"Lieutenant George: But this is brave, splendid and noble...
[Blackadder doesn't react - there's a long pause]
Lieutenant George: ...Sir
Captain Blackadder: Yes, Lieutenant.
Lieutenant George: I'm scared, sir
Private Baldrick: I'm scared too, sir
Lieutenant George: I'm the last of the tiddly-winking leapfroggers from the golden summer of 1914. I don't want to die... I'm really not over keen on dying at all, sir.
Captain Blackadder: How are you feeling, Darling?
Captain Darling: Ahm- not all that good, Blackadder. Rather hoped I'd get through the whole show, go back to work at Pratt and Sons, keep wicket for the Croydon Gentlemen, marry Doris. Made a note in my diary on the way here. Simply says: "Bugger".
Captain Blackadder: Well, quite.
[Outside: "Stand to, stand to, fix bayonets"]
Captain Blackadder: Come on, come on, let's move.
[at the door, Blackadder turns to George]
Captain Blackadder: Don't forget your stick Lieutenant
Lieutenant George: Rather, sir. Wouldn't want to face a machine gun without this.
[they walk into the misty trench, waiting for the off - suddenly there is silence - the machine guns stop]
Captain Darling: I say, listen - our guns have stopped.
Lieutenant George: You don't think...
Private Baldrick: Perhaps the war's over. Perhaps it's peace.
Captain Darling: Thank God. We lived through it. The Great War, 1914 to 1917.
Captain Darling, Private Baldrick, Lieutenant George: Hip hip hooray!
Captain Blackadder: I'm afraid not. The guns have stopped because we are about to attack. Not even our generals are mad enough to shell their own men. They feel it's more sporting to let the Germans do it.
Lieutenant George: So, we are, in fact, going over. This is, as they say, it?
Captain Blackadder: Yes, unless I can think of something very quickly.
[a voice shouts 'Company, one pace forward.' They all step forward]
Private Baldrick: There's a nasty splinter on that ladder, sir. A bloke could hurt himself on that.
[another call: "Stand ready" - they put their hands on the ladders ready to climb]
Private Baldrick: I have a plan, sir.
Captain Blackadder: Really Baldrick? A cunning and subtle one?
Private Baldrick: Yes, sir.
Captain Blackadder: As cunning as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University?
Private Baldrick: Yes, sir.
[another call: "On the signal, Company will advance"]
Captain Blackadder: Well, I'm afraid it's too late. Whatever it was, I'm sure it was better than my plan to get out of here by pretending to be mad. I mean, who would have noticed another madman round here?
[a whistle blows he looks at Baldrick]
Captain Blackadder: Good luck, everyone.
[Blackadder blows his whistle, there is a roar of voices as everyone leaps up the ladders, meeting the machine gun fire]"
We love to identify the top of the category of everything. But we also love the story of the emerging hero. We forget history for the sake of “progress”. Seems Darwinist.
All the reasons you give should be pretty general, but I feel like this is actually a pretty NFL specific phenomenon. NBA GOAT is pretty universally considered to be either Jordan or LeBron, and LeBron really only started having an argument in the past decade, nearly 20 years after Jordan's heyday. I don't follow NHL, but I'm pretty sure Gretzky is still considered GOAT, and half his career was before I was born. And in MLB, you'll still get majority support for Babe Ruth as GOAT.
I read the post thinking this isn't the same in soccer, the game the rest of the world knows as football; debate about whether Messi or Ronaldo was the greatest would quickly take in Maradona, Pelé, Puskas, Platini etc. Over here we mock the attitude that English football began in 1992 with the Premier League, much as that's the modern era, but it'll be a while until someone exceptional enough to challenge that perception of Messi and Ronaldo being the best recent players comes along, and that player would have to achieve a fair bit first.
Presentism is an unavoidable bias; how much worse is it when 20-year-olds earnestly debate the merits of players they never saw perform? That they're only familiar with because of histories written by others? I'd hate that as much as I hate 20-year-olds saying 'The best band ever is the Beatles because my dad told me.'
My experience of the GOAT debate in soccer is that, until Messi and Ronaldo (lol) came along, Pele had been the consensus GOAT since the 1980s. Yeah, others like Maradona got into the conversation, but Pele was overwhelmingly thought to be the greatest.
