I Don't Know About the Whole GOAT Thing

Tom Brady retired recently. You may have heard. If you’re reading this, I’d have to imagine that you did. If not, you’re almost certainly aware of the ongoing coronation of Brady as the GOAT — the Greatest of All Time.

I hate this discussion, and I’ve written and spoken at length about it before, but the occasion of Brady’s retirement gives me a good reason to do so again. I am firmly against the declaration of the GOAT for a whole slew of reasons, but the two biggest come down to definitions and presentism.

Nobody can actually agree on what the term means

Words mean things, and words having consistent meanings is crucially important when you’re making declarative statements. As far as this discussion goes, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone give a firm definition of some very key terms: “greatest” and “all-time.”

When we say a player is the greatest, what do we actually mean? Do we mean the best at his position? What does that mean? It’s a much more complicated question than you might think, because it entails defining the ideal of a position and measuring a person by how well they match up to it, which by nature excludes categories of players who may be great, but don’t play a position in a particular way.

For a non-quarterback example, how would you propose the compare the two great safeties Troy Polamalu and Ed Reed? Polamalu was ball of explosive energy at the line of scrimmage, while Reed was the consummate deep safety ballhawk. Both are great. Both were nominally safeties. Both played very differently. It would take a lot of work to convince me that one was absolutely better than the other.

Further, when we say “best,” do we mean the best at a given point or the best over a period of time? And which points? For how long of a period of time? I think you could make a case for finding one incredible performance by a given player and argue that such a performance gives that player a claim to the GOAT title. After all, it proves that they did things nobody else could, right? By definition, they are greater than any other player at that point, at least by one definition.

Exploring the question of “all-time” is equally tricky. When we say a football player is the best of all-time, do we mean that literally? How would you propose to make a meaningful comparison across eras?

If you decide that’s too tricky, how do you break down eras? Do we consider everything from post-World War II? Post-merger? Post the big passing rules adjustment in the 1970s? Post-free agency? Post the second big passing rules adjustment in the early 2000s? And if you break things down into those eras, how do you still seriously have a conversation about someone being the best of all time when you explicitly admit that all time doesn’t actually mean all time?

Nobody will admit they’re grading the past by the present

But even if you’d manage to come up with a satisfactory definition of “greatest” and “all-time,” I’m really skeptical of the idea that you can call someone the GOAT without carrying too much of the present into the past.

Even with era-adjusted stats, we’re not accounting for much of what made the past the past and how that differs from the present. Passing stats today look bananas compared to the 1960s and even the 1990s, but I don’t see many people seriously grappling with the question as to why that is. 

And there are many reasons! The game has evolved. Coaching was different then. Conventional wisdom was different, too. Does that make the players worse? Even if you could adjust the stats, can you adjust for the mindset that made it almost a guarantee that you had to run the ball X number of times before you attempted play action?

Or consider the practicalities of training. Every player today works out like it’s their job (since it is). But in the days of Vince Lombardi and the power sweep, Packers’ fullback (not running back! Another difference between eras) Jim Taylor was among the only members of the team who did regular weight training. I don’t know what to make of that when comparing him to guys of his own era. Does that make him better? Smarter? Just different? I really don’t know.

But I do know that we have to avoid deciding that the present state of football (or anything, really) is good and how it should be and the past is bad and outdated. Everything that is past was once present, and if we dismiss it merely because we’re in the present, our opinions aren’t worth anything, because guess what happens to the present? That’s right, soon we’ll be in the past, too, and I’d hate for everything we’ve come to enjoy to be dismissed with a handwave because that was then and this is now.

If all this sounds like a wandering way of saying “I don’t know” a bunch of times, it’s basically that. I honestly don’t know what to do with a discussion about the greatest players of all time except to take them on their individual merits relative to the time in which they played. It’s a much less incendiary discussion than yelling at people on TV about who is or isn’t the GOAT, but that’s all I’ve got.