G.O.A.T. Of All Sports!

#1
MAD

MAD

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#1
Now that Tom Brady has won another Super Bowl, is he the Goat?

Is he the Goat of all team or individual sports in the modern era?

Who goes above him?

Michael Jordan maybe?
Tiger Woods?
 
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#2
#2
Lol....I find the GOAT of all sports even kinda sillier than the GOAT of any specific sport.

Are we talking winning? Being the best athlete? Best at both?

If it's taking everything into consideration I have to go with Jordan.
 
#4
#4
mad4vols said:
Now that Tom Brady has won another Super Bowl, is he the Goat?

Is he the Goat of all team or individual sports in the modern era?

Who goes above him?

Michael Jordan maybe?
Tiger Woods?
Click to expand...

If GOAT is total resume, then it's Brady and maybe Lebron has a chance to catch him.

If GOAT is best talent/most dominant prime then it's MJ or Tiger, probably.
 
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#5
#5
I know nothing about cricket, but I've read some about this guy. Supposedly, on a statistical basis, nobody holds a candle to Don Bradman in terms of being the best in their particular sport. Not Gretzky, Tiger, etc.

Don Bradman - Wikipedia

In terms of sports that we are going to be more familiar with, I think the GOAT is Gretzky. Points is a hockey statistic that is goals + assists. If Wayne Gretzky never scored a single goal in his career, he'd still have more points than anybody else. Gretzky has more assists that anybody else has goals + assists. It's mind-blowing. And it's even more incredible when you consider how physically and athletically unimpressive he was. He was listed at 6 feet, 185 during his playing career. Never the fastest skater, the hardest shot, or the quickest release.
 
#6
#6
What about Michael Phelps? Venus?

IMO, it’s not fair to do this at all, but it’s especially ridiculous to not separate team sports and individual sports
 
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#11
#11
Hoosier_Vol said:
Still Jordan
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But why? Brady has more rings and all-time records, more championship appearances. He won 4 titles as a game manager and 3 as a guy slinging it. Most guys don't have the DNA to do both...2 full decades of dominance. His dominance has spanned 2 different eras. MJ had a decade. Football is the bigger and more competitive sport, IMO. Brady has more than twice as many playoff wins as the next guy....and he's not done. MJ had more celebrity and more individual awards. That's it.
 
#12
#12
Edwin Corley Moses (born August 31, 1955) is an American former track and field athlete who won gold medals in the 400 m hurdles at the 1976 and 1984 Olympics. Between 1977 and 1987, Moses won 107 consecutive finals (122 consecutive races) and set the world record in the event four times. In addition to his running, Moses was also an innovative reformer in the areas of Olympic eligibility and drug testing. In 2000, he was elected the first Chairman of the Laureus World Sports Academy, an international service organization of world-class athletes.[
 
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#13
#13
n_huffhines said:
But why? Brady has more rings and all-time records, more championship appearances. He won 4 titles as a game manager and 3 as a guy slinging it. Most guys don't have the DNA to do both...2 full decades of dominance. His dominance has spanned 2 different eras. MJ had a decade. Football is the bigger and more competitive sport, IMO. Brady has more than twice as many playoff wins as the next guy....and he's not done. MJ had more celebrity and more individual awards. That's it.
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Jordan will always be seen as the GOAT by many because:
- he's arguably the most marketed/marketable athlete of all time, which allows people to forget narratives that existed about him early in his career that he couldn't beat the Pistons, and he was only able to get past the Pistons after they had degraded (and the Lakers for his first title too)
- rightly or wrongly, he's seen as the straw that stirred the drink with the Bulls (i.e., if he wasn't there they don't win them).
- unblemished Finals record

Brady is marketable, but not like Jordan, and he's seen by many as not being the most important part of his team's victories (it was more Belichick, or his defense, or luck). Also, we are still something of a highlight reel society. Brady's personal highlight reel is not as impressive as some of his contemporaries.
 
