Wrapping Up: Super Bowl LV

So the Tampa Bay Buccaneers just won the Super Bowl. The score was a brutal 31-9 trouncing. As it turns out, missing the vast majority of your offensive line is a really good way to get your ass kicked by one of the five best defensive lines in all of football. There is so very little to say about this game that matters. The Bucs walked into their home stadium and dismantled the poor Chiefs until nothing was left but a large, swollen big toe. Yes, we are doing Patrick Mahomes turf toe jokes, buckle up. I want to do the Chiefs right at the beginning here. Patrick Mahomes is young. The team overall is young, and they will be back here sooner rather than later. The team suffered from multiple debilitating injuries and some off the field situation with their linebackers coach. It’s not an excuse for how poorly everyone not named Patrick Mahomes played, but it is something. The Chiefs played their worst game of the season at exactly the wrong time. It’s unfortunate, but I feel like everyone will move on.

The major storylines here are with the winners. You have to start with Tom Brady. The forty-three-year-old quarterback had a very solid game. A game better than any forty-three-year-old man has the right to put forth. Brady went 21/29 with 201 yards and he threw three touchdowns, two of which went to Rob Gronkowski. The old man went ultimate game manager. He didn’t need to do anything more. The run game had it going. The Bucs ran for a total of 145 yards and the O-line was dominating KC for most of the game. The real storyline is the overall impact on Tom Brady’s legacy. Brady has now won a Super Bowl as the starting QB for two separate teams. The topic of who the greatest QB of all time was over after the Patriots came back to beat the Falcons. What this win does is end the conversation of who the best football player overall is. Before tonight I would have tried to make an argument that maybe Jerry Rice or Lawrence Taylor would be considered the best, but that is over. That leaves us with one real question, where does Tom Brady rank all-time as an athlete overall?

This may seem irrelevant to what I normally do on these Wrap Up articles but this game sucked and there is almost nothing to write about so forgive me for writing a more interesting article. As far as I can tell, there are five people up for the greatest athlete of all time. Their names, in no particular order, are: Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Serena Williams, and Usain Bolt. Johan Cruyff, Lionel Messi, Michael Phelps, and Roger Federer all get honorable mentions from me but fall into the second tier that I don’t feel like explaining right now. I should probably put criteria on my top five and why I have them there but they are all so great I feel like it should be at least a little self-explanatory. Winning in the biggest sports and dominating for long periods is what it boils down to. Tom Brady earned himself a spot amongst these all-time greats with this maybe not final accomplishment. I will start here with the fact that he is not number one. Serena Williams is the most dominant athlete in her field of all time. What she has done to women’s tennis over the past twenty-two years will never be topped in any sport. Imagine if Brady had never lost more than two games a season and had also gone to fifteen Super Bowls while winning ten. That is the level of dominance we are talking about with Williams. For me, I think Tom Brady hits fourth on this list. MJ is number two. He is the most overly competitive person I have ever seen documented, he played defense every bit as well as he played offense, and in the end, he never lost on the biggest stage. He didn’t always have the best teams, but he always came up biggest in the biggest games and he proved himself to be one of the two greatest athletes of all time. Usain Bolt is third. He was so vastly superior to his competition. He was as good as it got and he did it throughout three separate Olympics, seemingly never losing a step.

So Tom Brady sits at the four spot for me. The fourth greatest athlete and overall athletic competitor of all time. That crosses all sports, and all ages, across all the countries in the world. Some people may start to get upset as to why he is not number one. To you people I say, shove it. If you are arrogant enough to think that calling Brady the fourth-best in a field of literally millions all competing for the same thing is a slight then you can get off of my website right now. Tom Brady has accomplished feats that no one else has or ever will, but so has everyone else I have mentioned in this article. At the end of the day, Brady lost to one good Giants team, one mediocre Giants team, and got out-dueled by a journeyman QB who can’t even beat our Mitchell Trubisky for a starting job in the NFL. Those are the only three blemishes on his resume. Unfortunately, they are big enough to move him down exactly three spots to being the literal fourth-best athlete of literally all-time in my estimation. This is all opinion and though I feel strongly about this list and think it is at least vaguely really good, I am aware this is definitely up for debate. It was also brought to my attention by a friend that maybe solo athletes should have their list set aside from team sports, which is a very good point, but he made the point after I had already written this and I don’t want to re-write all of this with that in mind. Sorry to disappoint, Alex.

Beyond the Tom Brady “place in sports history” conversation, the major storyline from this game was that awesome Tampa Bay defense. They are the ones that won this game for Tampa. Todd Bowles had cooked up a game plan, and it bloody worked. The front four for Tampa absolutely annihilated the decimated front five for the Chiefs. They were able to consistently get pressure on Mahomes while only rushing four. The back end also held up very well with a safety always being shaded towards Hill to prevent him from being as explosive as he can be. The only guy that was able to do anything significant was Travis Kelce and even he just had a pretty good game. It was nothing special from the best tight end in all of football. Lavonte David and Devin White played out of their minds and particularly White showed why he will be one of the best linebackers in all of football for the foreseeable future.

Tom Brady stated that he wants to run it back. This team, with the pieces they currently have, is a dangerous, Super Bowl contender because of course, they are. The only real question will be the same thing that it always is: Where will Tom Brady be at? Brady has been able to defy the laws of time for years now, but we saw with Peyton Manning, when the skill goes, it goes off a cliff. Peyton went from throwing fifty-five touchdowns in a season to being benched for Brock Osweiler. I don’t think we see that kind of decline from Brady next season, because it would be stupid of me to predict such an outlandish thing. However, I do wonder when and how father time inevitably catches up with Tom. I am certainly not going to predict a repeat, but if Tom can continue to stave off the ghost that gets every single athlete at some point, then it may be tough for me to actually predict any other winner come next pre-season.

Addendum: I realized about an hour after writing this article that I had completely forgotten about Wayne Gretzky, who not only deserves to be in the top five, but deserves a legitimate thought as the number one on this list. He belongs as either the best or second best on that list I wrote above. What Gretzky did in hockey would never be matched if they added a fourth period to the games. He was more dominant at his sport then any player before him. The only thing holding him back is that he only has four of Lord Stanley’s Cups. However, his individual dominance is so startling that this, at worst, drops him to the two spot. I apologize to Wayne Gretzky personally, as “The Great One” ought never be forgotten.