The American Spectator

AmSpecBlog

Not Much Lower

By Quin Hillyer on 3.4.08 @ 12:50PM

Wlady,
As for Bradshaw, I do not consider it at all an insult to be ranked with Starr, Marino, Young, Staubach and Aikman. I just don't see how anybody can say he can make an argument as THE best ever, whereas all the other six in my top group can at least make that argument. Indeed, I don't think you could find a top NFL man ANYwhere who would argue that Bradshaw is THE best ever. Bradshaw was a good big-game QB, but one got the sense that even Chuck Noll thought there were plenty of times when the Steelers were succeeding as much despite Bradshaw as because of him. Take Bradshaw off the Steelers, and they would still have been a championship contender and probably a SUper Bowl champion several times. Take Favre off the Pack in almost any year in which they won or challenged for the Super Bowl, and they would have been a barely-better-than-average team. Or, to put it another way, if Bradshaw and Archie Manning had traded places, I truly believe Archie would have won the same four Super Bowls and Bradshaw would never have had a winning season. But if Archie and Favre traded places, I truly believe Archie would have had fewer playoff seasons than Favre, while Favre would have had at least one winning season, indeed on playoff season for the Saints. (Archie's best two years were 7-9 and 8-8, with bad defenses dragging him down.) In short, some truly excellent quarterbacks (like Bradshaw and Archie Manning) have all the stuff to be great, to be legendary, if surrounded with reasonable talent -- but perhaps not enough of the right stuff to single-handedly make a bad team decent, a decent team excellent, a merely good team a champion.

Just a judgment call, but while I think Bradshaw was a great QB, I just don't see him as being in quite the rarified realm of Montana and Johnny U.

But that's what makes being a fan so much fun: Debates like these! :)

topics:
Trade