The Shadow-gloom and Weight of the Sacred

It's been a while since I sat down for a blog post, but all the attention football receives during the NFL playoffs has irked one of my pet peeves just enough to bring me back from blogging exile (at least for a single post). In the last decade, the notion of the "elite" quarterback has inundated the vernacular of football commentators and sports broadcasters. I could be wrong, but I don't remember the notion of "elite" quarterback being discussed when I was growing up, and there were some truly gifted quarterbacks during my childhood: Joe Montana, Dan Marino, John Elway (who I think is the all-time greatest QB--there, Jake, I admit it!), Warren Moon, Steve Young, Troy Aikman, and Jim Kelly are all hall of famers and quarterbacks I grew up watching. But, I never remember ever hearing discussions about their elite level or the comparative lack of eliteness from quarterbacks such as Bernie Kosar, Randall Cunningham, or Jim McMahon. Not so today.

Credit: Saquan Stimpson CC BY-SA 2.0

Eli Manning was famously asked prior to the 2011 football season if he considered himself in the same class as Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, to which he responded that he did think he was in their class. Everyone scoffed. But, he won the Super Bowl at the end of the season--his second--and everyone's perspective changed. Everyone pretended as if they had never questioned Eli's quarterbacking skills. At the beginning of the 2012 football season, Joe Flacco was asked if he considered himself elite quarterback, and of course he responded in the affirmative. Everyone scoffed. But, Flacco played in his second consecutive AFC championship yesterday (his third overall) and is Super Bowl-bound, and  he has never experienced a season in which he failed to quarterback his team to the playoffs.

Here's my complaint with the way sports broadcasters's discuss elite: they seem to think it is a category one can reach by simply trying hard enough, possessing the right tools, tightening up his game, minimizing mistakes. Elite, though, is not a statistical category, it is a comparative category. For example, I don't think Joe Flacco is one of the elite quarterbacks in the NFL, but compared to the quarterbacks on his team, he is elite. In his division (i.e., AFC North), Ben Roethlisburger is an elite quarterback, but within his conference--indeed, within the NFL--he is a second tier quarterback.

"Elite" is not a concept that stands on its own, like completion percentage or number of interceptions thrown. It exists when comparing one QB with another QB (no one seems to care if your center or linebacker are elite, by the way). You don't "move into the elite class of quarterbacks" (as the CBS pregame crew seem to think) by improving your game, nor do you move into that class by beating so-called "elite" quarterbacks in a head-to-head matchup! Heck, Tony Romo might win the Super Bowl in 2014 and 2015, but that doesn't move him into the same class as Tom Brady or, historically speaking, Jim Plunkett.

By definition, the elite category is the smallest (or nearly so) grouping of quarterbacks. Not every NFL quarterback can be elite, only a few. You can't draft an elite quarterback, it takes years of work to move into the top class of players. So here's how I'd categorize the quarterbacks currently playing in the NFL.

1. Tier Elite: Tom Brady, Peyton Manning
2. Tier Honorable: Eli Manning, Ben Roethlisburger, Drew Brees, Aaron Rogers
3. Tier Commendable: Matt Ryan, Joe Flacco, Matt Schaub, Jay Cutler, Andrew Luck, Robert Griffith III, Russell Wilson, Andy Dalton, Colin Kaepernick, Alex Smith
4. Tier Fledgling: Philip Rivers, Tony Romo, Christian Ponder, Ryan Tannehill, Sam Bradford, Brandon Weedon, Michael Vick, Mark Sanchez, Josh Freeman
5. Tier Give It Up Already: Jake Locker, Joe Webb, Brady Quinn, Blaine Gabbert, Matt Cassell, Anyone who plays QB for the Arizona Cardinals

I feel like I could move one or two second tier guys into the top tier, and one or two third tier guys down to the fourth tier (and vice versa), but I feel like this list is a good representation of most of the quarterbacks currently playing in the NFL. (If Joe Flacco--or Colin Kaepernick--wins the Super Bowl, I'll consider him a second tier man, "Honorable." I know that it has become fashionable as of late to criticize Peyton Manning, which I don't mind because I was sickened by all the fawning he received earlier in his career. Still, I think his record as a whole places him in the top tier even though I can understand how one might be offended that Brady isn't in a class of his own. Theses are tiers, though, not rankings of individual players.)