Ooh What a Lucky Man He Is
On how Tom Brady is the luckiest player in NFL history, and why that's not such a bad thing to say about him.
Sports commentary and opinion can be as nuanced and intelligent as it wants to be, but it rarely ever is elevated to a level worthy of praise, at least on the mainstream level. For every Spencer Hall, there are a hundred chucklefucks on Twitter trying to be Stephen A. Smith, spewing reductive takes that try to look for correlations where none really exist or offensive ones under veils thinner than tissue paper. Cheap hot takes mean money for those at the top, and folks like Stephen A. or Clay Travis inspire more people in aggregate than the thoughtful ones, even of those who are thoughtful do end up drawing sizable audiences. It’s the difference between a podcast audience vs. a cable news audience. One can be large, but the mammoths can dwarf them. Que sera, sera, I guess.
One of the most tiresome genres of debate is when people get into a debate on who the greatest in a certain field is. The enduring debate has been between Michael Jordan and LeBron James, where old school basketball heads cling to His Airness while the neophytes go for King James. It’s an interesting debate at heart that never gets to the good parts because people are always yelling about rings. Jordan’s Bulls won six titles. James has been on four title teams but went to the finals eight straight years, four with the Heat and four with the Cavaliers. Add in two more appearances, and it’s a staggering feat. The fact that his teams lost six times in the finals and Jordan’s lost none should not be a nick against James, but people love to look at the bottom line without any context. It’s infuriating, but it makes a lot more sense to distill team success down into individual merit. It’s not right, but it makes more sense since basketball has so few players on the court at a time.
Football has so many more moving parts that it’s impossible to pin success on any one player. You can have the best player in the league at a given position, even at quarterback, but that won’t mean success if you can’t hit on multiple other positions. That doesn’t mean that people won’t try to distill team success to one player. Quarterbacks have always been fetishized, long before the league turned into an exercise in commodifying the position past anything a reasonable person would. Dan Fouts revolutionized the passing game in the ‘70s, but Terry Bradshaw and his four rings overshadow him. The same goes for Dan Marino in Joe Montana’s shadow, although Montana’s hand in helping revolutionize offense by executing Bill Walsh’s West Coast concepts makes that gap a little smaller. Now it is happening with Tom Brady and his peers.
Brady has been the starting quarterback on seven Super Bowl Champions. Naturally, this has caused people to proclaim without hesitation that he is not only the best quarterback ever, but the best player to play in the NFL. There is an argument, mind you. Brady didn’t get to where he is by being mediocre. Either his talents were misevaluated in college to the point where he fell to the sixth round, or the Patriots staff coached him up to get to a level where he was worthy of his accolades. He may be the “greatest” player in NFL history, but “greatest” and “best” aren’t necessarily synonyms.
It’s fair to say that Brady is a top ten, maybe top five quarterback in the league based on total package in his tenure in the league. He did have the one year where he posted stats in 2007, when he set a record for touchdown passes in a season with 50, a record that would stand until 2013 when Peyton Manning threw 55 for the Broncos. To say he’s the best quarterback ever to play though? That’s where I call foul. Raw talent doesn’t always equate to titles. Raw talent plus luck and coaching definitely does. Brady, to me, is not the best player in league history, but the luckiest.
Before you start coming for my head by calling him “lucky,” please note that luck is certainly not a bad thing to have in sports. Every title team needs luck to win. Brady knows this all too well. In that 2007 season, Brady’s Patriots went into the Super Bowl with a 18-0 record, facing the plucky New York Giants. While the Pats were favored and had beaten the Giants in the regular season, the NFC Champions rode a gutty performance and two key lucky plays at the end of the game to seal a victory. The first saw Asante Samuel drop a sure interception that would have sealed the game for New England. The second was perhaps the most infamous play in Super Bowl history, David Tyree securing a reception from Eli Manning on a circus throw by pressing the ball against his own helmet. The Pats may have been the better team that season, but they fell victim to variance and luck to a team that came into the playoffs hot.
