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Chris Broussard: Michael Jordan, not Tom Brady, is the G.O.A.T. in all of sports

Published Feb. 9, 2017 11:31 a.m. ET

Andrew Lynch

After leading the Patriots to an epic comeback for his fifth Super Bowl title, Tom Brady is drawing praise as the greatest of all time in any sport — NFL, NBA, badminton, whatever. In fact, FOX Sports' own Skip Bayless said this week that Brady surpassed Michael Jordan as the most clutch athlete in professional sports history.

Yet on Wednesday's episode of the In The Zone NBA podcast, FOX Sports NBA analyst Chris Broussard pushed back against the idea that Brady has achieved cross-sports G.O.A.T. status.

CHRIS: Now we just witnessed an all-time great Super Bowl performance by an all-time great player, Tom Brady. I am a Brady fan - have been for quite awhile - and when it comes to quarterbacks, I’m willing to crown him The G.O.A.T. I’m even willing to give him an “arguably’’ when it comes to being the greatest football player at any position. But some of you out there are going too far. Way too far.

I’ve heard pundits here at FOX Sports and elsewhere say Brady’s the top clutch performer of all-time, better than Michael Jordan, better than Muhammad Ali.

Oh ye of little memory. Hast thou forgotten already. The G.O.A.T. doesn’t play in New England. He played in Chicago. And he didn’t throw a pigskin by bewildered opponents; he flew through the air past helpless defenders. With all due respect to Brady, for more than two decades, the greatest athlete in American team sports history has been Michael Jordan, and that’s still the case today.

The 15-year distance between Brady’s first championship in 2002 and his most recent in 2017 is indeed impressive. But there was also 10 years where Brady didn’t win the Big Game, that’s a mammoth, decidedly un-Jordanesque, decade-long gap right smack dab in the middle of Brady’s prime.

MJ, on the other hand, claimed his first crown in 1991 to begin what was essentially a run of 6 straight championships. Had he not taken a year-and-half off to try his hand at baseball, Hakeem Olajuwon, who won his only two titles while Jordan was either absent or rusty from a late-season comeback, would be viewed more like Patrick Ewing than Tim Duncan.

As far as being clutch, Brady is definitely that, rallying the Patriots from 4th quarter deficits to win two of the last three Super Bowls. But Air Jordan was so good that he never found himself in those kind of holes. Not only did Jordan never allow an opponent to reach a Game 7 in his 6 trips to the Finals, but he powered his Bulls to 3-1 leads in 4 of those 6 Finals. He was so far ahead of his competition that he never found himself dangling from the edge of the cliff like Brady has so often.

With Jordan, it’s not just about the rings, as impressive as his collection is. The ever-reliable eye test also told us Jordan was unlike anything we’d ever seen - regardless of the sport. Check this, even after his first retirement in 1993 - with only nine seasons and three titles under his belt - the New York Times and Los Angeles Times labeled him The G.O.A.T. Then, he gave us an encore and grabbed three more.

That makes Jordan’s title harder to erase than a 25-point third-quarter deficit.