Prologue: Jokes, before This Gets Real and I Shit on Your Hero.
I recently
got reminded that I still haven't lived up to
my promise to write an article about how Elway sucks. I don't mean as an executive, either. In that capacity he's actually been fairly successful, and by that I am specifically and exclusively referring to his recruitment of the GOAT quarterback. (Which, of course, he probably doesn't deserve credit for, because Peyton strikes me as the kind of free spirit who made his decision entirely based on the odds that he could corner the pizza market in any given location. I'm not joking. Peyton went to Denver because Papa John's is his future.)
No. I'm saying that John Elway, the quarterback, who won two Super Bowls, made nine Pro Bowls, was named second-team All-Pro on three occasions, and somehow won the NFL MVP in 1987, despite not being a top five player at his position in that season (more on that later), THAT John Elway sucks. Or, fine, 'is overrated.' Whatever. Here are my claims about Elway, in descending order of severity: He's not the GOAT; he's not in the GOAT conversation; he was at no point in his career the best quarterback in the league; he doesn't deserve his MVP; and he is categorically worse than every quarterback he's commonly compared with. I don't actually know how the relative severities of those statements stack up. I just wanted to use the word severity. It lends such a gravitas to my writing. Severity. After you finish this post, your view of John Elway will be severely altered. In a negative direction. Severely.
Part I: Origins. Or, How Elway Came to Be Overrated as Fuck.
He was a #1 overall draft pick.
That about covers it. But I guess I can say more things. When you're a #1 draft pick, you're usually hyped up. When you're also a quarterback, you get massively hyped up until it's virtually impossible for you to fulfill your hype. When you're also considered the Greatest QB Prospect Since Yourself, because I don't know who people got compared to before Elway, then you get hyped to an unimaginable extent.
Let's take a walk through memory lane. Here are the #1 overall draft picks since Peyton Manning.
2014: Jadeveon Clowney. Massively hyped up; so far has failed to deliver.
2013: Eric Fisher. I know, who? This was the draft that no one good came out of. I'm serious. I'm going through the first round trying to find the best player, and there just isn't one. I guess Cordarrelle Patterson? Or Star or Reid? Seriously, this might be the worst draft in NFL history. That I remember.
2012: Andrew Luck. At some point I'll write a comprehensive explanation of why Luck sucks. That is, assuming that his last two games
weren't heralding the dawn of a new day. Which they weren't. Suffice it (here) to say that Luck is massively overrated, and that he is in fact the most overrated quarterback since Elway. Just like how he was the most hyped quarterback prospect since Elway. Funny how that happens. Funny how when we expect a quarterback to be great we tend to believe that they're great even when they're not. FUNNY.
2011: Cam Newton. Somehow people still think he's elite. He's a competent quarterback who's good at running the ball. He hasn't been elite since Auburn. Or, more precisely, since week 2 of the 2011 season.
2010: Sam Bradford. I'm not going to say anything mean here because I feel bad for him and the Rams, but so far he's a bust.
2009: Matt Stafford. He's had some big yardage seasons, but he's not the kind of good you'd expect from a #1 overall pick. It helps when you're throwing to the most unfair physical talent to ever grace the WR position.
2008: Jake Long. Long was good, and then he got worse, and then he got worser, and now he's injured or not starting or something. Who cares.
2007: JaMarcus Russell. Fill in your own jokes here. Wait, no, I want to. PURPLE DRANK! BLANK DVD! HASHTAG THE COMEBACK! Okay, I'm done.
2006: Mario Williams. This is basically Clown's ceiling, even though Williams was kind of a letdown.
2005: Alex Smith. Yeah.
2004: Eli Manning.
They should have sent a poet. Wait, you people don't already think Eli sucks? Okay. Two Super Bowls doesn't make a QB great. And Eli kinda sucks otherwise. I don't actually think this merits that much elaboration. He's just bad.
2003: Carson Palmer. C-Palm had a two year prime. That's all that needs to be said.
2002: David Carr. This is the guy who got replaced by Matt Schaub. (I'm playing on your recency bias here. Schaub used to be fucking good. You think I'm exaggerating? In '09, he threw for 4770 yards and 29 TDs on 67.9% cmp%, 5.0% TD%, 2.6% int%, 8.2 YPA, and 98.6 rating. That compares favorably to most of Tom Brady's career. Also, his
wife compares
favorably to
Gisele.
