The Chiefs will travel to New York to in Week 4 of the 2023 season to take on the Jets, who now just so happen to employ quarterback Aaron Rodgers.
As Kansas City Chiefs fans, we’ve had the luxury of watching many elite matchups between Patrick Mahomes and other top-level quarterbacks around the NFL. We’ve seen Mahomes and Tom Brady battle six times, Josh Allen five times, and Joe Burrow four times—the same amount of games Mahomes has run into Lamar Jackson. Justin Herbert gets a double dose of Mahomes every season. The missing matchup that we’ve been robbed of twice now has been Mahomes squaring off against four-time MVP Aaron Rodgers.
In 2019, a season where the Chiefs and Packers both finished as the No. 2 seed in their respective conferences and made it to conference championships with the Chiefs going on to win Super Bowl 54, we were supposed to see Mahomes vs Rodgers Volume 1. Instead, Mahomes was rehabbing a dislocated kneecap, and we were robbed. In 2021 we were set to again get Mahomes vs Rodgers Volume 1 in the middle of the regular season, but when Aaron Rodgers tested positive for COVID leading in the matchup, we were yet again robbed.
While there is plenty of time for us to be robbed yet again of seeing these two future Hall of Famers taking the field against each other, we at least have a different setting to enjoy the game in. Sunday Night Football in New York (er, New Jersey) actually sounds like the perfect stage to finally digest a battle of two of the all-time greats, but which version of this matchup will we actually be getting in Week 4?
The best version of Mahomes vs. Rodgers arguably would have taken place in the matchup in 2019. Mahomes was coming off of an MVP season and near Super Bowl berth in his first year as a starter in 2018 and on a torrid streak to start the 2019 campaign before the knee injury heard ’round the Kingdom sidelined him temporarily. Rodgers was on his way to another great season as a Packer, but preparing to launch two consecutive MVP campaigns in the two seasons to follow. They were at the top of their games. To say that one is still at that level of play now would be a no-brainer, to say both are is something that will undoubtedly be debated in the weeks to come.
All we’ve gotten to see them actually compete in has been a televised two-man scramble in Las Vegas last June in The Match. Rodgers disgustingly teamed up with Tom Brady to take down the pairing of Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen. They only played 12 holes, which is a weird thing in itself, but Mahomes carried Allen for 11 of them until Rodgers had the audacity to hit a walk-off bending putt on the 12th to win it for the old dogs. Even the clutch gene of Patrick Mahomes couldn’t cancel out the Josh Allen heartbreak factor.
Back to football. Rodgers may not have had one of his more prolific seasons in what was presumably his last as a Packer in 2022 from either a statistical standpoint nor did it play out in his favor when it came to wins on the field. The Packers missed the playoffs and we got to experience another offseason soap opera between Rodgers and his now-former team. But considering that happened on the heels of back-to-back MVPs, we have to be cautious with how much weight we put on last season.
Mahomes, on the other hand, had one of the greatest seasons by a quarterback in the history of the NFL in 2022 on the way to his second MVP award, second Super Bowl MVP, and second Super Bowl championship. It was a revenge tour for Mahomes and the Chiefs that saw them go wire-to-wire as the league’s best team and a season that cemented Mahomes as the league’s hands-down best in the business.
Is the version of the matchup that we’re getting in 2023 going to be one that lives up to the hype we rightfully paid the duel in years past? That will ultimately depend on several on-field variables. How will Rodgers gel as a member of the New York Jets – will the offensive weapons and promising defense that the Jets sport create a mammoth with Rodgers at QB? Will the Chiefs’ new receiving corps and revamped defense improve on their Herculean effort from 2022 and get even better in 2023, or will we see regression after a dominant season?
Those questions remain to be answered, as do off-the-field questions for each quarterback. I won’t speculate much on what Mahomes has going on off the field out of respect for the family, but Rodgers’s extracurriculars I will certainly ponder. Are the Jets at risk of Rodgers realizing that we’re all just small specks on a giant rock in an endless void? Will another darkness retreat or ayahuasca journey open his mind and spirit’s eyes to see that football is ultimately an irrelevant vice that plagues a society so far out of touch with its inner self that he walks away altogether? What does it even really mean to keep score or touch down, man? Lombardi is a person, too.
Who knows, hopefully, both are at their peak and this is an early matchup of two 3-0 playoff-bound AFC contenders. That would be the best version we could possibly hope for, and we all should. The fact that we’ve missed out on this historic matchup twice already makes this one that is certainly due, both for the competitors on the field and the fans in the stands and watching from home.