as much as it pains me to say, I'm going with Brady.
I don't like the concept of judging QB's on winning games alone - that ignores the contributions of the 52 other players on the team. in the past, I've made the case that you should judge a QB on the basis of how many points his team scores - if a QB leads the team to the 1 yard line and the FB punches it in, well that's a good thing for the QB, you shouldn't look at that differently than if the QB hit a back-corner fade. so, I've argued that the best QB's are the ones running high-scoring offenses.
However, after a year of Tebow and a couple of years of Manning, I've come to appreciate other aspects of QB'ing, and I have a better understanding of complimentary football. What happens on offense can definitely effect the defense, so it's really tough to come up with an empirical metric to say whom is better. Because, at the end of the day, all that matters is getting the W, and so I'm left with looking at wins/losses, but I don't like it much. Brady has a much higher win percentage than Manning, and much higher than
I wanted to make the case that Brady has has benefited from better coaching and defense (which I will argue he has). I wanted to show that Manning has won more shoot-outs than Brady - the idea was that Brady has won more low-scoring games, and therefore most of his wins are attributable to the NE defense and Bill Belichick.
Here's my question: looking at the entirety of these guy's regular season careers, who has won more games where there defense has given up 24 points (current NFL scoring average is 23.3 ppg)? The answer is Brady, and it's not really close. Manning is 40-63 (0.388), and Brady is 36-36 (0.500).
I was surprised at how low both numbers were, so I compared to some contemporary QB's and recent HoFers. Mannings numbers, while low, are actually really good in comparison.
w l percentagemanning 40 63 0.388brady 36 36 0.500favre 33 74 0.308montana 21 22 0.488marino 23 64 0.264brees 27 61 0.307rodgers 15 21 0.417elway 19 47 0.288young 9 30 0.231aikman 6 37 0.140Of the QB's I looked at, only Joe Montana and Aaron Rodgers have a better win percentage in shootouts than Manning, and none more than Brady.