Oh wait, no she
doesn't. God DAMN quarterbacks have hot wives.)
2001: Michael Vick. Vick was amazing. Then he fought dogs and went to jail. Then he was amazing. And then he fell off a cliff.
2000: Courtney Brown: Say it with me.
WHO?
1999: Tim Couch. Couch is the definition of mediocrity at the quarterback position. Shortly to be replaced by John Elway. Just kidding. Or am I...? I mean, Elway played on better teams and Couch's career passer rating is only 4.8 points lower. That's
substantially less than the difference between Rodgers's and Peyton's. Hmm...
1998: Peyton Manning. This is the one that panned out. Let me clarify: This is the FIRST one that panned out. On this list. The sixteen preceding #1 overall picks
did not live up to expectations. Not a single one. Some (Couch, Brown, DRANK) were worse than others (Williams, Long, Vick), but
all of them fell prey to hype.
To summarize, over the past seventeen years, the best QB in the draft wasn't the first QB taken more than half the time. And in only one-seventeenth of those seasons was a QB taken first overall who played at the level expected of a first overall pick (i.e. eliteness). When you dig into it, first overall doesn't count for much.
Elway, though, was another level of hype. He was widely considered the most physically gifted and all-around talented quarterback prospect of all time, and the expectation for him was immediate dominance. After he was drafted and promptly traded, he began his career for the Denver Broncos. Unfortunately for the Broncos, his apparently inevitable dominance would never come...
Part II: Passing Is Hard. Or, Why John Elway Sucks.
Efficiency in passing is important.
No, really. Yards are virtually uncorrelated with wins, while the best efficiency stats available (Passer Rating (or rather
Uncapped Passer Rating, wink wink) and ANY/A) correlate most strongly with wins. Basically, this means that an efficient quarterback tends to win games, while an inefficient quarterback, even
one who throws the ball a lot and earns many yards, tends not to win as many games. Kind of. Statistics are weird.
("But wait, Anna!" you're saying. "Quarterbacks who throw for a lot of yards tend to do so because their teams have put them in a situation where they have to. It stands to reason that when you throw the ball a lot, you wind up throwing the ball less efficiently. So quarterbacks who are forced to throw the ball a lot can't be blamed for low efficiency!" Which would be a good point, except that there's no correlation between pass attempts and efficiency. Seriously. There's just not. This causal link is imaginary. While we're on the topic, there's also no correlation between team rushing performance and efficiency. Nor is there a correlation between team defense and efficiency. I ran all the numbers myself. So there go all your arguments for why
Russell Wilson isn't that
great.)
What does this mean? In general, it means that quarterbacks who pass efficiently but for relatively low volume (e.g. Russell Wilson) tend to do better than quarterbacks who pass inefficiently for relatively high volume (e.g. Andrew Luck). Doing both is better (e.g. Peyton Manning), and doing neither is the worst (e.g. Tim "All I Do Is Win" Tebow), but if you have to choose one it is better to be feared than loved. And it's better to be efficient than to throw a lot.
So what does this have to do with Elway? Let's look at what Elway was good at. Specifically, I'm looking at the passing categories in which he was most frequently among the league's best (top 10).
- Passes completed (top 10 x10, top 5 x5, top 1 x1. That's a beautiful thing).
- Pass attempts (top 10 x11, top 5 x5, top 1 x2).
- Passing yards (top 10 x11, top 5 x5, top 1 x1).
- Passer rating (top 10 x5, top 5 x4 -- more on this later).
- Yards per attempt (top 10 x9, top 5 x2).
- ANY/A (top 10 x7, top 5 x4).
- Completion % (top 10 x4, top 5 x2).
- Interception % (top 10 x6, top 5 x2).
- Pass TD % (top 10 x6, top 5 x4).
- Sack % (top 10 x7, top 5 x3).
Notice anything? Here's what you're supposed to notice: The categories where Elway was successful the most frequently, and the categories in which he tended to be
most successful, are the categories that don't correlate with wins. (Attempts, yards, and almost certainly completions, even though its not listed in the article I linked.
