As Herm Edwards once reminded us, you play to win the game. And on a higher level, you play to win the Super Bowl. But even though championships are the ultimate goal, have they become too much of a measuring stick for how we break down the greatest quarterbacks of all-time?

At no other position in football is a player’s worth measured by how many rings he has won. And with good reason – football is the ultimate team sport. You can’t hide anyone out there, like a fielding-impaired designated hitter in baseball, nor can one player take total control of the game regardless of the pieces around him like a young LeBron James.

If Tom Brady played behind the 2002 Houston Texans offensive line, we might remember him the same way we do Giovanni Carmazzi – just some random quarterback taken in the 2000 Draft. (That’s not a knock on Brady, either – greatness is impossible to achieve when you have 1.4 seconds to throw).

A month ago, few outside of the Patriots locker room knew Malcolm Butler. Now he’s seared into our collective conscious for perpetuity, even if the rest of his career unfolds in a David Tyree-type manner. All because of one big play. Those are the players you need to complete a championship dream – everyone’s number is called at some point. Not just the guy taking the snaps behind center.

But despite the fact that everyone who knows football is aware of these facts, there is a different set of expectations for quarterbacks. No one is taking Barry Sanders out of their list of Top 5 running backs because the Lions never reached a Super Bowl. Dick Butkus is still the gold standard for linebackers even though he played for some of the sorriest teams in Chicago Bears history.

Of course, the biggest problem for the Butkus-era Bears was that the team essentially had a rotating clown car of starting quarterbacks. And because that position holds such a unique ability to control and change games, the public perceives a player like Dan Marino differently than those at other positions who failed to put a ring on their fingers.

Part of this is due to the ever-increasing role of quarterbacks as the game has become more passing oriented. In Marino’s playing days, no one would have suggested Jim McMahon was the superior quarterback because he won a Super Bowl. But today the matter of winning it all seems to have moved up in importance as a criterion for quarterback greatness.

Granted, just about every quarterback universally listed among the top in the league today has won a Super Bowl. Brady, Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, Aaron Rodgers and Ben Roethlisberger have all gotten the job done. Perhaps the lone “cream of the crop” passer without a ring is Andrew Luck, and most of his career is still in front of him.

It’s not until you go to the next tier of quarterbacks where having a ring might hold water when arguing a quarterback’s merits. Russell Wilson, Eli Manning and Joe Flacco have won the big one, while similar talents like Philip Rivers, Tony Romo and Matt Ryan have not. If any of those guys were in the right situation – or the wrong situation – it’s possible their roles would be reversed.

The Manning family provides the greatest illustration into why Super Bowl rings can’t be used as the measurement of a quarterback’s greatness – no one will argue that Eli is a better overall QB than Peyton, yet he still holds a 2-1 lead in the most significant category.

So even though Vince Lombardi once told us that winning is everything, when it comes to measuring the all-time greatest quarterbacks, it should not be the only thing.