I don't think it's a given to say that Manning will have decline years. We've seen that Favre can play very well at the age of 40, and Manning takes much less of a beating throughout his career than Favre has. When your body doesn't get beat up it's easy to play well late into your career. Between the ages of 35 and 40, arm strength doesn't tend to decline too much, and I don't think Manning will lose his accuracy either.

i mean ya it's not a given but he clearly has a far better chance of being worse over these next 5 years than he was throughout his career. I'm not saying that manning is gonna drastically fall off or anything just that he will almost certainly be worse and yes I realize he had one of his best years this year.

peak marino > peak manning as well

The Steelers pull off a mind blowing gutsy call by attempting another pass play on 3rd down.

You accidentally have Brady in the top 3

w/e i dont even wanna argue brady as that has already been done a ton

i didn't put brady in the top 3 as i think marino is better than him, i said at absolute worst marino is #4 behind those 3

couldnt you say basically all of this for favre, who has also been healthier, had greater longevity, and more playoff sucess. his 'weapons' during his prime were pretty much a joke

Zimmer number 1 Manning fanboy

These guys are for sure ahead of Brady
Manning
Montana
Marino
Young

also
Favre
Unitas
Fouts

He's somewhere in this tier imo
Elway
Warner
Graham
Baugh
Anderson

except favre's numbers were not close to as good as marino or manning

i do think favre is underrated on 2+2 and is easily top 10 and prob around 6-8

didn't really wanna address this as i wanna talk about reg season marino > reg season anyone else but w/e this will hopefully be my last post on brady

steve young had jerry rice, brent jones, ricky watters, john taylor, and a sick oline for pretty much his entire career. i'd rank him 5th but i'd rather have brady, again I dont wanna get into a huge discussion over it but w/e

as for putting brady in a tier with the guys u put him....well yea i highly disagree with that.

At worst, the 13th best QB of all time isn't exactly an insult, but whatev. Agree to disagree is fine.

At this point I can't even tell who is leveling and who is serious anymore.

Honestly if someone put a list of:

Marino
Montana
Unitas
Manning
Favre

I would not argue it. The top of the QB tiers are so close that if you have a guy a few places ahead or behind I will not argue.

I will argue, however, if an ******* puts Warner and Kelly ahead of Manning. Yeah I love Warner and really no problems with Kelly, but jesus ****ing christ.

As I've said before I have it, Unitas/Manning/Marino and am completely fine with that top 3.

What sucks about using stats to judge players is in a 10 year career a football player will play about 150 games. That's a terrible sample size.

Am I wrong in thinking it's much easier to use stats to judge players in baseball because there is such a huge sample?

It's easy to put NFL QBs into tiers but it's splitting hairs to try to organize the tiers.

Cliffs: Football should be played year-round.

Here's some career postseason stats.

Peyton Manning
18 Games
435 692 62.9% 5164 28 19 87.6 7.46

Tom Brady
18 Games
395 637 62.0% 4108 28 15 85.5 6.45

Dan Marino
18 Games
385 687 56.0% 4510 32 24 77.1 6.56

Joe Montana
23 Games
460 734 62.7% 5772 45 21 95.6 7.86


Kurt Warner
13 Games
307 462 66.5% 3952 31 14 102.8 8.55

Kurt Warner has by far the best postseason stats. Sometimes the
defense has more to do with who wins SuperBowls than QBs.

Wow I usually think everything you say is word-vomit but this is spot on.

Weird, listening to these NFL "experts" on TV, I could swear that the QB is the only player who has anything to do with wins and losses.

fyp

Well, sure, if you are interested in using wins and losses or something. But a QB gets like ~30 chances per game to be good or bad, compared to ~6 for position players in baseball, so each game is worth a lot more in terms of stats that I care about.

But yes, most sports media choose the highest variance stats because in the variance they have the ability to craft whatever they want.

Long term variance in football is much shorter than other sports due to the many individual plays. It's still sure if it hits the long term line, but I'm pretty sure 150-200 games is long enough to figure out who is good and who is not. As hawk pointed out, there are a ton of plays in the career of each of these QBs, and the games might not be enough sample size, but the # of plays definitely is. Another problem with QB production, is the surroundings (teammates and coaches) can still not be uncoupled and will likely never be. I will say Manning has had a system that works great with his skill set, so did Marino and most other great QBs. But what's not to say there was a previous great QB that was always stuck in the wrong system or the wrong coaching staff and could have been much better than he performed.

Brady is a system QB, Manning is the system.

Brees is The Situation

ITT John Elway gets underrated.

What's this have to do with anything, really?

Denver had no business being in those first three super bowls. Browns were a much better team two of the years.

Elway had some terrible teams in his career.. with a coach who loved to run it up the gut on 3rd and 8.

If anything, starting 5 SB's in his career should be a net positive for evaluation.

John Elway is vastly overrated by the casual fan, hence the backlash I guess. He's great but not Marino/Montana/Manning great.