This one, in case you missed it.) Meanwhile the categories that matter the most -- ANY/A, Passer Rating, TD%, YPA -- tend to be his worst statistics. Let's get more into this. I want to focus on one important metric in particular: Passer Rating.
Part III: Elway and Passer Rating: An Unhappy Coupling.
This section will change you. No matter how much they try to tell you that Elway's a good quarterback, that he's elite no matter what the numbers say, you just won't believe it, because you'll remember that game where he completed 37% of his passes en route to 1 TD, 3 picks, 257 yards, and a 36.8 passer rating. And lost 42-10. In the Super Bowl. Of his MVP season.
When Elway came into the league, he had some growing pains. That's to be expected from a young quarterback. His first season, he put up a passer rating of 54.9. But hey, he was a rookie. The next year his PR was 76.8. Then it dipped back down to 70.2. In that, his third season, he had no fewer than NINE games in which he threw for a passer rating under 70. Now, I think Andrew Luck's a pretty bad quarterback, but he has fewer than nine sub-70 games (8) in his CAREER. Oh yeah, and so does Aaron Rodgers.
"But wait, he was just a youngster back then!" you say. And that's true. But here's the really damning thing: Throughout Elway's first ten seasons, he broke a 70 PR on 71 occasions. He fell below that mark 70 times. That's a 1:1 ratio. Elway AVERAGED a 73.8 passer rating for his first ten seasons in the NFL. He did not place in the top ten in passer rating during his first TEN seasons as a starter. He was 33 before he put up a passer rating over 85, and other than one season at 83.4, in his first 10 years he never even broke 80.
In fact, over his first ten seasons combined (1983-92), among quarterbacks who started at least three full seasons and threw at least 1000 total passes, Elway ranks 26th with a rating of 73.8. There are only 34 QBs on the list. He finishes 26th in cmp%, 25th in Y/A, and 24th in ANY/A. Again, these are the best available stats for quantifying a quarterback's contribution. And Elway, for his first decade in the NFL, ranked in the mid-20s for each of these stats. (For comparison, over his first three seasons, given atts>=500 and GS>=24, Russell Wilson ranks 3rd in passer rating, 7th in cmp%, and 4th in ANY/A. Meanwhile Andrew Luck comes in 18th, 24th (out of 24), and 17th, respectively. Just FYI.)
Around now you may be saying that passer rating has generally gone up since the '80s because passing has gotten easier. And that's true. But Elway was bad even by contemporary standards, at least for his first ten seasons in the league. For a comparison, last year, the top 10 included the likes of Ben Roethlisberger, Colin Kaepernick, Tony Romo, and Josh McCown, all of whom outperformed their contemporaries to a greater degree than Elway, and none of whom are HoF worthy. Looking over the past 10 years ('04-'13), Elway's closest analogue is probably Matt Hasselbeck, who ranks 22nd, 16th, and 23rd in PR, Cmp%, and ANY/A. Now, I'm a Seahawks fan and I love Matt (who, by the way, made the top 10 in PR in four of his first ten seasons), but I would never call him an all-time great. And yet, over the first (starting) decades of their respective careers, their performances were comparable. There are two possible conclusions to draw from this: One, Hasselbeck is a Hall-of-Fame level quarterback who deserves consideration in the GOAT conversation. Or two, Elway is massively overrated. I'm actually fine with either, but I think the correct one is obvious.
Part IV: The MVP. Or, What the Fuck Was AP Thinking?
1987 was a weird year. Reagan got surgery on his prostate. Vladimir Nikolayev was sentenced to death for cannibalism. Canada introduced the Loonie. Larry Wall wrote Perl. And John Elway somehow won NFL MVP, in a year where a strike shortened the season to 15 games, 12 of which included NFL starters.
Here's the case for why Elway deserved MVP: The Broncos went 10-4-1, which in 1987 was somehow good enough to win the AFC. In the games Elway played, the Broncos went 8-3-1, which is the equivalent of a little better than 11-5 in 16-game terms. Of course, four teams in the NFC did better (two were 11-4, one 13-2, and one 12-3), but hey. Elway completed 54.6% of his passes for 3198 yards, which is around 4264 yards exactly in a 16-game season, as well as 19 TDs (~25), 12 ints (~16), an 83.4 PR, and a 6.74 ANY/A. Those are... decent numbers.
