For many years now, avid football lovers widely agree that the greatest football player to ever cross paths with the NFL is Tom Brady. Brady, who won seven Super Bowls over the course of his career, lasted in the NFL for 23 years, beginning his career in 2000 and retiring in 2023. For the majority of his NFL career, Brady played as a quarterback for the New England Patriots. The Patriots chose Brady in the NFL Draft, keeping him as a quarterback until 2020, when he signed on as a quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for the final years of his career. Many of Brady’s biggest achievements came from his time at the Patriots, holding 11 Patriot team records and 23 NFL records, earning 3-time NFL MVP, 2-time Offensive Player of the Year, receiving NFL 2000s and 2010s All-Decade Team, and Pro Football Hall Of Fame accolades. However, even with all these honors, Brady is not the true greatest NFL player of all time.
While Brady is known mostly for his accomplishments, he is also well-known for his cheating scandal in the 15th year of his career. Commonly termed “deflategate,” the scandal led to the New England Patriots paying a fine of 1 million dollars and suspending Brady for four games. This came from an investigation that found the Patriots improperly inflating their footballs for the AFC Championship game. This scandal caused uproar from many fans, as the Patriots went on to win the Superbowl that season. Whether the team deserved to continue to the Super Bowl without a new, fair AFC Championship game stays controversial well after the 2015 season.
According to Vito Stellung of the Florida Times, “With the culture of cheating in New England, did that let Brady think he could get away with it?”
Additionally, Tom Brady became a star quarterback right as technology advanced the NFL. For decades, quarterbacks called their own plays on the field without immediate direction from their coaches. Headsets began appearing in the NFL in 1994, allowing for quarterbacks to communicate directly with their coaches on the field. Brady, whose career began in 2000, signed on to the Patriots just as this technology became regularly used in the NFL. While other quarterbacks deemed “great,” such as Frank Tarkenton and Joe Montana, won fewer Super Bowls, they called all of their own plays without direct communication from their coaches on the field. They lacked the technology that made Brady great, meaning that, while having less accolades, they were, in actuality, more impressive than Brady. With this technology dispute, it is reasonable to conclude that Tom Brady’s success cannot be as attributed to his own talent as it could be with quarterbacks in earlier years.
Even Montana, while notoriously positive about Tom Brady’s performance, nominates Otto Graham as the greatest player, stating, “Well, obviously Tom has had a tremendous career. The hard part is trying to compare eras…There was a guy way back, Otto Graham, who won 11 championships before there were Super Bowls. I mean, the game was just so different, the ball might not have even been the same shape back then. If you watch him, it’s just hard to compare guys.”
In total, it is reasonable to conclude that Tom Brady is not the greatest in the NFL, especially in comparison to quarterbacks who did not have the same technology and on-field communication as Brady. In addition, his scandals in deflating his team’s footballs, while not directly involved, denote any merit he has gained over his career.
