THERE ARE TIMES as a sports fan when you just know what you’re watching.
Football fans knew it when Diego Maradona turned the English defence like a little eel at the Estadio Azteca in 1986 and most of them have learned it to be true of Lionel Messi at countless junctures over the past 15 years.
Some basketball fans felt it somewhere along Bill Russell’s unparalleled line of 11 NBA titles with the Boston Celtics, others when Wilt ‘The Stilt’ Chamberlain dropped 100 points for Philly on the New York Knicks in 1962. Then came Michael Jordan’s ‘Shot’ in Game 6 of the 1998 Finals.
In golf, it was true of Jack Nicklaus and while his record of 18 majors may never be touched, a lot of people lucky enough to have witnessed both will tell you they know what they saw when Tiger Woods dominated his sport throughout the first decade of the 21st century.
At 27, Antoine Dupont already reeks of it in rugby. Max Verstappen, a year his junior, is reeling off F1 drivers championships with a relentlessness that suggests he’ll get there. Closer to home, it’s been earmarked with David Clifford since he did wreck to the 2016 Hogan Cup with St Brendan’s College and there will likely arrive a moment in the next couple of years of his career when it becomes the consensus truth.
The criteria that constitute a sportsperson becoming The GOAT are fast and loose. Tenure and trophy count can become points of obsession among traditionalists. For others, The Greatest of All Time mantle is merely a measure of talent, and it can belong to an athlete who burned quickly but brightly, elevating their sport to an unprecedented space at a given point in time.
It can be just a vibes thing, too: a solid indicator that you’re watching somebody who belongs in the GOAT debate, at least, is that they cause you to message into your group chat with expletive-ridden excitement even though you know everybody in there is already watching — and yours won’t even be the first message.
Patrick Mahomes is that guy in the NFL. He brings involuntary noises out of people who don’t have skin in the game. As a sheer sports entertainer, he is in The Messi Bracket.
The Kansas City Chiefs quarterback, 28, will tonight chase his third Super Bowl ring in what will be his fourth appearance in American sport’s biggest show.
In Mahomes’ six-year career to date, his Chiefs have played in the AFC Championship game — ostensibly the NFL semi-final — six times. Their worst outcome has been an overtime defeat (twice).
It has helped, of course, that the Chiefs are led by one of the best head coaches in the modern game, Andy Reid, and that they traditionally wield a defence which gets the ball back in Mahomes’ hands both quickly and in auspicious field position.
But Mahomes’ generational greatness has been rubber-stamped this season for the simple fact that he has led the Chiefs to Las Vegas while being surrounded by a receiving core which has oscillated between incompetent and genuinely idiotic.
The NFL’s most poignant love story in 2024 involved Taylor Swift’s boyfriend but not the 14-time Grammy winner. Mahomes and his league-best tight-end Travis Kelce must have felt it was the two of them against the world as they dragged the Chiefs into the playoffs and beyond, with running back Isiah Pacheco third-wheeling in support.
Mahomes and Kelce this year broke Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski’s all-time post-season record for touchdown combinations between a QB and tight-end with 16. They’ve played together for just over half the time for which Brady and ‘Gronk’ linked up at the New England Patriots and, later, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
It’s Brady, however, who holds the record that matters — and he needs two hands to do so.
If Mahomes can steer the Chiefs past the San Francisco 49ers tonight, just as he did four years ago, it still won’t take him even halfway towards Brady’s seven Super Bowl rings.
Brady’s status as his sport’s unequivocal greatest can be further illustrated by the fact that the Chiefs’ opponents tonight, San Fran, attempted to lure him out of his second retirement during the off-season just gone. Brady was 46 and the Niners wanted to parachute him in as their starter for 2023/24.
Head coach Kyle Shanahan went as far as informing his incumbent QB, Brock Purdy (then sporting an arm injury that made him a doubt for the start of the season), that he was pursuing Brady and that if Brady signed on the dotted line, Purdy would be relegated to understudy for the year.
“And I was like, ‘Yeah, he’s the GOAT. I get it,’” Purdy recently recounted of an undoubtedly uncomfortable conversation with his boss.
In the end, Brady declined the chance to potentially compete for an eighth ring. Purdy, with a rocket up him, produced an MVP-contender season as he steered a star-studded Niners offence towards Vegas.
The previously unheralded Niners QB — who still lives with a roommate and currently earns under a million dollars per year (Mahomes’ contract is worth $45m per year) — will first have designs on chasing down his Chiefs counterpart tonight.
As for whether Mahomes can get close to Brady’s seven titles is another matter altogether. It may simply come down to longevity.
Brady’s success was never predicated upon a natural athleticism. He instead boasted a perfect right arm, extraordinary periphery vision, teak toughness, and an incorrigible appetite for competition into his 40s.
Mahomes is infinitely more mobile and elusive than Brady but he has already begun to refine his game, rushing less and relying more on his arm, which rivals Brady’s for length and accuracy.
And the reality is that the Chiefs QB can do a lot of things in the passing game that even Brady could never do: he’s an assassin like the Patriots great but he’s equally an artist in his own image, routinely crafting plays off the cuff that aren’t even replicable in the Madden video game series.
Mahomes’ ability to read the game remains unrivalled among current quarterbacks and he’s Brady-tough, too: he effectively won both last year’s AFC Championship game and Super Bowl on one leg, and he doesn’t get hit enough to pick up the sorts of annoying injuries that can curtail a quarterback’s season, or even career.
But with all of that being said, Mahomes would have to win a Super Bowl every second year until he’s 38 just to pull level on rings with Brady.
Success tonight would put him on that average, but for Mahomes to get to seven, the Chiefs would have to sustain a dynasty worthy of eclipsing that of Bill Belichick’s Patriots — and their head coach Reid is currently 65.
In a team sport with so many moving parts, events may not align for Kansas City’s man under centre.
But perhaps like Tiger Woods to Jack Nicklaus, or like Michael Jordan to Bill Russell, titles will be thrown out the window in the meantime and we’ll just come to know that, in Patrick Mahomes, we’re watching the best to ever do it. Ultimately, that will be up to you to decide.
For now, we can all embrace watching him trying to get there, group chats at the ready.