Soccer suffers from a dearth of statistics so you really do need to have watched someone play to judge their greatness. In other sports that do have robust statistics it's a big more legitimate to argue the merits of players you yourself have never seen.
The thing is that Gretzky is essentially the GOAT of like, all athletics. No one in any professional sport is as dominant a figure as Gretzky in Hockey.
So I have a longstanding theory that the way we talk about the NBA GOAT is, oddly enough, about Bill Simmons and Kobe more than it is Jordan and LeBron. Pre-Jordan, the GOAT was pretty universally established as Wilt - and Jordan taking the crown simply pushed Wilt to #2, it didn't reorient the entire ranking system. It wasn't until LeBron started coming close in overall performance/accolades to first Kobe then MJ, that "RINGZ" culture started to take hold and Jordan's GOAT argument got condensed into an unimpeachable 6-0. Kobe shouldn't have even been a part of the conversation, but his titles and more superficial stylistic similarities to Mike coronated him as the Air Apparent who actually lived up to the promise. If Jordan's six rings made him the GOAT, then Kobe's five must make him the next-best or at the very least permanently ahead of LeBron.
And at roughly the same time, Bill Simmons was becoming the biggest force in sports media - and in particular, a must-read for two full generations of NBA fans *and* NBA writers/analysts, with a lifetime pet project of rearranging NBA history so that Bill Russell was better than Wilt rather than on a better team. And the disciples who would never take a breath without humping analytics in any other circumstance all buy into the idea that, in fact, the best player before Jordan was actually a guy who never averaged 19 a game in the NBA's most juiced scoring era and who shot 44% for his career in contrast to Wilt's 54%. While the actual evolution of the consensus GOAT has been relatively normal and static (Wilt for about 30 years, then MJ for about 20, now still probably Mike but maybe LeBron), the conversations and criteria have changed drastically in the 20 years since Jordan retired.
I was born in 1986, so I had a front-row seat to the entire steroid era and all the complexities of that. But even with that said....Barry Bonds is the greatest baseball player who ever lived.
I generally agree with Alex, but we'll skip the Babe Ruth part (it's like saying Jon Havlicek would have been the best NBA player in the 60s if the NBA was not integrated). I think what Freddie is missing is that "GOAT" status is not solely about athleticism and achievements, which is 2/3's of the Mahommes argument between Simmons and Thompson.
Simmon's specifically talked about "inevitability" that they'd find a way to win; which is another way of saying this guy/gal is an S-O-B, all-time competitor, who has a will to win beyond everyone else their competing against (and it never turns off). Brady had it. Mahommes has it + better tools = GOAT.
Jordan had it and played 82 games every regular season. Lebron (maybe) has it (eerrr, but not like Jordan, thus the GOAT debate).
Gretzky had it. Tiger had it (golf is simply a sport one can play after 77 surgeries). Serena had it. Naomi Osaka does not.
Baseball is tough because of it's 2-way nature, but Pedro Martinez had it on the mound.
I feel like this critique is even more applicable to contemporary fiction and literature. Deliver me from breathlessly enthusiastic reviews of mediocre work.
Call me a naysayer, but isn't much of what occurs, particularly about football, largely BS? From the obnoxious ego show that is the commentators inane blathering, to the hype, hysteria, money spent on displaying the field ever more loudly, the advertising, the gambling that makes one wonder who is actually playing for the team rather than the huge bets, but most of all, the violent injuries and the former players who are relegated to psyche evaluations and nursing facilities, sans compensation for emerging CTE after years of loyalty to the sport? Reminds me of what the spectacle represented of throwing Christians and whomever, to the lions, also in huge bloodsport arenas of days past.
Perhaps it's just me, but Greatest of all time is just more of the same hyperbolic sell, sell, sell. Next!
It’s a fun conversation, but I don’t think Tom Brady actually will be dethroned. Mahomes has had an amazing 5 years, but he’d have to keep it up for another 10 to best Brady — which makes me think there will always be challengers but Brady actually has a shot of holding onto the title for quite a long time.
