The original version of this thread first appeared back in July 2004 as a way to move all the Tom Brady vs. Peyton Manning debate out of other discussions and into one place. We don't know why people have a tendency to lose their minds over this issue, but it really does take over every discussion thread if we let it. At one point, a discussion of the San Francisco 49ers' salary cap problems turned into a debate over Tom Brady and Peyton Manning. Every time the Colts play the Patriots, we are in danger of this site becoming all Brady-Manning all the time. Therefore, Football Outsiders has two hard and fast rules:
1) Tom Brady and Peyton Manning are tied for the title of best quarterback in football.
2) Any discussion of whether one is better than the other must go in this thread, and will be deleted from all other discussion threads.
The original thread, with a longer discussion of the whole Tom Brady vs. Peyton Manning problem, is here [1]. Note that roughly 800 comments are missing from that thread, because we had to clean out old comments to try to solve some of the server issues. We did archive them and are working on a way to bring all older comments back without filling the comment database.
Part II, posted during the 2006 regular season game between New England and Indianapolis, is here [2].
Disclaimer: This discussion is far, far sillier than the other discussion threads on this site, and it is meant to be. The rest of the website is not like this.
Links:
[1] http://www.footballoutsiders.com/tombrady.php
[2] http://www.footballoutsiders.com/2006/10/29/open-discussion/4466/