Aaron Rodgers began his career as a starting quarterback with much anticipation. Three years into said career, he lived up to the hype by leading the Green Bay Packers to a championship, and Rodgers took MVP honors in the Super Bowl.
With that success arose the inevitable discussions about where he ranks among active quarterbacks. Does Sunday’s victory vault him ahead of the likes of Drew Brees or Super Bowl counterpart Ben Roethlisberger? Is Rodgers now as good as Peyton Manning? Is he entering Tom Brady territory?
The answers to those questions, in order, are: yes, yes (strange as it seems) and not yet.
As much as I’d love to proclaim that the Packers’ No. 12 is better than the Patriots’ No. 12, until Rodgers wins at least one more Super Bowl, that’s simply not the case. Don’t get me wrong, if faced with the popular question of “If you were starting an NFL team from scratch …” I’d pick Rodgers as my quarterback, partly because I’m a biased Packers fan, but mostly because he’s six years younger than Brady.
Right now, though, Brady gets the edge over A-Rodg. I’m not a Brady fan by any stretch (quite the opposite), but he deserves credit for putting up the numbers he did with the Patriots’ sorry excuse for a receiving corps. I know I wasn’t alone in thinking the departure of Randy Moss would be the downfall of the New England offense, and we all were dead wrong. Brady made Deion Branch look like Jerry Rice and would have turned Aaron Hernandez or Rob Gronkowski into a Rookie of the Year candidate if they hadn’t shared the tight end receiving load.
Give Brady the Packers receivers and he would have exceeded the 36-touchdown, four-interception performance that was his 2010 season and been an even easier choice for league MVP.
Super Bowl wins aren’t the only stat that matters when it comes to quarterback greatness. The notion that, if the Steelers had won on Sunday, Roethlisberger should be mentioned in the same breath as Brady is absurd. But Rodgers needs more titles (and some MVP awards) to enter the “Who’s better than Brady?” discussion.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Look, your team just won the Super Bowl, and the quarterback of that team is MVP. So your head might be in the clouds a little bit.
Come back to Earth, Josh.
Aaron Rodgers has gone 6-10, 11-5 and 10-6 in his three seasons as a starter. He has played in one Pro Bowl, he has finished no higher than third in passer rating in any of his three seasons and he has no MVP awards.
The future is bright for this guy, who seems to be a very, very likeable player, but to say he's on level ground with Peyton Manning, who if he suffered a career-ending injury tomorrow would go down as one of the top three quarterbacks of all time, is ludicrous.
If Aaron Rodgers suffered the same career-ending injury tomorrow, he'd go down as another Mark Rypien.
I'm not talking all-time. I'm talking right now. Last I checked, Manning has a sub-.500 record in the playoffs. If you want to teach kids how to play quarterback by having them watch one guy, that guy is Manning. But the one knock on him is he dominates in the regular season but tends to fall flat in the playoffs. Aaron Rodgers is 4-1 in the playoffs, and certainly played well enough in that one loss (423 yards and four touchdowns in a 51-45 loss to the Cardinals last year) that he should have five postseason wins, if not more.
Hollywood has this phrase called the "It Girl," which generally describes a starlet who is big right now.
Aaron Rodgers is the "It Girl" of NFL quarterbacks. Yes, he had a hot postseason that culminated in his first Super Bowl, but those with a rational bone in their body (you must have been born without one) will wait and see what happens before anointing him the second coming of Jesus.
Right now, he has four playoff wins, a championship and a Super Bowl MVP. Eli Manning and Drew Brees — also at one time the "It Girl" of NFL quarterbacks — can say the exact same thing.
Based on what the Packers "it girl" did the last month, though, I doubt if anyone would make the claim that Eli Manning is a better QB right now than Aaron Rodgers. Drew Brees might have a few more supporters, but until next season (assuming there is one) shows us something different, the top two quarterbacks in the NFL both wear No. 12.
People said the exact, the exact, same stuff about Brees a year ago. Then he had a down year and lost in the first round of the playoffs.
Like I said previously, Rodgers is good and quite likable but I'm not ready to (in the words of Dennis Green) "crown his ass" just yet.
Post a Comment