Monday 2/12/24
I'm looking at these miserable old-timers in an NFL history group on Facebook debate if Patrick Mahomes is on the "Mount Rushmore" of quarterbacks, with most of them saying, "Not even close," or words to that effect.
The bitterness of people and their ignorance-facilitating bias to their "glory days."
I'll do this quickly with Mahomes.
He's in the top five. You could argue he's second, though that might be getting ahead of things and putting particular emphasis on the amount of ability he has rather than the number of great seasons he's actually had.
Who do you have in there? Brady is number one, and I don't think anyone is going to get close for a long, long time, if ever. You can have Montana there, but I am underwhelmed by his regular seasons, if we're talking the second greatest quarterback ever. Took Montana a while to win an MVP.
Peyton Manning. If Peyton Manning was nearly the quarterback in the postseason that he was in the regular season, he'd be the clear-cut number two, but he wasn't.
It's kind of interesting that Montana and Manning are somewhat "flawed," or that they lack in an area.
Mahomes lacks in career length. I don't know if he's going to be the best active QB in the game in four years. Maybe he'll be the tenth best quarterback by then, in which case, I wouldn't have him number two. But he's trending to number two.
These old-timers are like, "Roger Staubach!"
That's clearly wrong. Can they not help themselves? Then they say things like, "No quarterbacks today would last five plays in the league back then!" Well, that's obviously false, too. Like these massive guys would get hurt as soon as they got out there because they weren't tough enough like back when men were men and blah blah blah?
I see stuff like this and I honestly wonder--I want to know--if the people saying these things believe them.
What I suspect they do is they don't believe them or not believe them. I think there's no reflection or attempt to get anything correct or, conversely, any consideration that they might be way off. They say what they say automatically. Like when the light is green and I still keep pressing the button at the crosswalk anyway. That voice says the same thing to me every time. It's just what it's going to say.
I think that's a hell of a way to be with anything. People are so loyal to their biases. And bias can take all forms. It can be, "I was born during this time period and so that means everything then was the best and always will be."
That's madness to me. You have a brain, and it's like choosing, "I'm not going to use you, brain, why should I need a brain?"
It's this weird, go-it-alone-sans-brain approach to life.
I mean, one could just think. It is amazing to me how novel just thinking a tiny little bit so often is now.
