A week has now passed since Tom Brady hoisted his latest -- and perhaps most remarkable -- Super Bowl trophy.
As the confetti has been cleaned up, much ballyhoo about the next season is already underway and the amazement begins to settle, it's no less astonishing what Brady was able to accomplish with the the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
At 43 years old, Brady won his seventh Super Bowl in his 10th appearance, collected his fifth Super Bowl Most Valuable Player honor and did so in the first season with the second team of his 21-season career.
It was a moment in history marked by history, as Brady became the first player in NFL history to win a championship during four different presidencies -- George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden -- according to NFL Research.
It's one of many historical notes provided by NFL Research that somewhat puts into perspective what the NFL G.O.A.T. has done.
Six NHL players, three NBA players and no Major League Baseball players have pulled off four presidents' worth of winning titles.
Along with that time-encompassing feat, he turned in another as he became the first NFL player to win a title in three decades -- 2000s, 2010s, 2020s -- per NFL Research. Seven NHL players have done that, four major leaguers and two players in the NBA.
Brady, however, is the oldest athlete to claim a league championship MVP across the four major United States team sports and he did so by a wide margin as he's the first to do it at 40-plus.
He broke his own NFL record, as he'd previously won a Super Bowl MVP at 39. The Pittsburgh Pirates' Willie Stargell was 39 in 1979 when he was the World Series MVP and is the second-oldest championship MVP across the big four sports, per NFL Research.
As for the house that is his called the NFL, Brady extended many of his own records, the amazement of his accomplishments having grown as he extended them to ridiculous margins. His 10 Super Bowl starts are now double that of second-place John Elway at five and he's more than doubled the most yards passing in the Super Bowl with his 3,039 yards to Kurt Warner's 1,156. And he has almost twice as many Super Bowl touchdowns as his childhood hero Joe Montana at 21-11.
Brady, who joined archrival and friend Peyton Manning as the only quarterbacks to win Super Bowls with different teams, now has more Super Bowl titles individually at seven than any NFL franchise has won. Perhaps that's the most impressive statistic of them all. Perhaps. But there's Super Bowl records aplenty to ponder as to which one is the most impressive or the greatest. But after last Sunday, there's really no reason to ponder who football's greatest of all time is anymore.
