Hi All,
First of all, as Cowboy fan correctly pointed out, this poll is an offshoot of the Manning/Brady poll. Yes, its a somewhat silly poll - by design. Nooone should really question Butkus's place in history compared to Bruschi - depsite his inability to win a playoff game. Yet other players, inexplicably, are held accountable for the very same shortcoming - Dan Marino, Barry Sanders, Peyton Manning, etc.
My feeling has always been that Football is a TEAM game and should assessed as such. Teams have three sepereate disciplines (offense, defense, special teams) 22 core starting players and numerous subsititutes. When assessing an individual players, one should be VERY careful in giving too much credit/blame to one person unless its fully deservsed. When I see the Patriots Dynasty, first and foremost I see a Bill Bellicheck devising a master gameplan that gives his players a massive advantage on the field. His schemes confuse the opposition and put his players in a position to succeed. Tom Brady is a DIRECT offshoot of that. Its difficult to imagine Brady succeeding so spectcularly on another team with a different coach.
Anyway, the bottom line is this - some players receive disproportional share of the blame when things go wrong, and others receive a disproportional amount of credit when things go right. That, in a nutshell, is Peyton Manning and Tom Brady.