Mr. Popularity

FOR THOSE OF us here in New England, it's hard to imagine anybody more adored than Tom Brady. He's got the three Super Bowl rings, the stack of beautiful girlfriends, the so-far perfect season, and that infuriating bone structure.

He is talented. He is humble. He is practically superhuman.

And he seems to have long outdistanced his closest football rival, Peyton Manning. Less obviously handsome, and with just one measly Super Bowl win, Manning, by all rights, should have receded into the distance behind New England's Golden Boy.

Except he hasn't. As Brady has racked up championships and magazine covers, Manning seems to have won something that eludes Brady: The rest of the country.

A Southern friend who recently moved here put it to me rather heartlessly: "You guys build your shrine to Tom Brady. But America loves Peyton Manning."

To put it in advertising terms, Brady and Manning are locked in a major brand war. In New England, Brady is just Tom, the selfless team leader who has worked extremely hard for his stardom. But elsewhere he is a different kind of celebrity - a godly untouchable who dates Gisele Bundchen, shows up on the cover of GQ, endured a scandalous breakup, and plays for a dominant team that got caught cheating.

Manning, meanwhile, has emerged as the affable, goofy everyman - a bit of a nerd, a guy who can make fun of himself. And his off-field popularity contest with Brady tells a story about America: We like winners. But we also like to relate to our winners, for them to be the kind of people in whom, despite their fame and the wealth, we can see a little of ourselves.

For proof of Brady's stratospheric ascent, take GQ magazine's recent list of the "50 most stylish men of the past 50 years." His company was improbable and staggering: Cary Grant, Elvis Presley, Marcello Mastroianni, Sean Connery, Miles Davis, the Kennedy brothers, George Clooney, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Marlon Brando, Richard Avedon, Robert Redford, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Malcolm X, Bob Dylan, Yves Saint-Laurent, and Beck. Among athletes, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Arnold Palmer, Jean-Claude Killy, and Bjorn Borg.

Brady was the only active sportsman. In the same issue, he was voted one of 15 men who "will change our future."

Amazingly, Tom Brady's biggest media fracas from this past winter - leaving his pregnant model girlfriend for a more globally famous model - started as a moral hurricane ("Will Tom do the right thing?") and then just blew over, seeming to recalibrate his stardom in the process. The tarnish on his halo had a whiff of old-Hollywood scandal. It was Eddie Fisher leaving Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor. It might have been unseemly, but it was glamorous all the same. It was also official: Brady wasn't just a quarterback anymore. He was George Clooney.

Just last week, he capped a media blitz by unveiling an exclusive new line of Movado watches - "The Tom Brady Automatic Chronograph"! - at a glitzy downtown Boston event. The watches cost $2,500 each.

And Peyton Manning?

Turn on the television and there he is, in an ad, happily cutting short an interview to help connect a TV cable.

If Brady, with his Super Bowl success and jealous-making passer rating, is the quarterback's quarterback, Manning, with his average puss, gangly carriage, and easy self-deprecation, is the people's quarterback. He'll hook up your television and watch it on your sofa.

It's not hard to understand why advertisers and consumers have fallen for Manning. He's made himself adorable, a dorky suburban dad who's more of a football fan than an NFL star. In one of his DirecTV commercials, he pretends to bristle when the installer assumes he just wants the NFL package. "I'm into other things - foreign films, cooking shows," he says, before admitting what he really wants is to watch football.

Not only is his self-mockery disarming, he's the rare athlete for whom the camera doesn't add 10 pounds of self-consciousness. He has uncanny physical grace and sly comic timing - his stint hosting "Saturday Night Live" earlier this year should make him as regular a host as Tom Hanks and Alec Baldwin.

When Brady hosted the show, stiffly, a lot of jokes centered on how hot he is. He has the face of a movie star, but none of the charisma. (His affinity for models seems apt - he's essentially become one, too.) Manning doesn't have Brady's face, but he doesn't need it. His averageness and uncoolness are a kind of beauty.

It's Jaguar versus a Ford truck. Brady's the luxury brand, Manning the utility.

Their diverging popularity isn't quite a red-state/blue-state distinction, although that dynamic exists, too. It's partly the difference between Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts - gorgeously remote vs. accessible - and partly a kind of wine-beer split, with Brady playing to the pinot noir crowd.

The result is that Manning has exploded across the advertising world. According to a recent Sports Business Daily survey of 65 sports business and media executives, the only athlete more appealing to Americans than Peyton Manning is Tiger Woods. In the survey, Brady came in seventh.

Advertisers simply see Manning as more versatile. Sports marketer Rick Penque said in an e-mail interview that Manning - an "everyman," in contrast to Brady - was simply "more malleable to a greater range of brand campaigns."

Behind their different media images lies a rich irony. In his commercials and in his persona, Manning is just some dude, some average fan, who happens to be a superb quarterback. But in fact he comes from football royalty: his highly regarded father, Archie, threw for Ole Miss and then the New Orleans Saints. Manning grew up privileged, one of the most-watched college athletes in history, and seemed predestined for NFL greatness.

It's Brady whose rise to the top is astounding. He started as an athletic nobody, picked in the sixth round of the 2000 draft by the Patriots - who, at the time, were nothing to write home about. He entered a sports dynasty through the backdoor, replacing the injured Drew Bledsoe in the middle of a game. Today, as he stares out at you dreamily from his new print ads for Stetson cologne, it's easy to forget where he came from. In essence, Manning has stolen Brady's script, and Brady has assumed a mantle seemingly fated for Manning.

Manning's narrative swap isn't quite as extreme as the one George W. Bush concocted for himself - from preppy Andover cheerleader to folksy, down-home rancher - but it's evocative. When voters were asked why they liked Bush, a famously familiar answer was that they sensed they could knock back a cold one with him. By that yardstick, there's something presidential about Manning, too.

But it's Brady who, in the past, has mentioned running for elected office. He'd be running on a different model, someone to be envied, aspired to, and desired. In that sense, the Brady brand (cool, jet-setting, sexy, absolute success) has a whiff of perfection that doesn't really rouse people. It embodies what we can't be.

If you believe the advertising, Americans don't aspire to be Manning. We already are him. Manning is lovable, in part, because he seems to walk among us. His stardom is a matter of how relatable he is. And irrespective of what happens on the football field, in that sense, he's got Brady beat.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.