Here in Boston, sports radio host Mike Felger (a Wisconsin product who mostly trolls locals) has started saying Mahomes is on pace to overtake Brady now. When people call in to say "he's only halfway to Brady," Felger often says "It's a daily sports show folks, I can't wait that long."
With respect to NFL I think you really have to treat it as a question of eras. Mahomes is awesome and I love watching him play, but huge changes to the rules on how defenses are allowed to play are what enable it. Similarly to how we all know Brady was never asked to do things Sammy Baugh did (and it would now be seen as crazy to consider it) you have to consider that a Patrick Mahomes or Lamar Jackson type player would have quickly been injured out of the league as recently as the 90s.
On Veterans Day 1990 my BIL treated me to press box seats at the LA Coliseum to see the Raiders/Packers game. Don Majkowski had one of the greatest, gutsiest performances I’ve ever seen by an NFL QB, leading the Pack to a decisive upset win despite being sacked 8 times. He was a great scrambler with a gun for an arm. Not a Lamar J but a good and willing runner when the opportunity was there. A week later he hurt his shoulder against Arizona and was lost for the season, and was never the same.
That's a really great example. My comp for the current type of QB play is someone like Randall Cunningham. He had a good career but no one in a million years would put him in contention for the greatest. IIRC he had a bad injury or two as it was and if he played the way modern running QBs do his career would have been very short.
Yes for sure! Randall had some great moments and had a lot that Jackson has now. I sadly recall a complete humiliation of the Pack; he teed them up and danced on their grave, playing with a lot of moxie and talent. But didn’t he spend most of his last years as a backup? I remember he looked good w/the Vikes but he didn’t last as the starter. That must’ve been b/c of an injury? I know he hurt his knee originally w/the Eagles.
Some of this is just a product of the NFL and NFL fandom, though. Baseball, hockey, and basketball struggle with this problem much less. Baseball has the reverse challenge, valorizing players whose careers peaked when Blacks were banned from the sport and there was only one World War. Hockey still considers Gretzky the GOAT and he retired in 1999. The NBA has a healthy competition between Jordan and LeBron, though I think, if pressed, most fans would go Jordan. The NFL is weird because comparing across eras is a lot harder and you can't really declare a true GOAT because the positions are so different. So you get situations where the new QB becomes GOAT.
For the record, I'd agree with the current chatter. Mahomes is better than Brady. But Peyton Manning was better than Brady too. It's just Brady won more. The Brady v. Manning debate, back in the day, had a little of the Jeter v. A-Rod flavor. Brady had a better football career than Jeter baseball career, but if I were starting a magic football team tomorrow and drafting QB's in their absolute prime, Manning and Mahomes would be picked ahead of Brady.
I used to think this about Manning v. Brady but watching what Brady did in TB followed by the semi collapse of the Pats after his departure has changed my opinion.
Came to post the same thing about baseball debates.
The NFL is so overwhelmingly popular and yet, of all the sports, there is very, very little actual game play each week/year. Hence endless blather as the market for content outstrips the actual product.
Add to this the fact that NFL fandom is notoriously shallow/unsophisticated and there is a perfect petri dish for endless GOAT debate.
Agree, with basketball it's much easier as although there are different positions, they more or less all have to have the same skills and do the same things. Individual players have a larger and more direct impact on their team's success.
In football, it is really difficult to quantify how much impact one guy directly has on team success. For example, if Mahomes throws for 500 yards. He still needs to rely on a good play call, his offensive line to effectively block and then his skill players to get open against the best athletes in the world and catch a ball going 60 MPH while sprinting full speed. So many other factors go into one play. That's why I think the GOAT argument in football is pointless.
Whoa whoa whoa, I mean no disrespect to Fran Tarkenton but how can you so cavalierly put a 4-time SB loser above a 3-time winner? I know rings aren't the only thing, but they do count for something, right?
It's mainly just a silly question for the Nick Wright and Screamin' Steven types to yell about. What would ESPN and Fox Sports do all day without questions like these? Go dark?
“Guys like that don't get mentioned because they’re old, and old is boring. Because nobody who's writing thinkpieces or shouting on ESPN today saw them play.”
