When two-way great Shohei Ohtani turned his slugging slump into the greatest game in baseball history in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series, it started a discussion in the newsroom: What are some of the other top individual performances in sports? And how do they compare to Ohtani’s 10 strikeouts and three home runs?
When it comes to the NFL, look no further than Tom Brady for a direct comparison between two of the greatest to ever do it at their positions in their respective sports. But does what the Patriots quarterback did in the infamous 28–3 Super Bowl LI comeback stack up statistically to Ohtani’s two-way masterclass?
I thought about getting cute with this, and going with Larry Fitzgerald’s wild 2008 postseason that nearly resulted in the Cardinals upsetting the Steelers in Super Bowl XLIII, or what Aaron Donald did in Super Bowl LVI, or even Doug Williams’s second quarter in Super Bowl XXII. But the easy answer here is the correct one—Tom Brady becoming the first quarterback ever to win five Super Bowls by leading the Patriots back from a seemingly-insurmountable 28–3 deficit against the Falcons in 2017. The Falcons took that lead with 8:31 left in the third quarter, and Brady had to be just about perfect from that point forward for New England to even have a chance. He was. In the Super Bowl, against a defense that looked too fast for the Patriots over the first two-and-a-half quarters, and in a situation where the Falcons knew New England had to throw, Brady was 26-of-33 for 284 yards, two scores and a 122.73 passer rating. There’s nothing, quite simply, in NFL history that compares to it.
Greater than Ohtani? Is it the equivalent of Ohtani's 10-strikeout, three-homer game? Ehhhh … I think you’d have to find a two-way player from the past to go there, and I’m not sure there’s a singular performance by some yesteryear Travis Hunter to match up with that. —
While this wasn’t a both-sides-of-the-ball performance, it did feel like Bears rookie Gale Sayers was transcending something when he essentially levitated over a sloppy and disgusting Wrigley Field to score six touchdowns against the 7–6 49ers back in 1965. Sayers scored on an 80-yard pass, 21-yard rush, 7-yard rush, 1-yard rush and 85-yard punt return. Today we often—consciously or not—judge performances through a fantasy lens, which tends to adversely affect the way we look at historical games that included outlier statistical performances. In this case, Sayers was not only dominant in the passing game, rushing game and on special teams, but was overcoming plays in which he was essentially dead to rights in the backfield, hurdling defenders spilling into his path. He was also throwing some crushing blocks on the punt return. Remarkably, he was not the only Bears player returning punts. Today, we’d be able to have this performance quantified not only as a fantasy player, but by some metric that encompassed his blocking ability, the amount of yards after first contact and the number of defenders he displaced in the passing game. At some point, maybe the only useful function for AI can be to revisit and label those performances under the same metric, so Sayers gets some much-deserved love.
Greater than Ohtani? While Sayers’s six-touchdown performance is incredible, I still feel challenged to compare it to what occurred in the NLCS. Ohtani’s dominant pitching performance was Ruth-ian, in an era where all athletes are optimized, not drunk or heavily smoking and are dialed into the sport year round. —
