In a major victory for labor, Tom Brady led Tampa Bay to victory in the Super Bowl on Sunday, giving him seven Super Bowl victories. That number is more than any other player, coach, or franchise in the history of the NFL, which seems like it should cement Brady’s legacy as the greatest football player ever—except that most people ALREADY considered him the best football player ever. So now people are forced to make cross-sport comparisons, debating whether or not seven titles puts him ahead of Michael Jordan, or Tiger Woods, or Serena Williams. These debates are borderline nonsense. You might as well debate whether Brady is better than The Beatles.
But sports debates about the Greatest Ever are inevitably tied to championships. There is a desperation to connect the two, even though they are obviously not the same. With his seventh win, Brady passed Jordan—but only tied Robert Horry! Of course, nobody thinks Horry is better than Jordan, because that’s not really how you evaluate players. Before Brady passed him, the football player with the most Super Bowl rings was Charles Haley. He’s a Hall of Famer, but you’d be forgiven if you’d never heard of him—he had the good fortune of going from the San Francisco 49ers and Dallas Cowboys at just the right time to win five Super Bowls, but he probably wasn’t even the best defensive player on those teams, let alone the best player ever. In baseball, Yogi Berra has the most World Series titles ever, but no serious fan considers him the best player ever.
Bill Russell stands as the most obvious possible exception—there are still a non-trivial number of basketball fans who consider him the best ever, and point to his 11 championships as evidence—but even this is illustrative. There were structural factors behind the Celtics dynasty that Russell led, most obviously that the Celtics were the first and fastest team to integrate. Boston was the first NBA team to draft a Black player, to build around a Black superstar, and use an all-Black starting five. That openness to talent of all races, combined with Red Auerbach’s coaching and the almost limitless control teams had over players, goes a long way to explain why Russell could dominate the sport for as long as he did.
These kinds of explanations, though, are unsatisfying. Once you open the door to them, you get tangled up trying to precisely quantify exactly how much weight to give things like free agency or racial segregation when evaluating historical greatness. Even an example as clear-cut as Tom Brady can get complicated if you look too closely at it. How do you factor in his superior coaching? Or the modern pass-friendly era? Or that so many of his teams had great defenses? These are the considerations that make most Greatest Ever debates interminable.
It is much easier to simply count wins. After all, that’s the goal of every athlete, right? So pointing to any structural explanation is simply Making Excuses and it’s the wins and losses that are the real Bottom Line. You see the temptation to think this way everywhere—to give individuals credit for successes that really belong to a team or group, or to turn structural problems into personal failings. Neoliberalism has basically made a whole ideology out of this temptation.
The problem is that it only works if you are willing to accept it in full, and nobody is really willing to accept it in full. Some basketball fans might tell you that Russell is better than Jordan—but nobody will tell you that Horry is better than Jordan. They might start adding caveats, like maybe that you have to be the best player on a championship team for it count, but now you have to find a new standard for best player, and so the house of cards starts to crumble.
Crediting individuals with successes that are really the results of team efforts and structural forces is one of the Big Lies of capitalism. But it’s also just really TEMPTING. It cuts through the bullshit and makes judging people easier. You can see why people are so quick to do it—which is why it’s so important to resist that urge.