Here's the case for why Elway didn't deserve MVP: Those numbers are BARELY decent. In 1987, Elway ranked 18th in cmp%, 13th in TD%, 7th in int%, 4th in YPA, 11th in PR, and 4th in ANY/A. Hell, even if you look at dumb stats, he's not that great: 4th in yds, 8th in TDs, 9th in completions. Other players performed substantially better. Let's take Joe Montana, whose team went 10-1 with him, for example. Montana ranked 1st in cmp% by a mile, 1st in TD%, 14th in int%, 7th in YPA, 1st in PR by a mile, and 2nd in ANY/A. Sure, Elway wins in int% (which is not an important stat) and YPA (which is secondary to ANY/A, which is built from it), but aside from that Montana crushes him. In fact, Montana was even named First-Team All-Pro that season over Elway, and deservedly so.
If you're willing to consider non-QB MVP picks, there's an even more deserving candidate than Montana in the mix. Jerry Rice finished the season second in yards (by less than 40, despite playing three games fewer than #1), 4th in receptions, and 1st in touchdowns. Let me elaborate: Rice had 22 touchdowns (#2 had 11). In 12 games. Rice had 22 touchdowns in 12 games. Rice had 22 touchdowns on 65 receptions. One of every THREE catches Rice made in 1987 was a touchdown. His record topped the previous mark by four, it lasted for 20 years, and HE DID IT IN TWELVE GAMES. This is one of the greatest individual feats in NFL history. But no, the MVP went to John "Mediocre as Fuck" Elway. What the hell.
Part V: But Comebacks!
Elway was known for his comebacks. In his 16-year career, he put together 35 fourth-quarter comebacks and 46 game-winning drives. Yes, one of those games (Den@GB in 1987, his MVP season) resulted in a 17-17 tie, which also happens to be a game in which he threw 0 TDs, 3 ints, a Passer Rating of 52.9, and an ANY/A of 3.13. But hey, shit happens. Surely a QB who's engineered so many comebacks must be great, right?
See, as it happens, comebacks don't seem to be correlated with greatness. The CAREER leaders in GWDs (Game-Winning Drives) obviously include all-time greats (Manning, Marino, Brady), but that's not because they're great, it's because they're the guys who started for fifteen years. The keyword here is competence. Elway started for fifteen years because his team thought he was great, even though he wasn't; whether he was competent or not is a matter of debate, but for the sake of pity I'll say he was. Same deal for other career leaders like Vinny Testaverde, Drew Bledsoe, Kerry Collins, and Eli Manning. That's not exactly a celebrated crowd. Those guys aren't great; they just started forever.
Fortunately, there's a way to even things out and find the guys who really excelled at GWDs for a shorter span: seasonal leaders! The record for GWDs in a season is 8, held by Jake Delhomme and Eli Manning. Tied for third are some greats, like Peyton Manning (twice) and Tom Brady, but they share that status with the likes of Don Majkowski, Jake Plummer, and Brian Sipe (NOT in his decent year). The next group includes Mark Sanchez, Alex Smith, Tim Tebow, John Elway, and the single greatest comeback artist of the bunch, Vince Young. Now THAT'S a celebrated crowd.
Part VI: The Rest of His Career.
Elway played better toward the end of his career. His brief ten-year affair with mediocrity ended in 1993, and for five of the next six years (up until the end of his career) he ranged from 3rd to 7th in the league in passer rating. In other words, he still wasn't exactly great (Steve Young, who was contemporaneous and who actually was great, led the NFL in passer rating six times between '91 and '98, placing 5th and 3rd in the two years he didn't), but he was decent. So what happened? What boosted Elway from straight-up bad to halfway good?
The common explanation is that Elway didn't have help from '83 to '92, the ten-year window in which he was awful. When he got it in '93, he suddenly started performing at a high level, thus indicating that he'd always been that good, but had just never shown it because of the terrible team around him. At least, that's how the theory goes.
The theory, of course, is completely wrong. I'll dismiss it piece by piece.
