Montana: Can't imagine how it feels to lose Super Bowl

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There are those -- like Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio -- who believe it's better to never have loved at all than to have loved and lost. Therefore, Florio gives Joe Montana the edge over Tom Brady as the greatest quarterback of all time because even though Brady's been to more Super Bowls (six) than Montana (four), Montana is undefeated in the big game and Brady's lost twice.

Montana's too smart to get dragged into that argument. However, in an appearance with Florio on PFT Live, he says he can't imagine how Brady feels having lost those two.

"Well, I'm sure it's always great to be there," he said when Florio asked if would have preferred getting to more Super Bowls even if it meant not winning them. "I'm not sure what it's like to lose once when we get there, since we were fortunate not to do that.

"But I can't imagine getting to that game and what that feeling is if you lose. To fight your way all the way there, and it's hard to get there, and to get there and lose, I just don't know how you even deal with it."

Poor Tom.

Taking the Super Bowl out of the equation, Montana thinks it's impossible to compare QBs across different eras.

"It's too hard to measure," he told Florio. "When the guy played, who they played with, how they play. And the era that they play in, because the game changes so much on that end of it . . 

"Before I played, what they did to wide receivers, [what] the DBs could do back then, they'd throw 'em in jail for now. And now you can barely touch [the wide receivers, and you] can't hit the quarterback like you used to be able to do."

While the more stringent rules favor modern quarterbacks, the "who they played with" element benefits the older players. In a discussion about how his 49ers learned to beat the 1980s Chicago Bears defense, Montana talked about holding back more blockers to pick up the pass rushers and leaving one-on-one matchups with -- and he said this with a smile -- Jerry Rice and John Taylor. And in the pre-salary cap/pre-free agency days, you could have two receivers of that caliber on your team for as long as you wanted. That's impossible in today's game, meaning contemporary QBs rarely if ever have the stable of offensive weapons (and don't forget, San Francisco also had Roger Craig at running back) that Montana enjoyed virtually his entire career.

So Joe's right: It is too hard to measure. 

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