Could cross-apply this to other sports too. Before GOAT was a term, the debate in baseball was between Ruth, Williams, or DiMaggio. Recently it was Griffey or (still the champ) Bonds, and now Ohtani is the media consensus. It’s super cool that we’re around to see the Greatest rather than those forgettable athletes of generations past!
With baseball especially the idea of a continuity with the past is very important to the culture of the sport which is not true at all of pro football.
Ohtani is extraordinary and a genuinely singular figure in the two centuries of baseball history (no easy feat), but I don't think anyone is calling him the GOAT just yet, nor did anyone say that of Griffey who just didn't manage the longevity that would have gotten him there.
You can quantify these things in baseball. In football numbers of different eras are virtually unintelligible against each other, even more so than basketball or hockey.
Thanks for the nod to Bart Starr, unvanquished hero of my youth. The QBR stat was one I hadn’t known, and there was a time when I could’ve rattled off his numbers by the season. Truly that was a different era - though mostly by rule tweaking. Players are bigger now, yes, but otherwise the game today is basically very similar. Funny that only Greg Cook’s QBR was better; a more perfect example of lost potential - and part of your point, I think - would be hard to find.
How about GOATTM? (To Me) --that would be Dan Marino.
It would be interesting to have this concept in literature, too.
John Milton-GOAT ?
I was just thinking that one way to avoid presentism is to argue about something hardly anyone cares about anymore.
Who is the GOAT novelist? Opera singer? Boxer? Bill-drafting legislator?
Novelist-Anthony Powell
Opera Singer- John McCormack
To an Athlete Dying Young
BY A. E. HOUSMAN
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.
perfect
And right before WWI.
"Lieutenant George: But this is brave, splendid and noble...
[Blackadder doesn't react - there's a long pause]
Lieutenant George: ...Sir
Captain Blackadder: Yes, Lieutenant.
Lieutenant George: I'm scared, sir
Private Baldrick: I'm scared too, sir
Lieutenant George: I'm the last of the tiddly-winking leapfroggers from the golden summer of 1914. I don't want to die... I'm really not over keen on dying at all, sir.
Captain Blackadder: How are you feeling, Darling?
Captain Darling: Ahm- not all that good, Blackadder. Rather hoped I'd get through the whole show, go back to work at Pratt and Sons, keep wicket for the Croydon Gentlemen, marry Doris. Made a note in my diary on the way here. Simply says: "Bugger".
Captain Blackadder: Well, quite.
[Outside: "Stand to, stand to, fix bayonets"]
Captain Blackadder: Come on, come on, let's move.
[at the door, Blackadder turns to George]
Captain Blackadder: Don't forget your stick Lieutenant
Lieutenant George: Rather, sir. Wouldn't want to face a machine gun without this.
[they walk into the misty trench, waiting for the off - suddenly there is silence - the machine guns stop]
Captain Darling: I say, listen - our guns have stopped.
Lieutenant George: You don't think...
Private Baldrick: Perhaps the war's over. Perhaps it's peace.
Captain Darling: Thank God. We lived through it. The Great War, 1914 to 1917.
Captain Darling, Private Baldrick, Lieutenant George: Hip hip hooray!
Captain Blackadder: I'm afraid not. The guns have stopped because we are about to attack. Not even our generals are mad enough to shell their own men. They feel it's more sporting to let the Germans do it.
Lieutenant George: So, we are, in fact, going over. This is, as they say, it?
Captain Blackadder: Yes, unless I can think of something very quickly.
[a voice shouts 'Company, one pace forward.' They all step forward]
Private Baldrick: There's a nasty splinter on that ladder, sir. A bloke could hurt himself on that.
[another call: "Stand ready" - they put their hands on the ladders ready to climb]
Private Baldrick: I have a plan, sir.
Captain Blackadder: Really Baldrick? A cunning and subtle one?
Private Baldrick: Yes, sir.
Captain Blackadder: As cunning as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University?
Private Baldrick: Yes, sir.
[another call: "On the signal, Company will advance"]
Captain Blackadder: Well, I'm afraid it's too late. Whatever it was, I'm sure it was better than my plan to get out of here by pretending to be mad. I mean, who would have noticed another madman round here?
