I know there are not a lot of people writing about sports on here, but, I thought I would take a little break and talk about Tom Brady for just a little bit. There has been a lot of talk about him being the GOAT over the last 3-5 years. While, being a sports fan, I like these discussions but I never really gave them much weight. The best you could really hope for is to talk about the best player of an era. In football, it is even harder as a many players are never even on the field at the same time when they play each other.
Even in basketball, the GOAT is an impossible discussion because of the way we look at greatness. Wilt Chamberlain was the greatest individual scorer, Bill Russell won 11 championships, Michael Jordan elevated his teams to greatness as an offensive and defensive force. (You could even make a case for John Stockton, if you are looking only at stats, since he is the only person to hold records in two of the four major individual metrics, steals and assists.) Football is even harder since a player only plays defense or offense, we will ignore special teams.
So, Brady will retire at some point with some pretty substantial records for an NFL quarterback. Most Super Bowls Wins, Most Touchdowns, Most Passing Yards, Most Wins. He will hold pretty much all regular season and playoff records you can think of. But, that doesn't mean he is the greatest ever, he is only one man on a team of 53 and he is only in the game less than half the time.
So what one stat says he is the greatest to play in the NFL, simply this. Tom Brady as an individual holds more Super Bowl titles than any other franchise has since the inception of the league. That's right, Tom Brady by himself has 7 rings, no other team in the history of the NFL has more than six. And one of those teams with six won them all with Brady. No other individual professional athlete has a record anything like that.