Every season, both the AL and NL honor their league’s most outstanding player with the MVP award – as you might expect, legends like Barry Bonds (7x), Albert Pujols (3x), Mickey Mantle (3x), Joe DiMaggio (3x), and Stan Musial (3x), just to name a few, grace the all-time leaderboards for most career MVPs won. However, not every MVP winner is even a Hall of Famer, as some players are dominant for a relatively brief period of time – case in point, George Foster of the Cincinnati Reds and Dale Murphy of the Atlanta Braves were MVP winners and two of the elite players of the late 1970s and 1980s, respectively, though both have fallen short of Cooperstown. Nevertheless, the pair were both highly productive players in their primes with similar career trajectories and totals, thus prompting the question:
In an October 2018 Monday Night Football game vs. the then-Washington Redskins, New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees threw a 62-yard touchdown pass to to Tre’Quan Smith to surpass Peyton Manning’s then-record of 71,940 career passing yards to sit atop the NFL record books. Though they have both since been surpassed by the incomparable Tom Brady, Brees and Manning remain #2 and #3, respectively, all-time in both passing yards and touchdowns. No doubt two of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history, the duo were part of a golden era of passers and faced off against each other numerous times (including in the Super Bowl), so it is only natural to ask:
