Top-Ten All-Time NFL Quarterbacks

I enjoyed Sunday's Super Bowl, more for the crisp game play and athletic drama than for the question that was bandied about in media circles the week before: if Peyton Manning wins, will he go down as the greatest of all time?



Look, Peyton is a wonderful quarterback who will ultimately go down with most of the league's meaningful passing records. At 32, he still has six or seven gravy years to go, and it wouldn't surprise me to see him get another two championships under his belt. The way the Colts draft, that team will continue to be competitive for years to come.



That said, any talk of the best ever is premature. He was outplayed again by the guy across the field, as Drew Brees completed just about everything he threw after the first quarter. That's a gunslinger, and a guy who made the clutch throws. Peyton threw a pick-six, which is another in a long line of underwhelming performances for a QB whose postseason record is 9-9.



Of course this list is subjective. And of course, my football knowledge is limited to the fact that I've only really been paying attention to pro football since the middle 1980s. That said, with an eye toward a history that I'm interested in, and with input from friends and family, here is my list:



1) John Elway: I'm a Denver fan, and I know this sounds biased, but he threw for 300 touchdowns and passed for over 50,000 yards. He made a lot of plays with his legs, running for 33 touchdowns, and he was the master of the fourth-quarter comeback. He almost single-handedly took mediocre Denver teams to the Super Bowl (and yeah, there were some blowouts in there), and he won a couple late in his career. He went out at the top of his sport, and he always handled himself with class and style.



2) Joe Montana: a gritty, never-say-die gunslinger, Joe Montana could really pass the ball. He was almost unstoppable on some of those '80s 49ers squads, and his cool demeanor in the face of pressure was his trademark. From his part in "The Catch" to his dominating Super Bowl wins, Joe Montana is, for many, the NFL gold standard.



3) John Unitas: my dad's favorite player and a true warrior of the game, Unitas made the Pro Bowl ten times. Looking at his career stats, you see the dominance in the sheer number of statistical categories he lead throughout his career. He tossed the ball around the yard and is probably most responsible for the type of football that is played in the NFL today.



4) Brett Favre: A guy who surprised everyone with his performance this year, Brett is a tough guy with an unbelievable arm. He's a winner and maybe the most entertaining QB to watch in the history of football. He attempts throws most quarterbacks wouldn't dream about, and sometimes he even pulls them off.



5) Dan Marino: I loved watching Dan play while growing up. I could watch Marino to Clayton all day, and many Sundays I did. He stood like a tower in the pocket, pass rushers flying all around him, and delivered the ball on time and in style throughout his career. A stat god who never won the big one, Dan is a good example of how great players need help to win championships.



6) Tom Brady: I can't understand how folks put Peyton ahead of Brady. Three championships. Some amazing records (the dude threw fifty touchdowns one year; he had six last year in the first half against the Titans). And he did most of it with receivers like Troy Brown, Deion Branch and Jabar Gaffney. Tom will move up this list before it's all said and done. He'll have a monster year in 2010/11, I think.



7) Terry Bradshaw: a tough guy with four Super Bowl wins--'nuff said.



8) Peyton Manning: a fantastic regular season player with uncanny timing and a true knack for field leadership. The simple fact is, though, that he should have a few more championships. With Harrison, Faulk, Wayne and Clark around him through the years, you'd think he'd have made it happen. His story still needs a third act, so we'll see if he can overcome the big-game mistakes he's made in the past and rise to the occasion.



9)Warren Moon: a personal favorite who could sling the potato, he threw 291 touchdowns in an abbreviated NFL career. You could never count the Oilers or, for that matter, the Vikes out when he was at the controls.



10)Bart Starr: I'll defer to John Clayton on this one.



Peyton seems like a good man. We know he's a great player. But until he gets his postseason record over .500, let's not anoint him the greatest ever to play the position.



And on another note, if the NFLPA and the owners go to a work stoppage, then they might as well just cancel the league. If they turn their backs on an American public that just posted the greatest ratings in the history of television, then they'll lose their business to greed--as simple as that. Just ask the NHL how that worked out for them (or the NBA or MLB, for that matter)...

Market Update: Abyss & Apex

There's plenty of strong speculative fiction appearing in magazines all over the internet now, and a terrific source for a lot of it comes from Abyss & Apex. Many of my favorite writers have appeared in their pages, and you can expect a strong diversity of content and style when you drop by for a read. I particularly enjoyed "The Wrong Basement" in #32...

Weekend Film Notes

Away We Go is such a sweet, disarming little film that you forget how serious it is at times. This is a film about disarray and self doubt and personal identity--some heady stuff indeed. At the center of the film are Burt Farlander (John Krasinski) and Verona De Tessant (Maya Rudolph). Burt sells re-insurance and Verona illustrates medical textbooks. They live in a drafty, single-wide someplace cold, and they're a few short months from having a baby.

In one early scene they sit huddled beneath blankets--freezing because they tripped the circuit again on the poorly wired single-wide--and Verona mutters, "Are we fuck-ups Bert? We're thirty-four years old. Are we fuck-ups?"

They go back and forth and finally Verona whispers, "I think we might be fuck-ups."

"We're not fuck-ups," Burt whispers back.

This line of dialogue plumbs the central aspects of the characters. Verona is searching for something better--for herself (she's clearly a talented artist) and her future family. Burt is the eternal optimist, happy in the moment, thankful to be with Verona.

When they embark on a series of investigative roadies to check out where they'll settle to build their family, predictable chaos ensues. Burt takes it all in stride, while Verona is a overtly dubious about these places.

The film shines in the embedded narratives. Allison Janney, Jim Gafiggan and Maggie Gyllenhaal are all superb in their turns. There is some serious hilarity in one of the most uncomfortable dinner scenes you'll ever see.



Written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida and directed by Sam Mendes, this is a film that truly shines in the comedic and somber moments alike. A sure-fire 'A' and a great way to spend a few hours...

Legion, on the other hand, is simply bad. Bad, bad, bad. The action sequences are so poorly rendered that you can't tell who has the upper hand. The character development is brutal, with Dennis Quaid, an actor I otherwise enjoy, doing almost nothing. There is a character who looks like Brett Favre, and some Angel that comes down from heaven and slices off his wings and tries to stop an army of possessed zombie-human-angels from attacking a bunch of waylaid travelers at a dusty diner (oh those damned interstates! always cutting off the good traffic!).

This one is poorly written, badly shot, shoddily acted and, well...very boring. Scott Stewart trots out every cliche in the book (yes, our savior almost falls off a cliff in the climax, and a couple of stones skitter over the side). The characters are thin as a dime, never elevating above stock caricatures.

And of course, they left it open for a sequel. Boo, hiss. I try not to post anything if I can't say something nice (and I've been taken to task for only pimping stuff I like via e-mail, but I generally believe in the old adage...), but I thought I'd give fair warning. This one is an 'F' across the board.

The Hurt Locker, Funny People and Carriers are all somewhat interesting. Surrogates and The Blue Butterfly were disappointing, though I love William Hurt.

Random Thoughts...

I love a cold'un, but 170 million bucks a year in associated shattered-glass-related-pub-fight medical care? Wow. That's a hard figure for me to grasp. That little ol' island had 87,000 smash-and-stab incidents in 2009? Sheesh...

From the Oregonians behaving badly front, Greg Oden took pictures of himself in the buff and they found their way onto the internet. Of course they did! That's the world we live in--an instant of idiocy gets archived for eternity on the internet. I'm thankful that I lived in an era (and I know this sounds Puritanical, but it's true) where, as a ten-year-old kid, I wasn't two clicks away from Cal Ripken's junk anytime I wanted to check my e-mail.

The Oregon Ducks swept the Southern California teams last week in hoops, breathing life into a season that had become derailed by a five-game losing streak. If we can get a win up at Gill Mausoleum on Sunday, we'll move into the top third of the Pac-10. It's a strange year for college basketball. I think the ACC might only get 1-2 teams into the tournament (have you seen North Carolina's act lately?). The Pac-10 might just have one. I see three or four teams coming out of the SEC.

Can you say mid-major magic? At the midpoint of the year, the tournament could have a lot of newcomers (and Jacksonville University, by the way, is pretty good).