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#14
#14
05_never_again said:
Jordan will always be seen as the GOAT by many because:
- he's arguably the most marketed/marketable athlete of all time, which allows people to forget narratives that existed about him early in his career that he couldn't beat the Pistons, and he was only able to get past the Pistons after they had degraded (and the Lakers for his first title too)
- rightly or wrongly, he's seen as the straw that stirred the drink with the Bulls (i.e., if he wasn't there they don't win them).
- unblemished Finals record

Brady is marketable, but not like Jordan, and he's seen by many as not being the most important part of his team's victories (it was more Belichick, or his defense, or luck). Also, we are still something of a highlight reel society. Brady's personal highlight reel is not as impressive as some of his contemporaries.
Click to expand...

Just means he lost earlier. I hate this argument, not saying you espouse it, but like you say, plenty of people do.

MJ couldn't even make the Eastern Conference Finals without Pippen and a great PF, and he couldn't make the finals without Pippen, a great PF, and Phil Jackson. I think it's fair to argue that Brady's success has a lot to do with the guys around him, but the same is 100% true of MJ.
 
#15
#15
n_huffhines said:
Just means he lost earlier. I hate this argument, not saying you espouse it, but like you say, plenty of people do.

MJ couldn't even make the Eastern Conference Finals without Pippen and a great PF, and he couldn't make the finals without Pippen, a great PF, and Phil Jackson. I think it's fair to argue that Brady's success has a lot to do with the guys around him, but the same is 100% true of MJ.
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Yeah, I mean rightly or wrongly, people say it. And also, in a discussion about any team sport, by definition the success of an individual player is determined by some extent by his teammates and coaches. Jordan, for a variety of reasons, gets almost exclusive credit for winning those Finals. Personally I think Jordan had more to do with his team's successes than Brady (mostly because basketball is just a fundamentally different smaller-roster sport), but the arguments people make sometimes seem to suggest he was on the floor with 1 other good player (Pippen) and 4 scrubs.

At the risk of sounding like an elitist, a lot of these arguments are driven by casual sports fans who only closely follow the sport late in the playoffs or in championship situations. If you're that kind of fan, an unblemished Finals record is incredibly impressive to you, because every time you watched a Finals with him in it, he won. And since he was Michael Jordan, perhaps you only watched a Finals when he and the Bulls were there. So in your mind, he's "undefeated" - every time you watched him play, he won. And then simultaneously, he's marketed seemingly everywhere.

I think you can add another reason to the list - the Bulls won the first three-peat with Jordan, then he retired. During the season he didn't play and the following season when he only played 17 regular season games and wasn't "back" yet, they didn't win a title. Then, once he's truly "back," they win 3 more titles.
 
#18
#18
05_never_again said:
Yeah, I mean rightly or wrongly, people say it. And also, in a discussion about any team sport, by definition the success of an individual player is determined by some extent by his teammates and coaches. Jordan, for a variety of reasons, gets almost exclusive credit for winning those Finals. Personally I think Jordan had more to do with his team's successes than Brady (mostly because basketball is just a fundamentally different smaller-roster sport), but the arguments people make sometimes seem to suggest he was on the floor with 1 other good player (Pippen) and 4 scrubs.

At the risk of sounding like an elitist, a lot of these arguments are driven by casual sports fans who only closely follow the sport late in the playoffs or in championship situations. If you're that kind of fan, an unblemished Finals record is incredibly impressive to you, because every time you watched a Finals with him in it, he won. And since he was Michael Jordan, perhaps you only watched a Finals when he and the Bulls were there. So in your mind, he's "undefeated" - every time you watched him play, he won. And then simultaneously, he's marketed seemingly everywhere.

I think you can add another reason to the list - the Bulls won the first three-peat with Jordan, then he retired. During the season he didn't play and the following season when he only played 17 regular season games and wasn't "back" yet, they didn't win a title. Then, once he's truly "back," they win 3 more titles.
Click to expand...

