Why Joe Montana Won’t Even Make My Top Five Best NFL Quarterbacks of All time

By Nick Ronson

Sports writers of the world have seized the occasion of this Sunday’s Super Bowl Game in Miami to debate who is the greatest quarterback of them all.
The argument seems to be that if Peyton Manning leads the Indianapolis Colts to victory, it would be his second at the helm of a Super Bowl champion, and given all his achievements, including four MVPs, he could lay claim to being even greater than, up to this point, the greatest quarterback in history – Joe Montana.

Well, Montana doesn’t even make my top five best quarterbacks in the history of the NFL, and here’s why.

Sportswriters get caught up in numbers and narrowly define quarterback’s achievements by what can be totaled on a calculator (by this measure James Dean was a lousy actor because he appeared in only four movies). Quarterbacks don’t have to be just great athletes who lead their teams to championships.
They have to be great dramatic entertainers, magnificent presences on the field, and in the living rooms of the more than 100 million viewers who annually watch the Super Bowl.

And Montana, for all his on field prowess, played small ball, threw short passes to receivers running surgically precise routes in an offensive scheme under coach Bill Walsh that managed to take a game of great brutality, muscle and speed, and turned it into dance troupe (quite a few of them fat) in cleats.
To be a great quarterback you must be a flawed God who can heave the ball downfield to a receiver slashing deep up the sidelines or across the field, and it has to be a beautiful, majestic and poetic thing.

Joe dumped shorties.

Nick Ronson’s Top Three:

Brett Favre: Favre got beat to death by the New Orleans Saints defensive line in this year’s NFC championship game and then took a worst drubbing after the game from the sporting press for throwing an interception that prevented the Vikings from getting a last-second field goal attempt that might have won the game. Instead, they lost in overtime. So. What?

Favre is a gladiator. He plays quarterback as hard-nosed as Dick Butkus played linebacker. He rares back and heaves the ball in defiance of the quick release, put- the-audience-to-sleep doctrine that makes so many NFL quarterbacks as dull as PGA golfers who have beautiful swings and the sex appeal of Sansabelt slacks. Sure Favre made terrific, fatal blunders in his career. So did the Flying Wallendas. But they were great to watch before they plunged to their deaths.

Roger Staubach: Staubach, the Dallas Cowboy quarterback first coined the expression “Hail Mary” for a 50-yard pass heaved desperately into the end zone at the last second of a 1975 Wild Card playoff game against the Minnesota Vikings. Drew Pearson caught the ball and the Cowboys won 17-14. Stauback was the first NFL quarterback to play out of the shotgun formation. He won two Super Bowls and the MVP in one of them. He earned a couple of nicknames in his career: “Roger Dodger,” for his scrambling, and “Captain Comback,” for leading the Cowboys to 15 fourth-quarter come from behind victories. He’s a Cowboy, and I detest the Dallas Cowboys. But he was a quarterback I couldn’t tear my eyes away from even as he was tearing out my heart.


Terry Bradshaw: Bradshaw’s hands were so large he put his index finger on the point of the ball when he threw his perfect, high-arching deep spirals to Pittsburgh Steeler receivers such a Len Swan who added to the beauty and grace of Bradshaw’s pigskin rainbows by racing under them, taking them in in full stride and gliding into the end zone. I can’t remember a single such Montana pass in a decade of watching him play. Bradshaw, like Montana, won four Super Bowls. But, unlike Montana -- whose coach would sometimes script the first 16 plays of the game -- Bradshaw called his own plays. He threw better. He thought better. He just flat looked better on the field than the onerous, cotton-candy tossing Montana.