific guys open, not working a route tree, layered attacks, progressions but matchup that the can predict and exploit.

 

Every time they played man on Gronk Brady went to him. When he scored he was covered by a lb and Brady knew where he was going from before the snap. That's reading right there. I was a little surprised by the hawks gameplan actually because I figured they were gonna play really tight man and just outphysical them at the line. It didn't seem like they really did that. I wonder now if they wish they hadn't tried to get after Brady so much and just spend more time punishing the receivers. I don't think there's any way the pats could match their physicality with anyone except Gronk. So it just seems like they would have tried to stay really close on their men but Brady hit a lot of guys that were pretty well open. Also the pick that Brady threw to Lane was one that even Ike could have caught. It's funny that people are seeming to criticize Brady for exploiting what might have been a weak point. I mean what was he supposed to do? Should have have said "well ya know people think I can't go downfield and can only take advantage of weak players so to prove them wrong I'm gonna test Sherman, Chancellor, and Thomas?" A great qb smells blood in the water and has that killer instinct. I don't feel like that takes away from the fact that Brady is a good qb. You play who you play. They were the best defense in the league this year and that's the bottom line. Even if they weren't as good as they were last year they were still the best this year. He played the absolute best defense that he could have played. Do you not agree that they were the best defense in the league this year regardless of how good they were last year?

 

Mark this down. The gameplan the pats used the other night will be eerily similar to the one we use when we play them in the upcoming season.

 

It's not a criticism of Brady that he exploited the Seahawks with a short passing game. Also, other than Bennett, the pass rush of the Seahawks was so-so at best. People think the Seahawks had a rabid pass rush this year when they were actually middle of the pack in number of sacks. That in itself created the passing lanes for the little routes that Brady excels at. I thought going into the game that the short routes may play into the way Seattle likes to play defense, but with how banged up the secondary became and with how quick Brady got the ball out it wasn't possible. What it comes down to is Seattle, especially late needed to make some adjustments and bring a more fierce pass rush and to force Brady to go downfield because the short passing lanes would have been clogged or you couldn't see them as well. You heard the stat near the beginning of the game that Brady was something like 1-22 on passes over 20 yards in either all his past SB or in the more recent losses....this was before he hit that TD to Gronk.

Brady played a great game, very deserving of the MVP - but as noted the point of the thread is discussion about him being the best ever. Many of us think no because he plays very well in his system which relies heavily on high precision passing and is efficient. You can look up the stats, in terms of active qbs Tom Brady is in the bottom third of quarterbacks in yards per completion (YPC) over his career. Even the marquee year of 2007 when Brady was supposedly slinging 25 yard balls on a rope to Randy Moss all day the Patriots still ranked in the middle of the pack in YPC if you take away YAC. What people forget about that year is how often Moss played decoy on the deep routes letting Welker run wide open on 5 yard patterns across the middle of the field.

Say what you want - but Tom Brady is largely a dink and dunker - which is perfectly suitable for today's game. The guy does it great and better than anyone. If anything their offense is a model of what today's NFL franchises should strive for with their offense.

 

I feel the same about their defense. I don't think they're based on getting to the qb like we are. Their secondary is their bread and butter. That's why I was surprised to not see them drop as many guys in coverage as they possibly could. I agree that the pats have always been a shorter passing team and I think it's because they don't have true deep threats. They have guys that play the system they are told to play. However, to say that he "can't" throw the deep ball is not accurate. A better way to put it is that he usually "doesn't". Can't and don't are two different things.

 

Rodgers is awesome at throwing it. Probably the best deep ball guy in the league I would say. However, he got to watch the Super Bowl while Brady got to play in it. For the 6th time. And win it. For the 4th time. And get MVP. For the 3rd time. Every player, even the great ones, have weaknesses. Brady's strength is not the deep ball but that doesn't mean that his other strengths don't more than compensate for that. That is just one facet of a guy's game.

 

That must be what people constantly say about Steelers fans because we are always talking about how many rings we have. The way his detractors come across is like "meh he's got all the hardware to show for his career but he just dinks and dunks and can't throw it deep and can't get out of the pocket" and whatever else. He just overcame a 10pt deficit against the best defense in the league. That is a fact. Everything you highlighted is a fact. How is it a childish argument to use facts? Who cares HOW the guy gets it done? He gets it done and that's the bottom line. That's not an opinion. Are you saying that if he threw a better deep ball that you would then say he's the best ever?