It is one of the best lines from “The Wire,” one of the best shows in television history, the one from Omar about how it you’re coming for the king, you best not miss. Josh Allen and the Bills have come for the kings of pro football, the Chiefs, before in the month of January. And have missed, you may have noticed. But they keep coming, against Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce and Andy Reid and Chris Jones and an all-time great defensive coordinator named Steve Spagnuolo. Now here they come again, in Kansas City this time, with a Super Bowl on the line.
It’s a well-established fact that the Bills can beat the Chiefs. Just not in the playoffs. They were up three points once with just 13 seconds left, and even that was too much time to give to Mahomes after Sean McDermott, the Bills coach, made the boneheaded decision to kick ball deep instead of squib it to kill maybe half of that time.
A year ago, of course, they finally had the Chiefs in Buffalo. Still could not take them out. The Chiefs beat Lamar Jackson and the Ravens in Baltimore the week after that, and then won their third Super Bowl in four years. So Allen and the Bills were still looking for the first Bills trip to the Super Bowl since the ’90s, when they lost four big games in a row.
Now Allen, one of the star quarterbacks of his time, once again tries to get by the one guy — Mahomes — that he hasn’t been able to get by, and Lamar Jackson hasn’t been able to get by. There is all of this amazing young talent at the position in pro football; all this amazing quarterback talent on display in these two conference championships. Allen is going to win the MVP or Jackson is going to win another MVP and if we held another vote today for that award, and you see where the Commanders are and where they were before Jayden Daniels got to Washington, and wonder how anybody could be more valuable, for this one season, than Daniels has been.
But it is Patrick Mahomes who remains the headliner. He’s still king until somebody knocks him off. We heard all year about how the Chiefs were just scraping by and he was scraping by and there was so much noise about all that, you almost started to forget that Mahomes and the Chiefs lost exactly one game this season — to the Bills, don’t you know — when they had all their players on the field.
Now they try to give themselves a chance to be the only team in history to win three Super Bowls in a row. The Steelers of the ’70s didn’t do it and the 49ers didn’t do it after them and neither did the Cowboys. Tom Brady and the Patriots never did. But here are Mahomes and the Chiefs, two wins away now, up against the Bills team that beat them in November. This is January. This time the money is on the table. We all know what has happened with Mahomes and these Chiefs when the money has been on the table in the past.
And as great a coach as Andy Reid is, and he is one of the very best of all times in the NFL, and even with Kelce being one of the best tight ends to ever play and with the way Spagnuolo’s hungry-dogs defense has stepped it up in championship games and in Super Bowl games, what has ultimately set this team apart is Mahomes, who may someday end up being called the greatest quarterback of them all.
Again: We talk so much about how talent rich the NFL is right now with young quarterbacks. It sure is. And yet: There is exactly one active quarterback under the age of 35 who has won the Super Bowl. That would be Mahomes who, if he gets another one this season, will have won four before he turns 30. Brady didn’t win his fourth — on his way to seven in all because of a remarkable finishing kick with the Patriots and then the Bucs — until he was 37 years old.
Brady used to be the gold standard. Now Mahomes is. He doesn’t have the numbers this season that Allen had, nor the video-game numbers that Jackson had. He didn’t come close to being the dazzling presence on a football field that Daniels was for the Commanders. All he did during the regular season is what he has done again and again in the playoffs:
When he had to take his team down the field to win the game, that is exactly what he did, even as people kept wringing their hands and clutching their pearls over how close so many of those victories were.
There’s an expression from golf that covers what the Chiefs did on their way to 15-2:
Not how, but how many.
The magic man at this time of year, for the past several years, has been him. The Bills go up against him — and that — in Kansas City. They knocked off Jackson and the Ravens last Sunday and now try to do the same to Mahomes and Reid and them, just on the road this time. Allen gets another chance to finally get his team past Mahomes’ team, one that isn’t all that terribly far from having made it to seven Super Bowls in a row. Oh, sure. They were that close to beating Joe Burrow and the Bengals in one AFC championship game and Brady and the Patriots in another, only losing that one to the Patriots because Dee Ford lined up just barely offsides before a play on which Brady threw the interception that would have clinched the victory for the Chiefs.
If the Bills can win this game, it will feel the way it would have back in the ’90s if the Knicks of that time were finally able to get past Michael Jordan. And would prevent Mahomes’ Chiefs from getting their shot at doing something that Michael’s Bulls did twice, their shot at winning three titles in a row.
Allen is a star, without question. Lamar Jackson is a huge star. Jayden Daniels has been a shooting star all season long, and then again in the playoffs against first the Bucs, and then the Lions. But the biggest star of this sport is still Patrick Mahomes. Others keep hanging numbers. He keeps hanging with the Lombardi Trophy.
Still the king. Here come the Bills again. Trying not to miss this time, in what has so often been Patrick Mahomes’ time of year in pro football.
EASY TO ROOT FOR THIS AARON, RYAN DAY SURE GOT SMART IN A HURRY & TURNOVERS DECIDE PLAYOFF GAMES …
Aaron Glenn is the right man to coach the Jets at this time, and not just because he played for them, and honorably, once.
He is someone for whom it will be very easy to root come next September.
But he has to know, and Jets fans have to know, that turning this thing around will be like turning around the Intrepid.
At least the Yankees tried their very hardest to keep Juan Soto before he walked out the door, which is more than you can say about the Giants and Saquon Barkley.
We don’t win a lot of titles around here any longer, but you have to say this about the big city:
We lead the league in guys named Aaron.
And that ought to count for something.
It would have been a lot more meaningful to have two Knicks make the starting lineup for the All-Star Game if we still actually had an All-Star Game in pro basketball.
Ryan Day is a variation of the old Mark Twain line about his father:
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
All the Ohio State fans who wanted Day fired after the Michigan game must be similarly astonished at how much their coach has learned in the past two months.
It is still always thrilling in sports to see someone have the moment of his life in the biggest game of his life, and that is exactly what happened when Will Howard threw that 56-yard completion to Jeremiah Smith on the 3rd-and-11 play that closed out Notre Dame.
I know, I know, speaking with the media is part of the gig for bigtime athletes, win or lose.
But sometimes, to paraphrase Captain Barbossa in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” the rules about that need to be more like guidelines.
Seriously, what did everybody want Mark Andrews to say after he dropped that two-point conversion at the end of Bills vs. Ravens?
By the way?
Here is something of which Lamar Jackson was once again reminded in that game:
You turn the ball over, you generally lose, even if you do take your team down the field at the end.
Joe Montana played four Super Bowls, won them all, and in those game threw 11 touchdown passes again zero interceptions.
In nine Super Bowl games, Tom Brady threw just six interceptions.
And you know what happened when Brady fumbled the ball away, against the Eagles?
That became one of the Super Bowls he lost.
And in the two Super Bowls the Giants got off Brady and the Patriots, Eli Manning threw just one interception.
You know why his brother Peyton doesn’t have three Super Bowls instead of just two?
Because Peyton crushed the Colts with that fourth quarter interception against the Saints in Miami one time.
Man oh man, Uncle Steve Cohen and David Stearns were a lot sweeter on Pete Alonso on the night of Oct. 3 in Milwaukee than they appear to be now.
