Coming into the 2011 NFL season with roster positions on a few teams still up in the air it is pretty obvious with teams considered favourites that it’s because of one single player they have – an elite quarterback.

We know that thirty two teams will start the season some touting first or second year pros under center, but six of those teams have starting quarterbacks that have already won an NFL championship.

Those six teams are New England (Tom Brady), Indianapolis (Peyton Manning), New Orleans (Drew Brees), Pittsburgh (Ben Roethlisberger), Green Bay (Aaron Rodgers), and New York Giants (Eli Manning).

If the bet were offered to you that any one of those six teams will win the Superbowl against the field of the remaining twenty-six teams/men would you take the six or the field?

If you think one of the six teams with the experienced champion at the helm, and all are pretty decent teams as there isn’t a real stinker there, you are gambling that a few of the nouveau riche bubble quarterbacks won’t break through this season.

If you take the field then you may like your numbered chances with any of Matt Ryan (Atlanta), Joe Flacco (Baltimore), Matt Schaub (Houston), Michael Vick (Philadelphia), Mark Sanchez (New York Jets), Tony Romo (Dallas), Philip Rivers (San Diego), Jay Cutler (Chicago) or some upstart winning an easy division and causing an early round upset for a fifty percent chance at a conference championship and Superbowl cameo.

Considering the hype bestowed on some of these guys and their teams: Atlanta, New York Jets and Philadelphia in particular, maybe that is a smart bet.

BAROMETER OF GREATNESS

The point is in today’s NFL the quarterback is a very important position and a team can go from first to worst if their guy can’t play due to injury or as Arizona found out last year without Kurt Warner - to retirement.

Any bet against the veteran winners might be considered silly, because the guys I first listed that have led their teams to Superbowl titles have accounted for nine of the last ten Superbowl wins, including eight consecutive, and three of them have lost Superbowls to each other.

Only one player, Brady, has quarterbacked in four Superbowls, and of the six guys listed he is the one who hasn’t won lately...all five of the other elite guys have won since his last title. Yet Brady is the quarterback, probably the only one in the league that is used as a barometer of greatness by which everyone else is compared.

If a quarterback is a top ten quarterback then he ranks after Brady and among nine others.

Peyton Manning is often considered the best passer, but he has only one Superbowl title so nobody wants to put him ahead of Brady.

Every year at this time there tends to be a controversy somewhere about quarterbacks and how they rank among their peers. And every fortnight or so that swirl gusts in New York and yet again people will question if Peyton’s younger brother Eli Manning has earned the right to even be listed as elite.

There is some history to this dispute and it may be a good omen for Eli that this is happening again, because last time he did not speak up when ex-Giant teammate Tiki Barber asserted on the eve of the 2007 season that Eli wasn’t even a top 16 quarterback.

Eli worked at his game that year through the normal ups and downs of Giants football under the glare of lights and critics and somehow won the Superbowl. In the process he put a blemish on Brady’s quest for an unbeaten season and everyone forgot about poor Tiki.

At the time we took Tiki to town in our writing here suggesting that since so many guys were rookies that year and some teams had veteran backups with no clear starter the fact that Eli earned his job surely meant he had to rank better than sixteenth.

We were vindicated then and feel it’s time to step to bat for Eli again, but it looks like this time the debate isn’t whether he is better than middle of the pack, but is he in a class with Brady and the others on the four other teams with experienced Superbowl quarterbacks?

LIST OF CHANGE

That is a list that changes every year. Lots of great quarterbacks never win Superbowls but are ranked artificially high for their perceived abilities.

Back in 2007 people fawned over Donovan McNabb, Carson Palmer, and Matt Hasselbeck, but nobody expects any of these guys to win anything this year. Since then Eli Manning has not only won a Superbowl over a great team he has also jumped the cue of veteran players into the discussion of winning and longevity with a contending team and he did this based on play not what people perceive about him.

We thought (I always had reservations about McNabb and Palmer) that some of those other guys built up reputations that placed them into this elite discussion prematurely. The truth is that the reputation of being reliable and a winner, like Brady is just as hard to defeat as it is to earn in the first place.

The NFL changes so fast.

Just yesterday I looked up who the highest paid (expected total compensation) players are for this season and shockingly only two of them are the best quarterbacks on the best teams.

Peyton Manning is currently first in pay at $23 million, and Sam Bradford the second year quarterback of St. Louis is second?

Bradford? Really!

Bradford is to earn a little more than the great Brady north of $18 million for one season. The top five rounds out with a defensive player, Oakland’s Richard Seymour and Michael Vick.

Last season people doubted Vick could regain a starter’s job in the NFL and now he has chased another quarterback out of Philly and symbolically opened the “Eagle Kool-Aid Stand” out in the parking lot. He had a great half season last year and earned back job security and now he might be your bet to get even better than he has been in his whole career to date based on his play from October to December?

Brady’s first season as quarterback in New England which ended in an unlikely Superbowl against the league’s best team did not earn him his elite reputation until two seasons later when he won his second championship and pretty much became money winning consecutive games and playoff games. Brady did not get in the elite discussion until people feared the Patriots.

So people are quick to anoint players with little evidence to prop them up, and sometimes a little slow on recognizing the real persevering talents.

Lots of players have had good seasons. Unfortunately teams buy in and pay out too early. Then they end up stuck in last place bailing their way out.

Derek Anderson’s one great season in Cleveland should in hindsight go down as a major miscalculation. The Browns invested so much in him after one upstart season that they felt compelled to build around him. When they should have been drafting someone better or trading for competence they held out hope that Anderson could be coached back to his 2007 form, and he never was. He ended up part of that squalor in Arizona last year as the Cardinals decomposed after Warner retired with no confident replacement at quarterback.

LOADS OF CONFIDENCE

The one thing that Brady, Manning and Manning, Roethlisberger, Brees, and Rodgers have that sets them apart from everybody else including Vick coming into this season has to be their loads of confidence. They all have the confidence from knowing they already won and if you watch them in any of their seasons even on falling short they look like they still expect to do it again, sometime.

When asked on a New York radio show whether he considered himself a top five quarterback alongside the likes of Tom Brady, the usually reserved Eli Manning did not hesitate to answer: “Yeah, I consider myself in that class and Tom Brady is a great quarterback...”

And why not say that?

Manning is the only one who can claim to have gone toe to toe against Brady and have beaten him in the most important game.

One repercussion of putting himself in that class of player is that his teammates back him up. His wide receiver Hakeem Nicks told the New York Times that Eli picks up on blitzes and can dissect a defense as good as anyone in the league. That certainly can’t hurt him where they all must prove it together in games.