[a whistle blows he looks at Baldrick]
Captain Blackadder: Good luck, everyone.
[Blackadder blows his whistle, there is a roar of voices as everyone leaps up the ladders, meeting the machine gun fire]"
To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors' eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.
We love to identify the top of the category of everything. But we also love the story of the emerging hero. We forget history for the sake of “progress”. Seems Darwinist.
All the reasons you give should be pretty general, but I feel like this is actually a pretty NFL specific phenomenon. NBA GOAT is pretty universally considered to be either Jordan or LeBron, and LeBron really only started having an argument in the past decade, nearly 20 years after Jordan's heyday. I don't follow NHL, but I'm pretty sure Gretzky is still considered GOAT, and half his career was before I was born. And in MLB, you'll still get majority support for Babe Ruth as GOAT.
Yup Gretzky is damn near universally considered the NHL's GOAT. Even if Alex Ovechkin passes his career goal title, it won't be enough.
Was just thinking this. Ovie is absolutely the man though.
I read the post thinking this isn't the same in soccer, the game the rest of the world knows as football; debate about whether Messi or Ronaldo was the greatest would quickly take in Maradona, Pelé, Puskas, Platini etc. Over here we mock the attitude that English football began in 1992 with the Premier League, much as that's the modern era, but it'll be a while until someone exceptional enough to challenge that perception of Messi and Ronaldo being the best recent players comes along, and that player would have to achieve a fair bit first.
Presentism is an unavoidable bias; how much worse is it when 20-year-olds earnestly debate the merits of players they never saw perform? That they're only familiar with because of histories written by others? I'd hate that as much as I hate 20-year-olds saying 'The best band ever is the Beatles because my dad told me.'
My experience of the GOAT debate in soccer is that, until Messi and Ronaldo (lol) came along, Pele had been the consensus GOAT since the 1980s. Yeah, others like Maradona got into the conversation, but Pele was overwhelmingly thought to be the greatest.
Yeah, I would have thought Maradona succeeded Pele but not according to this: https://business.yougov.com/content/47180-uk-who-is-the-goat-mens-footballer
So I guess football really is calmer about GOATs. Four candidates in my lifetime…
Soccer suffers from a dearth of statistics so you really do need to have watched someone play to judge their greatness. In other sports that do have robust statistics it's a big more legitimate to argue the merits of players you yourself have never seen.
The thing is that Gretzky is essentially the GOAT of like, all athletics. No one in any professional sport is as dominant a figure as Gretzky in Hockey.
So I have a longstanding theory that the way we talk about the NBA GOAT is, oddly enough, about Bill Simmons and Kobe more than it is Jordan and LeBron. Pre-Jordan, the GOAT was pretty universally established as Wilt - and Jordan taking the crown simply pushed Wilt to #2, it didn't reorient the entire ranking system. It wasn't until LeBron started coming close in overall performance/accolades to first Kobe then MJ, that "RINGZ" culture started to take hold and Jordan's GOAT argument got condensed into an unimpeachable 6-0. Kobe shouldn't have even been a part of the conversation, but his titles and more superficial stylistic similarities to Mike coronated him as the Air Apparent who actually lived up to the promise. If Jordan's six rings made him the GOAT, then Kobe's five must make him the next-best or at the very least permanently ahead of LeBron.
And at roughly the same time, Bill Simmons was becoming the biggest force in sports media - and in particular, a must-read for two full generations of NBA fans *and* NBA writers/analysts, with a lifetime pet project of rearranging NBA history so that Bill Russell was better than Wilt rather than on a better team. And the disciples who would never take a breath without humping analytics in any other circumstance all buy into the idea that, in fact, the best player before Jordan was actually a guy who never averaged 19 a game in the NBA's most juiced scoring era and who shot 44% for his career in contrast to Wilt's 54%. While the actual evolution of the consensus GOAT has been relatively normal and static (Wilt for about 30 years, then MJ for about 20, now still probably Mike but maybe LeBron), the conversations and criteria have changed drastically in the 20 years since Jordan retired.
I was born in 1986, so I had a front-row seat to the entire steroid era and all the complexities of that. But even with that said....Barry Bonds is the greatest baseball player who ever lived.
