Last
football commentary until Labor Day — I promise. But there’s a certain type of
sports bloviating, rampant at this time of year, that annoys me no end, and I
need to vent.
Every NFL
postseason triggers a wave of commentary about quarterbacks, more specifically
putting them down because their team didn’t win the Super Bowl. A few years
into the career of every successful NFL quarterback, that will start to be held
against him, as in, “He can’t win the big one.” This year, it’s already being
muttered about Peyton Manning, Tom Brady (who’s won three, but they say he
can’t do it any more!) and Matt Ryan.
Horseradish,
I say. Quarterbacks don’t win Super Bowls; teams do. A good quarterback helps
the team considerably, but rarely can a terrific quarterback take a flawed team
the distance. At some point, the weight becomes too much for anyone, no matter
how good, to carry.
Which One Would You Pick?
Any time I
hear a commentator opine that a quarterback can’t win the big one, a
hypothetical question comes to my mind. If you were building a football team
and choosing a quarterback, who would you pick from the following choices:
Trent Dilfer, Jeff Hostetler, Mark Rypien, Doug Williams, Dan Fouts, Dan
Marino, Fran Tarkenton, or Jim Kelly?
The
difference, of course, is that the first four quarterbacks won Super Bowls and
aren’t in the Hall of Fame, and justifiably so. The latter four never did, but
are in the Hall of Fame. There isn’t a quarterback in the second group that I
wouldn’t pick over anybody from the first group, with no hesitation whatsoever.
For that
matter I’d take Peyton Manning, with his one Super Bowl ring, ahead of Terry
Bradshaw (four rings), Troy Aikman (three) and Bob Griese and Jim Plunkett
(two). Manning is the better quarterback, but the others had the benefit of
playing for better teams (and perhaps coaches), so they carried home more
titles. Manning had his team up by a touchdown with half a minute to play
against Baltimore this year, when the defense inexplicably gave up a 70-yard
touchdown pass. Anyone think a team coached by Don Shula, Chuck Noll or Jimmy
Johnson would have done that?
The Necessity of a Star Defender
Actually,
if you look at the history of the Super Bowl, almost every winning team has had
at least one Hall of Fame defensive player. The deeper a team goes into the
playoffs, the more important a great defender becomes, because the
extraordinary things that guy can do will enable his teammates to cover the
many threats posed by a strong opponent playing late into the postseason.
When Joe
Montana “won” four Super Bowls, he did it with Hall of Fame defensive players
like Ronnie Lott and Fred Dean backing him up. They covered his extremely rare
mistakes, and kept the team in the game so Montana’s quarterback play could win
it. Tom Brady didn’t have that sort of defensive cover this year, and his team
lost to Baltimore, with at least two certain Hall of Fame players on its
defensive unit.
Finally,
consider Steve Young. Two years in a row, he took the 49ers to the NFC
Championship Game, where they lost to the Cowboys. Commentators were talking.
Then cornerback Deion Sanders (now in the Hall) signed up for a season and the
Niners won it all. Deion left, and the following year, Young and the Niners
lost in the first round of the playoffs. Young is one of the best that ever
played, but if not for Deion, they’d still be saying, “He couldn’t win the big
one.”
