It's the ultimate team game, but it ultimately comes down to the players and no player gets the most credit or the blame than the QB. Fair or not look at every starting QB whose won a Superbowl the past 10 years
Mahomes
Stafford- Pro Bowl QB that season
Brady
Mahomes
Brady
Foles- anomaly but had a magical postseason rub
Brady
Manning- All time great defense and Manning did enough
Brady
Wilson
Flacco- 12 TDs 0 INTs in his run
Eli
Rodgers
Other than Foles , Flacco(who had magical postseason runs) and Peyton(who had a historical defense) every QB who won it was playing at an elite level.
KC won a chip a year after naming Mahomes starter and you give credit to Reid more when he couldn't get it done with Smith or McNabb.
Coaches are way more important in the NFL than other sports they make a huge difference, but in the end the players have to execute and perform when it matters most. Those are usually the teams led by a top QB
This is a good jumping off point for the circular nature of these king of arguments.
The team won so therefore the Qb was good and therefore they won because of the Qb.
You hit some obvious examples in here. Stafford. For 11 of his 12 years in the NFL he couldn’t win a playoff game. Then in one year his team wins a SB and he is proof that it’s all about the QB and you can’t win without an elite QB.
Wilson. He won 1 SB with the best defense in the NFL and one of the top running games. Despite the defense remaining elite for 3 more years he never won again. Without the best other 52 in the league surrounding him he has won 3 playoff games in 8 years. Just to scale that, there have been 92 playoff wins. 92/32 teams means the average team wins 2.875 playoff games. Your example of proof that you need an elite QB to win SBs has been average in winning playoff games for the last 8 years.
Flacco. Do you really think Joe Flacco suddenly became an elite QB for a month then went back to average or worse for the rest of his career? Or was he just a piece of a team that dominated. And if that did happen, you are only proving that any QB can pretend to be elite even though they aren’t, therefore proving you don’t need an elite QB. Sane with Foles.
Early Brady, old Peyton and lifetime Eli were not dominating focal points of their teams. Brady won 3 of his 6 here when he was a cog in the machine and Peyton won half of his SBs when he was a liability. Peyton is actually a good argument AGAINST “it’s all about thf QB” because they built and entire organization around giving him weapons and playing defense from ahead and he consistently choked. Indy built the epitome of the “it’s all about the Qb” team and won 1 SB in 13 years.
Football is a team game. Teams with good players and good coaches win. Teams with poor talent or bad coaching don’t.
You can take the “you can only win with an elite qb” argument, which requires changing only to mostly and changing elite to “or won who wins” argument and apply it to coaches, apply it to defenses, OLs, DL, secondary, etc and you will find teams win with good players and strengths in all areas are equally important.
Yes, the NFL has changed the rules to accentuate passing and scoring. What this has done is make QB stat accumulation easy and create the idea that decent QBs are elite because of stats.
The 2021 Rams didn’t win because of an elite Qb. They won because the gave an average QB who never was good enough to elevate a team to winners, the best weapons, excellent offensive coaching and a dominating defense.
The quality of the other 52 players and coaches elevates the play and reputation of the QB, to create a circular argument that the that was good enough to win, only was because of the QB. And the ease of stat accumulation at the QB position means that any decent QB that you put on a good, well coached team, is suddenly elite because they won and put up stats. It’s impossible for a QB on a good winning team in today nfl to not pit up stats that dwarf historic QB stats from before the fantasy football, can’t touch the QB, can’t defend receivers, let’s make every game 50-49 rule changes.