First: "Elway didn't have a great team/Elway always had to carry his team." Right off the bat, let me note that this particular point has little to do with Elway's individual performance. This is more a reflection on his team's performance, and the credit due to Elway for that performance. (This comes from the popular but misguided idea that it's okay for a QB to perform badly individually as long as his team is successful. This is related to the equally false ideas that when a team wins, it's always because of the QB.)
Elway didn't have a bad team. He pretty much never had a bad team. Between 1983 and 1998 (his 16-year career), the Broncos won at least 10 games nine times, and won at least 8 games 14 times. In '83-'87, '89, '91, '93, and '96-'98, Elway had an above-average defense, including top-10 on nine occasions. That doesn't happen when your only good player is your quarterback, so get that out of your head. That especially doesn't happen when your best player is a quarterback who frankly isn't playing well. The disparity in team talent we're talking about here isn't between terrible and good, it's between good and great.
But the bigger question is how good Elway's receivers and offensive line were, since those are the two factors (pretty much the only two) that actually affect how well a quarterback plays. (The other two that people bring up a lot are running game and defense, but there's no evidence that these have a statistical effect on QB efficiency. Having a bad defense or running game basically just makes you need to throw more, which DOES have a negative correlation with wins (according that website I've been linking) because obviously it means you have a worse team. But it DOESN'T actually make you throw less efficiently. It just means that you'll be throwing on some more early downs, which isn't actually a disadvantage, because (unless you're down 40 with 2 minutes to play) the opponent still has to account for the run.)
I don't know how to possibly establish the quality of Elway's line. But I can look at a few individual players (years I list will be as they intersect with Elway; many of these players played for the Broncos before/after Elway's tenure).
Elway had a little talent on the line to start his career, including two-time Pro Bowler Keith Bishop at LG from '83-'89, and the decent Bill Bryan at center from '83 to '88 and Ken Lanier at RT from '83 to '92, but beyond that it was pretty slim pickings. But starting at the end of that first decade (c. 1993), his line began to improve in a big way.
From '93 to '97 he played with Gary Zimmerman, the All-Pro, Hall-of-Fame left tackle (the most important position on the line). In '98 he was replaced by the excellent Tony Jones, who had also played at right tackle the previous year. Tom Nalen held down the middle from '94 to '98, making two Pro Bowls in that span and a total of five Pro Bowls and two First-Team All-Pro selections in his career. Two-time Pro Bowler Mark Schlereth started at LG for the Broncos from '95 to '98. Dan Neil had a solid year at RG in '98. Harry Swayne also played well (surprise, surprise) at RT for the Broncos in '98, and Bryan Habib was solid at RG from '93-'97.
In other words, from about '95 (Zimmerman, Schlereth, Nalen, Habib, Broderick Thompson) to '98 (Jones, Schlereth, Nalen, Neil, Swayne), Elway was playing behind lines that weren't just good, they were fucking great. That '95 line had players who made a total of 14 Pro Bowls and five FTAPs in their careers, and the '98 line had a total of eight Pro Bowls and two FTAP selections in the squad, but three of them made the Pro Bowl that year.
Early in his career, Elway's best receivers were Vance Johnson ('85-'95 minus '94), Mark Jackson ('86-'92), and the solid Pro Bowler Steve Watson ('83-'87). These guys were decent, but they were nothing special. But as with his line, after his first decade in the league, Elway suddenly found himself playing with a star-studded receiving corps.
From '95 on Elway played with three-time Pro Bowler Rod Smith, who put up a total of 2402 yards and 18 TDs in '97 and '98. He threw to Pro Bowler (and, in '98, 1000-yd receiver) Ed McCaffrey for the last four years of his career as well. From 1990 on, Elway had the Hall-of-Famer, eight-time Pro Bowler, and four-time FTAP Shannon Sharpe at tight end. From '94-'97, he had five-time Pro Bowler Anthony Miller at WR. All this means that in the mid-to-late '90s (let's take '97 for instance), Elway was throwing the ball to Smith, Sharpe, Miller, and McCaffrey, four guys with 16 Pro Bowls and four FTAPs between them.
Finally, and I know I said this doesn't really matter (but it does at this level), but from '95 to '98 Elway played with the superb, HOF-worthy Terrell Davis, who rushed for an INSANE total of 5296 yards and 49 touchdowns between '96 and '98.
I'll spin this from the popular angle, and then I'll come back and tell you why that angle is wrong.
