John Elway

Yes. Sorry.

"... and then casts a disparaging eye toward Dan Marino and others like him whose defenses were lucky to hold the opposition to 17 points in a half."

Or did you mean the part of the equation about Tuck Rules and clutch kickers who never missed at the ends of games after their quarterback couldn't get the offense deeper than the opponents' 30 or so.

Whole lotta things go into whether a QB is a winner or not.

 

So, your opinion of Tom Brady is?

 

He's a Hall of Fame quarterback who has been on the positive side of the "luck" equation a little more frequently than many other quarterbacks of comparable ability.

 

This thread has been ridiculous.

 

Is Gherig searching the interwebs for a response?

 

Bronco fan here adding his two cents.

Elway does tend to get propped up as the "king of fourth quarter comebacks" more than he probably should, especially when Montana and Marino were just as capable in that department. And it is silly to say that Marino had the more talented teams built around him than Elway... but nobody can say they were better than the ones built around Montana.

But with that said, people exaggerate how good the teams were around Elway. The defenses, for example, had more to do with how good Joe Collier and Wade Phillips were as coordinators, than they had to do with the talent level.

In the years Elway was in his prime and took teams to Super Bowls three out of four years (and an AFC title game against Buffalo), there were several players from the original Orange Crush, but they were all past their primes. Among players in their primes, I would only put Karl Mecklenburg, Dennis Smith, Simon Fletcher and Steve Atwater as truly talented players, and Atwater is the only player I can safely say belongs in the HOF (Mecklenburg is debatable). Everyone else couldn't get in sniffing distance of the Pro Bowl.

The offensive line was terrible through those seasons. The running backs were mostly an average bunch... Sammy Winder had a couple of good seasons but didn't last long. Bobby Humphrey showed promise, but his contract holdout cost him. As for receivers, the Three Amigos are overrated, and it had everything to do with them getting one of those late 1980s posters that were all the rage.

With all that said, there are legitimate reasons to say Marino may have done better if teams around him were built better.

But what it comes down to is that Elway performed better in his later years, particularly after Jim Fassel got him to put a better touch on the ball. We all talk about how hard Elway threw, but that sometimes made it an issue for his receivers because he threw it too hard. When Fassel got him to put a better touch on passes, Elway did better.

As for where I would rank them, I'd put Montana ahead of Elway, and Elway ahead of Marino, when looking at the entire package, but recognizing that Elway and Marino could have performed as well as Montana with better talent around them. And it's also worth asking how much of Montana's success came through Bill Walsh coaching him up -- Montana did have talent coming into the NFL, but I always believed he needed the right coach to refine him a bit to truly make him a top passer. It's similar to how I view Tom Brady, in that Bill Belichick was the right coach to get the best out of him.

 

Brady also took only a small fraction of the Pats' salary cap money during his Super Bowl runs. Like Russell Wilson, these are once-in-a-decade bargains that the right team can ride an awful long way.

 

The goalpost keep moving here. It's a cute slight of hand.

The original post was attempting to prove the Elway was average based on stats. I, among others, pointed out several factors that contributed to his occasionally average stats as compared to other quarterbacks in the league or of the era.

The defenses Elway played with have almost nothing to do with his offensive statistics. Great Denver defenses and Karl Mecklenberg and Steve Atwater seem to be kind of irrelevant as to how they pertain to the original post. Frankly, so do Super Bowls.

If anyone would like to attempt the argument that Vance Johnson, Sammy Winder, Gerald Willhite and Steve Watson were actually exceptional players, on the same level as Rice, John Taylor, Mark Clayton, Mark Duper, Roger Craig, etc., then go right ahead. I don't think you'll have much luck.

 

Right. Elway didn't have superior talent around him until he was toward the end of his career. Not very many HOF quarterbacks played the majority of their careers with a coach who didn't know how to take advantage of his talents.

 

Look at the statistics Elway put up after Reeves was fired, from 1993 to when he retired. He was better in every category. Some of them dramatically better. He turned 33 in 1993. Did he somehow just magically get good? The five best passer ratings of his career all came after 1993.

It's not coincidence.

 

He did also have crazy talent on those teams. Sharpe, Davis, Atwater, Zimmerman, Schlereth, Nalen, Rod Smith, Ed McCaffrey.

Shanahan knew how to use Elway. Reeves and Phillips did not.