Mike Tanier

If you have felt underappreciated during the holiday season, remember that it could be worse. You could be Drew Brees.

Brees broke Dan Marino’s single-season passing record of 5,084 yards with his final pass on Monday night's win against the Falcons. Ho-hum, you say: Passing records fall every season. Except that Marino’s standard has held for 27 years, and only one other quarterback has ever surpassed 5,000 yards: None other than Brees, who threw for 5,069 yards in 2008.

Brees’ pursuit of Marino’s milestone has gotten the “oh, by the way” treatment from some outlets, while a few analysts cared just enough to give Bress the Roger Maris brush-off. “Brees' record will be severely watered down. So much so, that it almost deserves an asterisk," wrote Mike Freeman of CBSSports.com, alluding to today’s liberal passing rules and strategies.

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Last week, Brees became the 13th quarterback in NFL history to surpass 40,000 career passing yards. You might have missed the fanfare and the parade: The story got buried in the stats ‘n’ notes section of most sports sections outside of Louisiana. Brees will pass Johnny Unitas on the all-time yardage list before breaking Marino’s record, and he could also pass Joe Montana by season’s end. It’s not clear what punctuation marks he must use as apologies for passing those legends: Maybe an ampersand and a pound sign, harsh symbols for our “severely watered down” times.

When not cruising past Marino, Unitas, and Montana, Brees is being a solid citizen about his contract situation. He becomes a free agent in March, but negotiations on a new deal have been tabled until the offseason. Saints president Mickey Loomis has praised Brees for not letting the slow/nonexistent negotiations become a distraction, but Loomis has not exactly sped things along, either. Apparently, things have become so severely watered down 32-year-old all-time record holders just grow on trees.

Granted, Brees is getting some props: He is often mentioned as this year’s “runner-up MVP,” and the Saints are quietly 12-3, in the playoffs, and in good position to wrap up the second seed in the NFC. But Brees deserves to be seen as more than a runner-up. He deserves a heck of a lot better than the asterisk treatment. Brees is a future Hall of Famer, and he should be acknowledged as one of the best quarterbacks, not just of this generation, but of any generation.

In good company
Yes, Brees is a Hall of Famer. He’s not a Hall of Famer if he wins another Super Bowl, or if he has three more good years, or if he breaks the right combination of records. He is a Hall of Famer even if he announces before kickoff Monday that he is giving up football for tiddlywinks. Brees is not “on his way.” He is there.

Brees is about to be named to his sixth Pro Bowl and has led his team to a Super Bowl victory. Every eligible quarterback in history with six Pro Bowls and a ring has made the Hall of Fame. In fact, the only quarterback in history with six Pro Bowl selections who is not in the Hall of Fame is John Hadl, the Chargers legend who earned much of his all-star notice in the wild-and-woolly days of the early AFL. Brees’ record blows away top Hall of Fame argument starters such as Ken Stabler (four Pro Bowls, one ring) and Ken Anderson (four Pro Bowls, zero rings). Brees fits much more comfortably among second-tier Hall members such as Dan Fouts (six Pro Bowls, zero rings) and Bobby Layne (five Pro Bowls, two rings), well above the Joe Namath-George Blanda class of quarterbacks who made the cut for other contributions. You can argue that multiple Pro Bowl appearances were harder for old-time quarterbacks to achieve, because careers were shorter, but Brees is only 32, and we are giving him zero credit for what he might accomplish in the next decade.

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Counting Super Bowls and all-star appearances is a rather simple-minded way of ranking quarterbacks. But we cannot use statistics, because Brees blows the field away. He has the highest career completion percentage in history of any quarterback with over 3,000 pass attempts. He just passed Montana for 10th on the all-time touchdown list. Brees, Peyton Manning and Tom Brady are carving the record book up in unequal thirds, or at least all the parts of the record book that Favre didn’t shred by trying to play until the sun went nova. Give Brees five more modest seasons in the 3,000-yard, 20-touchdown range (and account for Brady's having similar production), and Brees will retire among the top five quarterbacks in every meaningful category.

And despite our “watered-down” times, Brees’ totals will stick -- other than Brady, other quarterbacks in Brees’ age group (Tony Romo, Eli Manning, and the like) are thousands of yards and many touchdowns behind.

Brees lacks an MVP award, but he has a shelf full of everything else: the Bert Bell Award, Offensive Player of the Year, Comeback Player of the Year, Super Bowl MVP and the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award, which acknowledges community service as well as on-field success. This is not the résumé of a borderline Hall of Fame candidate; it is overwhelming evidence of greatness, a slam dunk that is only going to rattle backboards even harder after a few more seasons like the past five.