John Elway

It may have been Terrell Davis' team at the end, but his last game he was Super Bowl MVP.

That's insane to think about.

 

Much better than Marino's last game.

 

Hell, he may not even be the best in his draft class. For all but the end of their careers, Marino was generally regarded as the better QB. Elway getting the rings at the end changed that perception, but changed perception doesn't necessarily mean true.

 

I think this is very spot on. How about the fact that Shanny never really won without him either. I think that says a lot.

 

That is not correct. Those rings certainly solidified Elway's standing, but he was in the discussion with Montana and Marino for years before it all came together at the end.

 

Best QB of the last 40 years.

Bled victories from defeats with mediocrity around him for most of his career. Had no freaking ACL in one of his knees.

Stats that favorably compare Erik Kramer to him should be ignored by reasonable people.

And damn, dude . . . at least paraphrase if you want to start dumb threads.

Marino was the blueprint for Peyton. Overrated due to a lot of scoring passes in blowouts.. Much more to the position than pretty numbers.

 

That's true. But we all know the power of a couple rings.

Perception changes even after retirement. When Favre broke the TD record, people were writing the top 10 all-time QB list with him in the top 5. After he retired, he didn't make too many of those lists. Now that he's back in the public eye and a year or so away from being elected into the HOF, he'll be in the conversation again.

I'm certainly not in the "Marino didn't win a ring, so he's not in the conversation" camp, but I'd take Elway over him.

 

Read again. I never said he wasn't "in the discussion." He was certainly there, but as I recall, before 97/98 that discussion usually concluded with him coming in behind Marino/Montana.

 

Behind Montana, yes. But by then, he had established his legacy as Mr. Comeback (the running tally of those was a staple of watching the NFL for a good decade-plus), he had gotten into a system in which he was putting up comparable numbers to Marino and Marino's fast start seemed like a million years ago by the mid-90s, when he was just a hobbled, bitchy, good but no longer great quarterback

 

The Elway-Marino comparison was pretty interesting until Elway ended his career with two rings.

 

You know how some people hate the word moist?

That's me and "efficiency." And this is not just because I'm a Kobe fan who's even enjoying his performance this year, his most inefficient of seasons.

Erik Kramer was more efficient than John Elway? Great. About as useful as knowing Chris Paul has a superior PER to Magic.

 

I will listen any argument about stats and baseball — park factors and BABIP and OPS+ and whatever the fuck you can dream up — and give it appropriate consideration. Every baseball game is a series of tiny one-on-one match-ups, and while I can feel a little wary of some of your comparables by pointing to shit like the way the Twins made David Ortiz into a punch-and-judy hitter by insisting he follow their organizational philosophy and argue this devalued his actual talent considerably, I am, for the most part fine with making statistical comparisons between baseball players.

I remain extremely skeptical of straight-across football comparisons. Extremely. Give John Elway a receiver like Jerry Rice for his entire career and it is staggering to imagine what he might have done. Hell, give him Bill Walsh and it would have been a trip. No matter what Aaron Schatz believes, football statistics are not to the point yet where we can account for play-calling, and schematics, and field position strategy, and the fact that John Elway frequently threw brilliant passes while running for his life because his offensive line was awful, his receivers should have been selling insurance, and his head coach was an old school offensive neanderthal.