Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes is chasing both Tom Brady and history — and he knows it
Tom Brady is 18 years older than Patrick Mahomes and five Super Bowls more accomplished, so it is patently absurd to compare them. But here are three counterpoints:
1. What fun is sports if we can’t talk about the patently absurd?
2. We know that Mahomes is so hyper-aware and motivated by higher goals that he is already designing a way to be the next GOAT.
3. When that discussion is had, Super Bowl LV will play an outsized role.
This is the NFL’s juiciest quarterback matchup ever, or at least since Super Bowl XXIV with Joe Montana and John Elway. Maybe we spend too much time talking about legacy at times, but this Super Bowl is dripping with it. Legacy everywhere you look. Legacy and protocols.
Brady is the greatest quarterback of all-time. Mahomes is the greatest quarterback of right now. They will be compared for generations — long after each man is retired, which, at Brady’s pace, might be around the same time. You might think you’re watching a football game. You’re actually watching legends being altered in real time, with commercial breaks.
Not that we need this little extra point, but we have it anyway: We know for certain that both men are competitively petty enough to care about all of this.
Brady is the most successful athlete of all-time in America’s biggest sports league. He remains internally motivated by being the 199th pick in a draft that happened TWENTY-ONE years ago. He is also intent on convincing the world that his success with the Patriots was more about him than Bill Belichick. This is a heck of a start.
Mahomes is a league MVP and Super Bowl MVP and drives a $350,000 Ferrari to work for a team that gave him a half-billion dollar contract. He is 25 years old. Nobody in league history — not Brady, not Marino, not Montana, not anyone — has been this good this young. Still, he openly mocks such egregious slights as (checks notes) being ranked among the four best football players in the world and being named All-Pro.
You’d have to be crazy to be motivated by these things. Brady and Mahomes are each that specific brand of crazy.
So, you don’t think Mahomes would take particular enjoyment in avenging his only playoff loss by beating the GOAT in his own stadium, and lending some credibility to his own GOAT case?
Conversely, you don’t think Brady might post another Bad Boy For Life video if he beat America’s quarterback in the Super Bowl?
This is going either of two ways. First, let’s imagine the Chiefs lose to the Bucs. That would mean Brady would have seven Super Bowl wins to Mahomes’ one, and have done it with two different franchises. He would have beaten Mahomes in an AFC Championship game and a Super Bowl. He would have won Super Bowls an almost unfathomable 19 years apart.
No matter how much more aesthetically pleasing and statistically impressive Mahomes is — and that gap is significant — football players, and quarterbacks in particular, are judged by Super Bowls.
And if Brady were to beat Mahomes at the age of 43, to be not just the only quarterback to beat Mahomes in the playoffs but to do it twice with a rematch unlikely, well, that is going to be tough to overcome. The arguments could be ended pretty effectively: Brady beat Mahomes twice in playoffs, once in Mahomes’ stadium and once in the Super Bowl, each time as an old man, so kindly move along.
Mahomes would return for the 2021 season as the best quarterback on the planet. But Brady would return as the GOAT, and have reason to believe that status would remain unchallenged for decades.
Now ... what if the Chiefs win?
Well, if we’re honest, it’ll still be a rough go for Mahomes to catch Brady. Six Super Bowl wins is so many Super Bowl wins. Six? Come on. That’s crazy. Joe Montana was the GOAT for a generation based on winning four.
Troy Aikman once tweeted that Mahomes should talk to him when he “has 33 percent of my Super Bowl Titles.” This was before Mahomes won last year’s Super Bowl MVP, and we mean no disrespect here to Aikman, who is an all-time legend.
But if Aikman ever gets cross with Brady, Brady could mention that he could lose the careers of Aaron Rodgers, Steve Young and Drew Brees in his couch cushions and still have as many Super Bowl wins as Aikman.
So, man. Six. That’s going to be tough.
But if the Chiefs beat the Bucs in this Super Bowl, it’s at least possible and, actually, Mahomes would have more Super Bowl wins at age 25 than Brady did.
He’d also be able to say he beat Brady in his own stadium in (likely) his last Super Bowl. Let’s just imagine — and even this is a little crazy — that Mahomes finishes his career with four or five Super Bowl wins.
Mahomes would have more impressive stats (particularly on a per-game basis), be remembered as helping change how football is played in a way Brady never did, and possess (again, likely, but you never know) final bragging rights.
Mahomes is fond of quite literally counting grudges on his hands — to 10 to mock Mitchell Trubisky’s draft selection ahead of his own, to four to mock the NFL Network ranking him behind Lamar Jackson, and two fingers on each hand to mock sharing second-team All-Pro honors with Buffalo’s Josh Allen.
Mahomes has a long way to go before he can count more Super Bowls than Brady on his hands, and he might have enough respect for an all-time great to not do that, anyway.
But if the Chiefs win this Super Bowl, he could count three head-to-head wins against Brady on one hand compared with two for Brady on the other.
It would be a start, at least.
This story was originally published January 29, 2021 at 5:00 AM.