Patrick Mahomes and the NFL’s next great quarterback rivalry
By Jacob Harris
Which of the NFL’s young quarterbacks will rise to match Patrick Mahomes to form the NFL’s next great quarterback rivalry?
The quarterback rivalry is perhaps my favorite recurring storyline in professional football. They’re one of the most vibrant examples of sports entertainment in a league that rose to prominence on pageantry—from NFL Films romantically capturing the game and making it feel titanic, operatic, and artful, to Dick Ebersol’s Vince McMahon-ian vision that drove NBC Sports’ focus on pomp and circumstance and athletes’ personalities.
There’s something mythic about a great QB rivalry that is unmatchable in sports. Like most things that are mythic, it’s mostly artifice—after all, these are ultimately just adults being paid a lot of money to play a kids’ backyard game (albeit at the highest possible level)—and anything portrayed with such dramatic weight is soap opera trickery. But none of that matters, because football is at its best when competition meets performance art.
Since Peyton Manning’s retirement, the NFL has been woefully without a real QB rivalry to sink its sharply honed, mass-marketing teeth into. Aaron Rodgers is a draw by himself, but he’s never had a true rival. Drew Brees is breaking records, but he doesn’t have an arch-nemesis. Tom Brady lost his main enemy when Peyton Manning retired. So there’s a void—a dark, empty space in the football universe waiting to be occupied by two great QBs who bring the best out of each other.
Enter Patrick “Late-90s Matt Stone” Mahomes, the most talented of an uber-promising crop of young NFL quarterbacks. He’s only seven games into his career, but it’s difficult to imagine Mahomes being anything other than a transcendent talent going forward. Which of the NFL’s other young quarterbacks will prove to be the the Leno to his Letterman? The Coke to his Pepsi?
That rival will eventually reveal himself organically and render this piece even more arbitrary than it already is. But what is sports talk other than arbitrary? Allow me my moment.