I'll respond as I did in an earlier post, Steve Young, Aaron Rodgers, and Andrew Luck have 2 Lombardi's between all 3 of them. Tom Brady has 2 Lombardi's since a large portion of Patriot Nation melted down in early 2014 and wanted him traded.
The Patriots were favored to win the Super Bowl on March 1st of this year, and that was with almost half of their team heading to free agency and Belichick expected to be frugal in free agency. Who do you think the oddsmakers were betting on?
Hint-it wasn't Jimmy Garrapolo.
Now Belichick has loaded them up for the next couple of years and they are even heavier favorites to win it all. It's no guarantee as the SB never is, but I love Brady's chances to get them another Lombardi in 2018, and at least one more after that. And imo it's possible they could ultimately end up with more.
there's far more to this equation than discussing the comparative strengths of the Patriots, Packers, and 49ers as overall franchises -- which is all a comparison of the hardware proves.
The fact of the matter is that the only franchise of the three that suffered directly for its choice to move on from its superstar quarterback was the Colts, and they did that deliberately to tank (there is no other word for what the Colts were doing that year) for the best quarterback prospect they could possibly get their hands on.
Manning, Favre, and Montana were moved on from as a result of carefully orchestrated plans that the front office of their franchises decided on despite these front offices knowing darn well that each of them had years of life left in them. All of Montana, Favre and Manning took franchises to the playoffs and Manning took his team all the way.
And in each case, the franchise that cut them executed its plan and was back in the playoffs, if not that year, within a few years. And only the Colts, the weakest of the three franchises at the time, don't have any hardware to show for it.
And anyone here actually expects this Patriots franchise, known as the great master of contingency planning and treating players like plug and play devices based on Bill Belichick's scouting priorities, has no plan to move on from Brady to a viable replacement whether or not Brady has a few years of life left? The history of the way these things go between franchises and their aging-but-still-great quarterbacks disagrees with you.
This is what history tells us. History tells us that if a franchise thinks it can still put up a fight in the league after its premium elite quarterback has moved on, it will not rest on its laurels and ride its aging superstar back down to ground floor level. It will execute a plan, bring in a replacement, and try to keep winning. If the plan fails, it fails, but there will be a plan, and rather than risk even one year of unprofitable mediocricy, the franchise will cut or trade the aging superstar and execute the plan and the superstar will wind up with a few wilderness years at the end of his career. It happened to some of the best quarterbacks of our generation and some of the best quarterbacks of past generations. I see no real reason to think that Brady will be different here. Just because he's exceptional doesn't make him an exception.