We fans always take greatest to mean most accomplished and then argue about which metrics—Super Bowl rings, career yards, win-loss ratios—mean the most. But what if we tweak the question and use greatest as an adverb instead of a noun: Who has played the position greatest? Who has realized the position in the most elevated way?

Peyton MF Manning, that’s who. Why? Obsessive study: After each of his fifteen seasons in the NFL, Manning has spent the entire month of March with his offensive coordinator, re-watching and dissecting every one of his preceding season’s plays, looking for patterns. The payoff: complexity. The man processes and unleashes more of it than anyone who’s ever played the game—often before the ball is snapped. The fact that he calls his own plays, combined with his unparalleled repertoire of dummy (and real) audibles, snap counts, and hand signals, puts him in the head of every defender lined up across from him. Once a play is live, his arsenal of pump and eye fakes is unmatched. And then there’s the feet. From Pop Warner on, quarterbacks are trained to drop and set. Without set feet, there can be no power, no accuracy, no hope. Manning, on the other hand, drums them back and forth. He prances, his weight shifting, hovering. He does this to keep his options open longer, and to create more options—he’ll often connect with seven or eight different receivers in a game. And he does it because he _can—_because his mind so slows time that he can afford to wait that fractional second, cloaking his intentions before setting his feet. Even so, his average snap-to-release time (2.35 seconds in the Chiefs game) is among the league’s quickest.

The rap against Manning is that his postseason record pales next to those of Brady, Aikman, Bradshaw, and especially Montana—who went four for four without a single pick in his Super Bowl appearances—and that he’s got only one ring.** 2 ** But Manning has played at a rarefied level more consistently than any other player. (His four MVPs are the most of any player in history, and his twelve Pro Bowl selections are the most by any QB.) His best is categorically different from any other QB’s best. It’s got more working parts and gears. It’s more orchestral.

As this piece goes to press, the Broncos are 11–3, and Manning—whose surgically fused 37-year-old spine, it must be remembered, sidelined him for the entire 2011 season—is in the running to break the Bob Beamon-like record of fifty regular-season touchdowns that Tom Brady set in 2007. If he does, then goes on to win it all, it will be…terrible. The case for Peyton MF Manning being the best ever will be so overwhelming, so irrefutable, that we will, all of us, lose our beloved argument. It will be pulled out from underneath us. At long last, we will be forced to admit that the point of our never-ending greatest-of-all-time argument is the arguing and the agreeable distraction it creates. From, you know, the nothingness.

Until then, I’m just saying that Peyton MF Manning is the final stage in the evolution of the pocket passer. I doubt we will ever see anyone better.

1. Proof in point: the pompously mannered sentence following this footnote.

2. Is it really all about the rings? Please. The Super Bowl isn’t even a football game. It’s a psychic and temporal tumefaction, a giant end-of-empire carbuncle, of interest to semioticians, perhaps—but a farcical measure of football greatness. Exhibit A: the way the power outage changed the trajectory—and very nearly the result—of last year’s game.

andrew corsello (@AndrewCorsello)_ is a _ ** GQ**_ correspondent._