So why is Brady so lucky? A lot of that luck came with how down bad his team’s division was during his run. The AFC East, a division historically dominated by the Buffalo Bills and Miami Dolphins, see those franchises turn into shoddily-run sloppy shops, while the Jets continued to be the punching bag they’ve been for their entire run outside of Super Bowl III and a few years of punchy contention here and there. It’s easy to get into the playoffs when you’re guaranteed between five and six wins a year in your own division. Then you have Bill Belichick finding a situation where he could become the best coach in NFL history, orchestrating defenses with generational talent almost every year. Whether it be Willie McGinest, Tedy Bruschi, Vince Wilfork, Mike Vrabel, Darrelle Revis, Richard Seymour, Rodney Harrison, Jerod Mayo, or Stephen Gilmore, the Pats were stocked with talent on the other side of the ball with a certified football genius coaching them.
The elephant in the room is that Brady is also lucky that the NFL treats cheating scandals like a kid stealing a lollipop from the candy drawer before dinnertime. Now, I’m not saying the Patriots are the only team in the league that has cheated during Belichick’s tenure. What I am saying is they historically have been the worst team at hiding that they’ve been cheating, or the team that is boldest, most brazen, and most hubristic about it, or perhaps the one that burned former staffers so badly that they’d be willing to admit that they cheated while there in league history. If the NFL had treated cheating the way that many people wished they would have, Brady might have been locked in a gulag alongside Belichick, Robert Kraft, and many other players and staffers in the organization. The NFL, however, has a strict “NUH UH, NOPE, DON’T SEE IT” policy towards cheating. Just look at the New Orleans Saints bounty scandal. Everyone involved in that mess got to see work again, and they were actively trying to injure other players! It takes luck to be able to bend the rules with no repercussion.
Most recently, Brady’s trot to the Super Bowl with the Buccaneers had several lucky breaks. The NFC South in 2020 was a lot harder than any AFC East Brady faced in his heyday by virtue of the New Orleans Saints existing. However, while they could not secure a divisional championship, they were good enough to get into the playoffs as a wild card, where they drew the Washington Football Team, a divisional champion with a losing record. Their next three playoff opponents, the Saints, Packers, and Kansas City, all suffered injuries along their offensive lines, injuries that allowed the Bucs opportunistic pass rush to harass the other quarterbacks. The Saints also had Drew Brees even gimpier than he’d been before at quarterback. The Packers coaching staff became cowardly even with the league MVP at QB. And Andy Reid, a guy who never met a playoff meltdown he didn’t like, was coaching Kansas City. Brady absolutely had a hand in that title, don’t get me wrong, but he was also perhaps barely in the top ten of quarterbacks in the league in 2020 and definitely in the right place at the right time.
I’m not denigrating him though, even though he’s perhaps one of the most unlikeable players in league history. It’s good to be lucky, but to be that lucky, you have to be able to put yourself in positions to benefit from that luck. There’s a reason Trent Dilfer only won one Super Bowl on the strength of a historically great defense. There’s also a reason why Aaron Rodgers, perhaps the most gifted quarterback ever to take a snap in the league, has only won one Super Bowl. Coaching and team construction have a lot to do with whether you win. Luck does too. Rodgers has been the victim of so many restrictors in his career that the one title he did win with Mike McCarthy (perhaps the worst coach in league history to have won a Super Bowl) means as many as the ten he might have won if he was a Patriot his entire career with that support structure around him. It’s not jealousy or hate to point this out. It’s just being able to watch football and see what is unfolding around you.
In the end though, Brady will be the one who’s remembered, and that’s reasonable. To the victors go the spoils and what not. Sometimes, the best you have is to be a folk hero, remembered in your local circles and celebrated not on the grandest stages like someone like Brady was, is, and will forever be, as long as there are humans around who remember the game of American football. It’s not hate to say that he’s lucky though. I feel like so much sports discussion centers around talent and pure performance that saying someone is lucky feels like denigration. It truly isn’t. Then again, maybe that’s what separates those like Spencer Hall from those like Stephen A. Smith. You gotta have foresight to see that there are just some things that are out of your control, and sometimes, the players you don’t like the most are the ones benefitting from them the most.