I generally agree with Alex, but we'll skip the Babe Ruth part (it's like saying Jon Havlicek would have been the best NBA player in the 60s if the NBA was not integrated). I think what Freddie is missing is that "GOAT" status is not solely about athleticism and achievements, which is 2/3's of the Mahommes argument between Simmons and Thompson.
Simmon's specifically talked about "inevitability" that they'd find a way to win; which is another way of saying this guy/gal is an S-O-B, all-time competitor, who has a will to win beyond everyone else their competing against (and it never turns off). Brady had it. Mahommes has it + better tools = GOAT.
Jordan had it and played 82 games every regular season. Lebron (maybe) has it (eerrr, but not like Jordan, thus the GOAT debate).
Gretzky had it. Tiger had it (golf is simply a sport one can play after 77 surgeries). Serena had it. Naomi Osaka does not.
Baseball is tough because of it's 2-way nature, but Pedro Martinez had it on the mound.
I feel like this critique is even more applicable to contemporary fiction and literature. Deliver me from breathlessly enthusiastic reviews of mediocre work.
Agree with this so much. I read so many breathless reviews of books that I find utterly forgettable.
Call me a naysayer, but isn't much of what occurs, particularly about football, largely BS? From the obnoxious ego show that is the commentators inane blathering, to the hype, hysteria, money spent on displaying the field ever more loudly, the advertising, the gambling that makes one wonder who is actually playing for the team rather than the huge bets, but most of all, the violent injuries and the former players who are relegated to psyche evaluations and nursing facilities, sans compensation for emerging CTE after years of loyalty to the sport? Reminds me of what the spectacle represented of throwing Christians and whomever, to the lions, also in huge bloodsport arenas of days past.
Perhaps it's just me, but Greatest of all time is just more of the same hyperbolic sell, sell, sell. Next!
It’s a fun conversation, but I don’t think Tom Brady actually will be dethroned. Mahomes has had an amazing 5 years, but he’d have to keep it up for another 10 to best Brady — which makes me think there will always be challengers but Brady actually has a shot of holding onto the title for quite a long time.
Everyone should know that NFL really is an acronym of Not For Long. And Father Time is undefeated.
Here in Boston, sports radio host Mike Felger (a Wisconsin product who mostly trolls locals) has started saying Mahomes is on pace to overtake Brady now. When people call in to say "he's only halfway to Brady," Felger often says "It's a daily sports show folks, I can't wait that long."
And I’m on pace to be the world’s oldest person. Anyway, he’s not halfway!
With respect to NFL I think you really have to treat it as a question of eras. Mahomes is awesome and I love watching him play, but huge changes to the rules on how defenses are allowed to play are what enable it. Similarly to how we all know Brady was never asked to do things Sammy Baugh did (and it would now be seen as crazy to consider it) you have to consider that a Patrick Mahomes or Lamar Jackson type player would have quickly been injured out of the league as recently as the 90s.
On Veterans Day 1990 my BIL treated me to press box seats at the LA Coliseum to see the Raiders/Packers game. Don Majkowski had one of the greatest, gutsiest performances I’ve ever seen by an NFL QB, leading the Pack to a decisive upset win despite being sacked 8 times. He was a great scrambler with a gun for an arm. Not a Lamar J but a good and willing runner when the opportunity was there. A week later he hurt his shoulder against Arizona and was lost for the season, and was never the same.
That's a really great example. My comp for the current type of QB play is someone like Randall Cunningham. He had a good career but no one in a million years would put him in contention for the greatest. IIRC he had a bad injury or two as it was and if he played the way modern running QBs do his career would have been very short.
Yes for sure! Randall had some great moments and had a lot that Jackson has now. I sadly recall a complete humiliation of the Pack; he teed them up and danced on their grave, playing with a lot of moxie and talent. But didn’t he spend most of his last years as a backup? I remember he looked good w/the Vikes but he didn’t last as the starter. That must’ve been b/c of an injury? I know he hurt his knee originally w/the Eagles.