Two really fine stories (among likely hundreds of others) were published in the last week on the internet:

• "Vilcamba" was really cool.
• "Copies" was excellent--a little sad.

I started this year's long project this week, and it sure feels nice to get back into a long-form rhythm. I've also got some movie insights to unload later this weekend, if you're planning on hitting the video store...

The Ghosts of Belfast

Stuart Neville's The Ghosts of Belfast is a stunning debut. Part thriller, part political history, part ghost story, this novel represents a fantastic foray into the world of fiction. Neville's muscular prose is active and crisp.

A riot is like a fire. It has a life of its own, and does as it will. But it can be fanned or quelled. Fegan knew that as well as anybody. The police and the kids were the kindling, paper and dry wood. Men like Caffola were the naked flame, ready to set them alight. Others, like Father Coulter, were water to douse the burning. But Father Coulter wasn't here this evening, so Caffola sparked and blazed unabated. Morbidly fascinated, Fegan watched him work.

Fegan, literally haunted by his past, is a terrific character. A man who "doesn't like words" and is possessed of a murderous past, he sets out on a revenge-fueled spree to set things right in Ireland ("right" is a relative term of course, when one trades death for death).

Neville, to his credit, embraces the sordid politics of a changing Ireland. The piece is as fascinating for its conflict as it is for its lessons in history. The story is plausible and extremely fast-paced. If you are looking for a top-notch fiction that really defies genre classification, give The Ghosts of Belfast a shot.

Science Fiction and Scholarship

I was saddened by the news that the Internet Review of Science Fiction will be suspending operations after its February issue. Though I came to this publication a little late, I enjoyed many of the articles they published and I think it served a pretty important role in the world of speculative fiction. It was accessible, exhaustive (they reviewed a ton of books on that site) and generally well written.

After sniffing around the internet for some of the other critical speculative fiction publications, I found the following:

• Science Fiction Studies is a publication of DePauw University in Indiana. This magazine has been published since 1973, and features articles, reviews, interviews, special editions and historical documents.
• While not a magazine dedicated to sci-fi studies, World Literature Today, a publication of The University of Oklahoma, is publishing a special issue on the genre later this year.
• The Science Fiction Research Association lists conventions, symposiums, calls for papers and upcoming publications on its website.
• SF Signal is a science fiction blog with lots of good content.
• Syfy is the website for the cable channel, and they post some solid content.

If you know of some other great resources in the genre, I'd love to hear about them...

Ambiguous Endings

I recently read a comment from an editor that said there is a definite art to wrapping up a story. This same editor cited shabby third acts as one of the most common rejectionable offenses. I think there is a lot of truth to that maxim (more as a reader/viewer than as a writer), but I see the other side of the coin also.

A few years ago Stephen King took a lot of heat from his fans for The Colorado Kid. Readers were up in arms that King left the conclusion up to them. The same author was criticized a bit for his wrap-up to The Dark Tower, an ending whose infinite nature I thought was perfectly appropriate, given the complexion of the story arc and our hero, Roland Deschain.

Movies like A Civil Action, whose ambiguous anti-climax (Travolta shrugging, speechless, in a tight close-up) effectively captured the hopelessness of our civil justice system, and No Country for Old Men (an excellent film, across almost every critical criterion) have been taken to task for their open-ended conclusions.

In some cases (and I think this is the case for each of the four works I cited above) I think less is more. It's laudable for an artist to have confidence enough in his or her audience to glean "meaning" from the text without the benefit of overt explanation.

I had an editor request a rewrite on a story that called for a huge chunk of excised "showing" in the third act. His argument was, let's just let them see what they want for themselves. The audience can determine the horror more effectively than we can dictate it to them.

I'm in a similar place with a story I'm revising right now. I wrote a scene that included a blow-by-blow account of the vision in question, then I chopped it. I'm trying to leave the ending far more ambiguous, which allows for a little spectatorial creativity. One of the great strengths of writing horror, I think, is the subjective nature of the subjects that make our skin crawl.

Why not put that individuality to good use?

On another note, I received a personalized rejection on a story I sent to one of the "Big Three" fiction magazines yesterday. I've tried these folks a number of times, and it was gratifying to get a note of encouragement on my progress as a scribbler...