Who is the best basketball player of all time? The best quarterback? The best athlete?

These questions are some of the most heavily debated in sports. This year, ALLCITY set out to answer them.

Over the course of 10 days, we conducted polling of Diehard sports fans across the country on a number of different categories. The vote garnered 535 responses.

Every day this week, we’ll reveal top-five lists in the following categories:

• Monday: The best basketball player of all time
• Tuesday: The best quarterback to ever take the field
• Wednesday: The best overall athlete ever
• Thursday: The biggest, baddest villains in Philadelphia sports history
• Friday: The best uniforms ever worn by an Philly team

We’ll also reveal how PHLY Diehards and staff voted on these categories and how they differ from the national results. For transparency, our methodology is listed at the end of this article.

So is the G.O.A.T. Debate officially settled? You be the judge.

BEST BASKETBALL PLAYER OF ALL TIME

The G.O.A.T. of basketball debate is seemingly settled…

Michael Jordan took the title in our vote by a pretty wide margin. He received 325 first-place votes while LeBron James earned just 67. At spots three and four, Kobe Bryant and Wilt Chamberlin were separated by just 0.2% of the point share, while Kareem Abdul-Jabbar rounded out the top five.

CHGO Diehards made up 37% of the entire voting pool, which could have swayed the result in Jordan’s favor. Did the voters get it right?

PHLY Diehard results

Diehards in Philly saw the vote a bit differently. These were the results:

1. Michael Jordan
2. LeBron James
3. Wilt Chamberlain
4. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
5. Julius Erving
   
   PHLY voters mostly know ball, but clearly some home town cooking with the great Dr. J cracking the top 5 list and garnering 12 first place votes!

BEST QB OF ALL-TIME

Diehards anointed Tom Brady at the G.O.A.T. quarterback, a title he earned in a landslide with 293 first-place votes. Joe Montana and Peyton Manning are separated on the list by the thinnest of margins – their point share percentage appears identical, but Montana earned three more points.

Patrick Mahomes and John Elway round out the list. In total, Diehards listed 231 different names on the best QB list, but these five rose above the rest.

PHLY Diehard results

Once again, the PHLY Diehards’ list had a local flair. These are the results:

1. Tom Brady
2. Joe Montana
3. Peyton Manning
4. Patrick Mahomes
5. Dan Marino

Amongst the PHLY Diehard vote, Tom Brady ran away with the most 1st place votes receiving 111 first place votes and the next closest was Joe Montana with 10 first place votes. Clear that Brady ran away with the G.O.A.T. crown in this exercise.

PHLY Staff results

1. Tom Brady
2. Peyton Manning
3. Joe Montana
4. Patrick Mahomes
5. John Elway

Who had the better list, the Diehard or the staff? All comes down to Marino vs. Elway for the final spot. Pecking order of Montana vs. Manning is a classic new school vs. old school debate, with perhaps some recency bias in the staff voting results. Let us know in the comments below who had the better list! One glaring observation is the lack of Nick Foles on the list! Blasphemy.

Here’s a futher breakdown of the results from Round 2 of Rank Week at ALLCITY!

BEST ATHLETE OF ALL TIME

Once again, Michael Jordan tops one of our G.O.A.T. lists, this time for the honor of best athlete. Jordan received the most first-place votes among ALLCITY Diehards.

In total, voters listed 529 different athletes. The top-five on this list earned 2,680 points, which is 33.7% of the total point capture.

PHLY Diehards Results

1. Wayne Gretzky
2. Bo Jackson
3. Michael Jordan
4. LeBron James
5. Michael Phelps

Gotta say, I think the PHLY Staff dominated the Diehards in this voting category…

PHLY Staff

1. Michael Jordan
2. Muhammad Ali
3. Lionel Messi
4. Michael Phelps
5. LeBron James

Jamie Lynch’s take: I think there’s some OBVIOUS omissions from a potential top 5. Let’s start with Bo Jackson, no doubt a FREAK athlete, but doesn’t Deion “Prime Time” Sanders professional career(s) eclipse Bo’s off simple longevity? I digress. Serena Williams I think is deserving of being on this list, the greatest women’s professional athlete of all-time IMHO. Tiger Woods? He changed the sport of golf forever & is likely the greatest golfer the world’s ever seen. Then you could mention a Jackie Robinson who was a freak athlete who dominated hoops, football, track & field AND baseball.

Who do you think staff AND Diehards missed off their list? Let us know below in the comment section!

Methodology and quality controls

• Rankings used a 5–1 points system: five points for first place through one point for fifth place.
• Spelling, capitalization, obvious shorthand, and name variants were normalized before scoring.
• Team, color, era, alternate, and home/away uniform descriptions were consolidated into consistent market-specific labels.
• When the same final answer appeared more than once within one ranked question, it counted once at its highest placement; lower repeats were discarded.
• In a published uniform Top 5, a general team-only bucket was omitted when a specific uniform for that same team was also listed. If a general bucket stood alone, it displayed as the team name without “Unspecified.”
• Tied point totals share the same numerical rank. Display order then uses first-place votes, ballot mentions, and alphabetical order.
• ALLCITY point totals reconcile exactly to the sum of the five markets, with zero formula errors in the final workbook.

Agree with the results? Disagree? Let us know on X, Instagram, or Facebook @PHLY_Sports.