Some of this is just a product of the NFL and NFL fandom, though. Baseball, hockey, and basketball struggle with this problem much less. Baseball has the reverse challenge, valorizing players whose careers peaked when Blacks were banned from the sport and there was only one World War. Hockey still considers Gretzky the GOAT and he retired in 1999. The NBA has a healthy competition between Jordan and LeBron, though I think, if pressed, most fans would go Jordan. The NFL is weird because comparing across eras is a lot harder and you can't really declare a true GOAT because the positions are so different. So you get situations where the new QB becomes GOAT.
For the record, I'd agree with the current chatter. Mahomes is better than Brady. But Peyton Manning was better than Brady too. It's just Brady won more. The Brady v. Manning debate, back in the day, had a little of the Jeter v. A-Rod flavor. Brady had a better football career than Jeter baseball career, but if I were starting a magic football team tomorrow and drafting QB's in their absolute prime, Manning and Mahomes would be picked ahead of Brady.
I used to think this about Manning v. Brady but watching what Brady did in TB followed by the semi collapse of the Pats after his departure has changed my opinion.
NFL Football as the official sport of America's Eternal Present tracks.
Came to post the same thing about baseball debates.
The NFL is so overwhelmingly popular and yet, of all the sports, there is very, very little actual game play each week/year. Hence endless blather as the market for content outstrips the actual product.
Add to this the fact that NFL fandom is notoriously shallow/unsophisticated and there is a perfect petri dish for endless GOAT debate.
I'm a much bigger baseball fan and yeah I definitely get tired of the dead air NFL talking heads have to fill
Considering his own talent, and the players who surrounded him, Manning is hugely overrated. An anti-goat.
Agree, with basketball it's much easier as although there are different positions, they more or less all have to have the same skills and do the same things. Individual players have a larger and more direct impact on their team's success.
In football, it is really difficult to quantify how much impact one guy directly has on team success. For example, if Mahomes throws for 500 yards. He still needs to rely on a good play call, his offensive line to effectively block and then his skill players to get open against the best athletes in the world and catch a ball going 60 MPH while sprinting full speed. So many other factors go into one play. That's why I think the GOAT argument in football is pointless.
Tarkenton > Mahomes
Winslow > Kelce
Recency bias and shameless hype ruins sports
Whoa whoa whoa, I mean no disrespect to Fran Tarkenton but how can you so cavalierly put a 4-time SB loser above a 3-time winner? I know rings aren't the only thing, but they do count for something, right?
As a Bears fan, I’d blow my load if Williams ends up being discussed for a Pro-bowl much less goat lol
It's mainly just a silly question for the Nick Wright and Screamin' Steven types to yell about. What would ESPN and Fox Sports do all day without questions like these? Go dark?
As my dear old dad used to say 50 years ago. "They have to do the nightly news show every day even if there is no news".
“Guys like that don't get mentioned because they’re old, and old is boring. Because nobody who's writing thinkpieces or shouting on ESPN today saw them play.”
Could cross-apply this to other sports too. Before GOAT was a term, the debate in baseball was between Ruth, Williams, or DiMaggio. Recently it was Griffey or (still the champ) Bonds, and now Ohtani is the media consensus. It’s super cool that we’re around to see the Greatest rather than those forgettable athletes of generations past!
With baseball especially the idea of a continuity with the past is very important to the culture of the sport which is not true at all of pro football.
Ohtani is extraordinary and a genuinely singular figure in the two centuries of baseball history (no easy feat), but I don't think anyone is calling him the GOAT just yet, nor did anyone say that of Griffey who just didn't manage the longevity that would have gotten him there.
You can quantify these things in baseball. In football numbers of different eras are virtually unintelligible against each other, even more so than basketball or hockey.
Thanks for the nod to Bart Starr, unvanquished hero of my youth. The QBR stat was one I hadn’t known, and there was a time when I could’ve rattled off his numbers by the season. Truly that was a different era - though mostly by rule tweaking. Players are bigger now, yes, but otherwise the game today is basically very similar. Funny that only Greg Cook’s QBR was better; a more perfect example of lost potential - and part of your point, I think - would be hard to find.
Ha ha you still think words have meanings
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/322/660/103.jpg
FdB should begin championing the acronym GATT - Greatest At This Time to describe those particular ath-o-letes who excel at being...well...GATT.