Popular opinion holds that Elway was playing with trash through '92, and then when he finally got a decent supporting cast, he showed his true colors. He threw for a passer rating of 73.8 and an ANY/A of 5.10 through his first ten years, but in his last six, he put up a PR of 88.9 and 6.36 ANY/A throwing to solid receivers and playing behind an okay line. He also won two Super Bowls after losing his first three, showing that finally his team was giving him support. Moreover, since these last six years came after he was already 33 years old, if he'd had that level of support around him from the beginning, he surely would have put up numbers that compare well with the other all-time QBs.
Here are all the things wrong with that argument.
1) Elway was not playing with trash through '92. His teams were less talented than they would later become, but they were by no means bad. Refer back to the paragraphs about how successful his team was even in the early years. The Broncos made three Super Bowls in four years. That's an exceptional feat, even in a weak AFC. And yes, they lost all three games by blowouts (by a combined margin of 136-40), but Elway was at least partly to blame for each of those three losses. In the first game, he was decent-but-not-good, throwing for an 83.6 rating. In the second game, he completed 37% of his passes for a 36.8 rating; in the third, he completed 38% for 108 yds, 0 TDs, 2 ints, and a stunning 19.4 rating.
2) Other great QBs have thrown to bad receivers, and they've universally done better than Elway did. For the first six years of his career Brady threw to receivers at least as bad as Elway's early targets. He put up a rating of 88.4 and an ANY/A of 6.12, basically equalling Elway's peak output. When Brady started getting talented receivers in 2007, he promptly put up one of the greatest passing seasons ever, and since then he's averaged a 101.5 rating and 7.61 ANY/A over the past 8 years. Admittedly, it's gotten easier to pass since '04, but if you look into the Advanced Passing stats on PFR (I won't get into these here; basically they're standard deviations relative to other contemporaneous passers) you can see that Brady's pretty much dominating Elway across the board. Yes, throwing to weak receivers probably hurts your numbers, but not to the extent that it excuses Elway's piss-poor performance.
3) Elway's supporting cast in the mid-to-late '90s wasn't just good, it was great. I've already talked about this to some extent in the preceding paragraphs, but I'll reiterate and summarize here. The 1997 Broncos, with Elway, Davis, McCaffrey, Smith, Sharpe, Miller, Zimmerman, Schlereth, Nalen, Habib, and Jones, are one of the most talented offenses of all time. Their weakest point--and I don't say this lightly, or in jest--is at quarterback.
4) Super Bowls are a really bad judge of a quarterback's abilities. Dan Marino made (and lost) one Super Bowl in his career, but he is a vastly better (although still slightly overrated) quarterback than Elway, who made five and won two. And those two Super Bowl victories really WERE just a product of worse opponents and better teammates on the Broncos. Elway still played like shit in the '97 championship (55% cmp%, 51.9 PR), although he was decent in the '98 win against the Falcons. (He and the Broncos would have and SHOULD have gotten shredded by the '98 Vikings.) You really shouldn't judge a quarterback based on five games, but if you're going to do that, DON'T use the five games in which he totalled a 59.3 Passer Rating for your argument.
5) There's no way to know for sure how good Elway would have been if he'd played with the sky-high level of talent on the ~'97 Broncos for his whole career. But it's reasonable to assume he still wouldn't have been that great. QBs don't decline that fast, so I'm willing to bet that Elway's performance in the '90s isn't all that much better than his performance as a prime player with the same talent would have been. After all, the great-but-overrated Brett Favre had his best season in 2009, despite winning three straight MVPs (HOW) in the '90s. The fact that even on his ultratalented later offenses Elway STILL didn't perform any better than, say, Tony Romo (who I'm firmly convinced is the better passer) indicates that his supposed "missed prime" wouldn't have been anything special.
Part VII: Conclusion.
John Elway is the ultimate case of hype overpowering reality. For decades, fans have used self-deceptive
doublethink arguments to convince themselves and others that he truly was one of the greatest of his generation. But the facts are clear, and the analysis is solid: John Elway started off bad, and was never any better than decent. His career accomplishments are overblown and undeserved, and the excuses about team talent that his fans make are unconvincing and exaggerated. Elway sucks.