People like to assume MJ would've won 8 in a row but there is no way that happens. The NBA is an absolute grind. You gotta play 100+ games to win a title and doing that 3 years in a row is crazy, forget about 8 years. By all accounts, Jordan's first retirement had a lot to do with his being sick of the burden of playing and dealing with the media and social pressure. He needed a break.

The late 90's in the NBA was total ass. MJ had a super team. The '96 Sonics were awesome. The '96 Magic were good but too young and Grant missed the ECF. The '97-'98 Jazz were good but old as hell. It just wasn't a good league during the second 3peat. There had been so much expansion followed by a talent lull. The Sonics won 61 games in 1998 with GP, Schrempf, and Vin Baker as their big 3. That's probably a 50-win team today. You'd need another GP quality player to make that a contender now. The '99 Spurs went 15-2 in the playoffs and they didn't have anything special at guard. They had to add Parker and Ginobili to win in the 2000's when the league got tougher.
 
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#19
#19
n_huffhines said:
People like to assume MJ would've won 8 in a row but there is no way that happens. The NBA is an absolute grind. You gotta play 100+ games to win a title and doing that 3 years in a row is crazy, forget about 8 years. By all accounts, Jordan's first retirement had a lot to do with his being sick of the burden of playing and dealing with the media and social pressure. He needed a break.

The late 90's in the NBA was total ass. MJ had a super team. The '96 Sonics were awesome. The '96 Magic were good but too young and Grant missed the ECF. The '97-'98 Jazz were good but old as hell. It just wasn't a good league during the second 3peat. There had been so much expansion followed by a talent lull. The Sonics won 61 games in 1998 with GP, Schrempf, and Vin Baker as their big 3. That's probably a 50-win team today. You'd need another GP quality player to make that a contender now. The '99 Spurs went 15-2 in the playoffs and they didn't have anything special at guard. They had to add Parker and Ginobili to win in the 2000's when the league got tougher.
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Yep. I think the reason they were able to do 3 in a row twice is MJ split it up. Of course if someone did that today, they'd be liable to be criticized for "not being able to handle the grind." Can you imagine if LeBron had a 1.5 year retirement during his peak years? Holy cow.
 
#20
#20
05_never_again said:
Yep. I think the reason they were able to do 3 in a row twice is MJ split it up. Of course if someone did that today, they'd be liable to be criticized for "not being able to handle the grind." Can you imagine if LeBron had a 1.5 year retirement during his peak years? Holy cow.
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MJ gets a pass from 99% of fans on that and a lot of the same fans would call Lebron soft for it.

I realize people give MJ a pass because his Dad died, but that's incomplete information. There's much more to it than that, and I'm not sure why that makes it acceptable in assessing his greatness. Almost every athlete keeps playing when a close family member dies. Ultimately, all the reasons combined boil down to "he didn't want to play basketball enough" and to me, that's a knock on his legacy.
 
#21
#21
n_huffhines said:
MJ gets a pass from 99% of fans on that and a lot of the same fans would call Lebron soft for it.

I realize people give MJ a pass because his Dad died, but that's incomplete information. There's much more to it than that, and I'm not sure why that makes it acceptable in assessing his greatness. Almost every athlete keeps playing when a close family member dies. Ultimately, all the reasons combined boil down to "he didn't want to play basketball enough" and to me, that's a knock on his legacy.
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I can't imagine losing your dad in that fashion, but I wonder of Jordan would have kept playing if he didn't have that volume of off-the-court obligations. He was (and still is) a cultural icon/celebrity, not just a basketball player. Nobody forced him to be both; he wanted to be marketed by Nike to the extent that he was, he wanted to be in Space Jam, etc.

I bet if one of those two didn't occur (either he didn't allow himself to be marketed as heavily, or his dad wasn't killed) he probably doesn't do the first retirement.
 
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