Opinion | Tom Brady Is Not the GOAT

To classify Tom Brady as the greatest football player of all time is among the least controversial assertions anyone can make about anything. It’s a subjective opinion accepted as objective truth: He played quarterback for 23 professional seasons, and if those 23 seasons were divided into three separate careers, all three might qualify for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He won six Super Bowls with the New England Patriots and a seventh with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He is the winningest player, the man who played the longest at an elite level, and the unthinking answer to this particular debate.

The only problem is that this assertion is wrong. And that’s not a criticism of Brady, in any way. It’s a criticism of how greatness is considered.

The belief that Brady was the greatest who ever lived first began percolating around 2015, hardening into intransigence after his seventh championship in 2021. Before that, the title had been officially assigned to wide receiver Jerry Rice by the N.F.L. Network in 2010; before Rice’s coronation, the answer was running back Jim Brown, on and off for the previous three decades. Throughout history, GOAT status has been applied (temporarily and capriciously) to numerous individuals, arguably starting with William (Pudge) Heffelfinger, a lineman who starred for Yale in 1888.

This process of historical reinvention never ends. In 20 years, someone different will inevitably be classified as the greatest football player of all time — and that’s a problem, because perpetual reinvention makes the entire argument irrelevant.

Here’s what I mean: If you believe, as I do, that the Beatles are the greatest pop band of all time, and someone asks you to explain why that is your belief, there’s an impulse to say it’s because they made the best songs. It feels like the answer one is supposed to give.

But that’s a flawed argument, even if it’s true. In the span of eight years, the Beatles recorded 213 songs, 188 of which they wrote themselves. Around 80 of those 213 songs fall somewhere between very good and beyond exceptional, an astonishing explosion of brilliance within a minuscule window of time.

Yet the sheer number of good songs they released is not what makes the Beatles unrivaled. Greatness is not a numbers game. It’s not cumulative or mathematical. Greatness is about the creation of archetypes.

It’s possible a modern pop artist could have a career similar to the Beatles that lasts five times as long, generating twice as many tracks that surpass the “very good” classification. But if that were to happen, it would still not make this hypothetical artist greater than the Beatles, unless she invented some new kind of previously unimagined music that altered the definition of what pop music is. If she did not, it would mean she was still fundamentally working within the same idiom the Beatles established, and her bank vault of anthems would mainly reflect craft, longevity and the capacity to absorb and unpack the thousands of familiar songs amassed in the Beatles’ shadow.

So if you believe, as I do, that the Beatles are the greatest pop band of all time, a better argument would be this: Though the Beatles did not invent rock ’n’ roll, the songs they composed and recorded represent the enduring understanding of rock and pop and psychedelia, and almost anything still relevant about those musical categories can be traced back to their 213‑song catalog, meaning no later artist working in those categories can surpass their greatness, regardless of the quality or quantity of the work they produce.

This does not mean the “greatest” version of something is automatically the first version of something, because the first version often has no connection to whatever it spawns. Being first is not enough. To be the greatest [whatever] of all time, something needs to be the first elite rendering of an entity still containing the core characteristics of its most modern version.

In other words, it’s the earliest incarnation of greatness still intimately related to all examples that follow. Which is why, despite so much evidence to the contrary, the greatest football player of all time is still Jim Thorpe, a Native American who retired from the game in 1928 and died when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president.

This, I realize, feels wrong. It contradicts the way most people are conditioned to think about greatness. Brady and Rice are certainly the most accomplished football players of all time, and that’s how greatness is measured in most professional contexts. But in athletics, the question is considered differently. In athletics, greatness is (or should be) measured the way it’s evaluated on a playground: We’re about to play football. Who gets picked first?

“Certainly not Jim Thorpe,” you say in response, because you’re a reasonable person. Thorpe was 6-foot-1 and 202 pounds, and he rarely lifted weights. At the 1912 Olympics, he ran the 100‑meter dash in 11.2 seconds. In 2025, that wouldn’t place him among the 10 fastest high school students in Oregon.

If someone had tossed Thorpe into a time machine and transported his outmoded 1920 body to the present day, he might be able to walk on as a nickelback for South Dakota State. Put Saquon Barkley into the same machine and send him back to the 1920 Canton Bulldogs, and he scores the first three times he touches the ball.

This, however, is an idiotic way to consider the question, and not just because time travel is impossible. It’s a flawed metric for trying to define any form of greatness, unless you’re willing to concede that “the greatest player of all time” is always going to be whoever happens to be the best player right now. Doing otherwise would be no different than trying to identify history’s most commercially popular film without adjusting for the inflation of ticket prices. When comparing individuals from different periods, the comparison must reflect the totality of the experience for every involved detail — the person, but also the circumstance.

One of the best‑known stories about Thorpe’s Olympic triumph is that someone stole his shoes on the first day of the decathlon competition, forcing him to borrow one shoe from an opponent and to rummage through the garbage in order to find another. The cleats were different sizes, and one was so large that he had to wear two pairs of socks to make it fit. He was wearing those random shoes when he ran his 11.2 in the 100 meters, on a track made of cinders and before the legalization of starting blocks. This prompts any analyst to project his true time in the 100 as much faster.

But what’s more instructive about the anecdote, even if it’s impossible to verify, is how it shows what the world was like in 1912: A world-class athlete could show up at the Olympics with only one pair of running shoes. When the shoes were stolen, he did not file a grievance or complain to the officials, and if he’d been unable to fabricate a mismatched pair from the rubbish, he likely would have competed in dress shoes or run barefoot. In 1912, the world’s premier sporting event was more slapdash and informal than any middle school track meet from 1982. And those Olympic Games are not an isolated example: This was true for all things related to sports, and for most of everyday life.

When evaluating someone like Jim Thorpe against someone like Tom Brady, it’s not enough to estimate how much Thorpe might have benefited from modern nutrition or how much Brady might have suffered if he’d been forced to grow up in rural Oklahoma before the invention of breakfast cereal. One must also consider how those differing environments would have caused them to understand almost every aspect of the material world in totally different ways.

We don’t have video footage of Thorpe running the football. Such footage does not exist. Yet we know he was the greatest ball carrier of his era, and we know this era was when football (as we still understand it) came into being.

It was an 11‑on‑11, full‑impact sport. There were four downs and a touchdown was six points. A game from 1920 would not look the way a game looks today, but its similarities outweigh the differences. And within that similar yet primitive world, Thorpe was the T. rex.

He was the strongest runner, the most punishing tackler and the best kicker anyone had ever seen. He’s the model for how football was supposed to be played, materializing at a time when no previous model had been cast. He was the prototype for what a football player was supposed to be, the first exemplar other players tried to emulate. We don’t need footage of Jim Thorpe in order to see “Jim Thorpe.” We see him whenever we see anyone run with a football, at any level.

Try to recall the most exhilarating open‑field run you’ve ever witnessed. (I’d pick the 2005 incarnation of Reggie Bush running against Fresno State, though there are thousands of others just as good.) Whatever you’re seeing on the TV inside your mind is the atomic structure of what football is — speed, power, agility and instinct.

You’re seeing 11 men trying to stop one man, and the 11 men are failing. The man with the ball has more speed and more power. His agility and instincts make it impossible to get him on the ground. The way the ball is carried and the way the runner moves are both unique and familiar, and if one could remove the logos from the helmets and the colors from the uniforms and the numbers from every player’s back, it could be happening in any decade. It could be happening in 1920. It is eternal and it is natural, and it’s always Jim Thorpe.

Chuck Klosterman is a writer and journalist. This essay was adapted from his new book, “Football.“

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