As the NFL playoffs begin this weekend with the league’s two all-time passing leaders in featured games, the NFL has just bizarrely snubbed one of them by leaving him off its NFL 100 list of the greatest 100 players of the league’s first 100 years.
Amid a series of eight or nine other highly questionable decisions in fashioning the NFL 100 team, the failure to include New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees stands as the most egregious.
Brees is the league’s all-time leader in passing yards, touchdown passes, completed passes, passing yards per game, and completion percentage, and is fourth in games won — even though only twice has he ever played on a team with a top-10 defense. He was the MVP of a Super Bowl and led his team to two other conference championship games. How can the greatest statistical player at the game’s most prominent position not be among the top 10 quarterbacks, or top 100 players, in league history, especially when he has been a consistent winner despite consistently having bad defenses as millstones around his neck?
The 10 quarterbacks that did make the team all were terrific: Sammy Baugh, Tom Brady, John Elway, Brett Favre, Otto Graham, Peyton Manning, Dan Marino, Joe Montana, Roger Staubach, and Johnny Unitas. But how, for example, does Marino make it ahead of Brees when they both played under modern-era rules but Brees far outclasses Marino in almost every statistical category? Plus, Brees has a Super Bowl win while Marino has none. (Marino’s only Super Bowl appearance was a 38-16 blowout loss despite his Miami Dolphins boasting the league’s seventh-best defense. Marino had a decidedly mediocre game, compiling a mere 66.9 passer rating.)
How does Brees not make it ahead of Favre when Brees leads him in most good statistics, has the same number of Super Bowl titles, and has thrown an astonishing 99 fewer interceptions than Favre while playing nearly as many games? Favre’s only Super Bowl win came when his Green Bay Packers boasted the statistically best defense in the whole league; Brees won despite a defense ranked a lowly 25th of 32.
The omission of Brees from the NFL 100 is mind-boggling.
Also snubbed by NFL 100 was Bart Starr, who led his Packers to six championship games in eight years, winning a still-unsurpassed five in the final seven. In addition to leading the most storied title-winning team in league history, Starr led the league in completion percentage four times, lowest interception percentage three times, yards per passing attempt twice, and passer rating four times. His statistics surpass Roger Staubach’s in almost every particular, even though Staubach played when rules began changing to favor the offense more than in Starr’s era.
Of all the great players on the Packers’ Lombardi dynasty, only tackle Forrest Gregg makes the NFL 100. Not Jim Taylor, not Willie Davis or Willie Wood, not Herb Adderly or Ken Bowman, and not even fierce middle linebacker Ray Nitschke. Yet NFL 100 features not one but two Oakland Raiders punters: Ray Guy and (get this) Shane Lechler.
Others most notably snubbed were running back Marshall Faulk, fifth in all-time yards from scrimmage; kicker Morten Andersen, until this year the all-time scoring leader; and receiver Art Monk, a three-time Super Bowl winner whose 940 career catches, when he retired in 1995, were more than 100 catches ahead of his nearest competitor.
I’d say that surely the NFL can do better than its list of 100 all-time greats — but then I remember how awful its officiating is, and I realize that no, perhaps it’s too blinkered to get almost anything right.
