Beginning on Friday the 6th, Football Perspective hosted a “Wisdom of Crowds” election with respect to that age old question: Who is the Greatest Quarterback of All Time?™ Well, Football Perspective guest commenter Adam Steele offered to count the ballots and provide a summary. What follows are his words, and the results from the contest.

First, I want to offer my sincere appreciation to all the readers who participated in this project, as it wouldn’t have been possible without your contributions. We generated over 300 comments and lots of great discussion. And, as you’re about to see, every vote really did matter.

After tallying 80 ballots, 2,000 votes, and 26,000 ranking points, the difference between first and second place was just eight points. That’s insane. Well, I won’t tease you any longer, so here are the results:

This chart is sortable by total points, points per ballot (using 80 as the denominator), GOAT votes, top 10 votes, and top 25 votes. In the interest of statistical significance, a player needed to appear on at least five ballots in order to be ranked in the table below.

According to the readers of Football Perspective, Peyton Manning is the Greatest Quarterback of All Time, narrowly defeating Joe Montana. Tom Brady and Johnny Unitas fill out the FP Crowd Mount Rushmore. However, it gets more interesting when you look at the exact vote distribution for these four quarterbacks:

# Quarterback 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th Other 1 Peyton Manning 32 9 8 11 5 8 2 2 2 1 2 Joe Montana 16 24 15 8 5 3 5 2 1 1 3 Tom Brady 18 20 12 3 6 3 4 7 1 6 4 Johnny Unitas 6 11 15 11 11 7 7 2 2 2 4

As you can see, Manning received the most first place votes (32), almost as many as Montana (16) and Brady (18) combined. However, Montana and Brady both garnered more top three votes than Manning, with 55, 50, and 49 respectively. While Johnny U lagged behind in GOAT votes, he still registered a strong 32 in the top three, which tells me that our readers have a solid understanding of NFL history and the impact Unitas made. Brady edges Montana in first place votes, but fell 71 points short in the overall tally. Why? Brady was placed outside the top seven by 14 voters, compared to only four such votes for Montana.

My takeaway from this chart is something most of us already knew: Peyton Manning and Tom Brady are far more polarizing than Joe Montana. With Manning, people either think he’s the GOAT or he’s overrated, without much middle ground. Brady seems to be a Mount Rushmore pick for the majority of observers, but way overrated according to the minority who feel otherwise. On the other hand, just about everyone loves Montana, who represents the closest thing to a consensus pick for quarterback greatness. All that being said, these trends aren’t very surprising.

Manning and Brady automatically become more polarizing because their careers happened at the same time, including a boatload of head-to-head meetings. In addition, these two men have become the favorite modern representatives for the Stats vs. Wins debate, which says something deeper about our style of football fandom, and evidently inspires a lot of passion and defensiveness.

Manning and Brady are also easy targets for criticism, though much of it is not necessarily fair (Manning can’t get it done in the playoffs, Brady can’t win without cheating). Even their personalities become a talking point: Manning is too much of a robot, Brady is too much of a pretty boy. On the other hand, Montana kind of sits comfortably in his own bubble, as history has treated him much better than it his contemporaries. While his career largely overlapped with the Elway/Marino/Kelly triumvirate, those three are more often measured against each other (perhaps because they were all members of the same draft class) than they are to Montana. It also doesn’t hurt that Montana comes across as humble, affable, cool-headed, and generally non-offensive. Even the people who aren’t particularly high on Montana don’t seem to hate him with the same passion that is directed towards Manning or Brady.

Let’s close with a table displaying the full distribution of votes, including the quarterbacks who aren’t ranked on the previous list. Note that by default, only the top 10 quarterbacks are shown, but you can change that number using the dropdown arrow on the left.

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