Troy Aikman on cold take about Patrick Mahomes: It wasn’t pointed at Chiefs QB
ESPN broadcaster Troy Aikman’s mentions on X blew up following the Chiefs’ 25-22 overtime victory against the 49ers in Super Bowl LVIII.
It wasn’t because of anything Aikman had written or said on Super Bowl Sunday. It was because Chiefs fans were responding to a 2019 message on Twitter (which is now X).
Aikman had not liked that the Athletic noted Mahomes was putting up career numbers that were on pace to dwarf Aikman’s. So he wrote: “Talk to me when he has 33% of my Super Bowl Titles.”
Chiefs fans were more than happy to point out that Mahomes now has as many Super Bowl championships as Aikman.
A Dallas Morning-News story said Aikman was asked about the social-media reaction while on Sportsradio 96.7 FM. Aikman said the reason for that 2019 message on X was to call out the focus on statistics.
“It rubbed me the wrong way just because, you know, we’re at a time where we point to players’ greatness by numbers,” Aikman said, per the Morning News. “We’ll see, hey, this guy has scored a touchdown in each of the last 12 games and you know, who cares?”
Aikman continued: “I mean, that’s what (Mahomes is) there to do. And so it was never, it was never pointed at Patrick. And I never doubted for a minute that he could win a championship. And he’d already won league MVP. I mean, he had already kind of proven what he could do in the league.”
While some believe Aikman’s message didn’t age well, he argued the opposite was true because the conversation is about how many Lombardi Trophies the Chiefs have won instead of Mahomes’ personal statistics.
“I mean, there’s a lot of quarterbacks in this league that put up good yards this year that didn’t win a championship, but nobody cares,” Aikman said, per the newspaper. “And that was really my point. And Patrick, he would agree with all of that.”
