Quarterback Future Shining Brightly in NFL Playoffs
As we wrote about last week, the future is bright at the quarterback position with a new era of passers taking the baton from their elders. The four quarterbacks scheduled to start on Championship Sunday are the youngest quartet since championship play began in 1970 (NFL-AFL merger).
Cincinnati’s Joe Burrow, Philadelphia’s Jalen Hurts, Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes, and San Francisco’s Brock Purdy will have an average age of 25 years and 98 days on Championship Sunday. That’s 133 days younger than the previous youngest foursome in 1996.
The headliner is Burrow-Mahomes IV.
Sunday will mark their fourth meeting and second-straight Championship Game matchup. The last time quarterbacks squared off in back-to-back Championship Games before their 28th birthday was in 1986-87 when John Elway and Bernie Kosar gave us a pair of legendary performances.
Mahomes has led the Kansas City Chiefs to a whopping five-straight AFC Championship Games. He will join the GOAT, Tom Brady, and Hall of Famer Ken Stabler as the only quarterbacks to start a Championship Game five years in a row, the first to do so before turning 28.
The Chiefs beat the Bengals 45-10 in Mahomes’s first start against the franchise, but that was before the dawn of the Burrow era in The Queen City. Since then, KC has dropped three straight to Cincy. Mahomes is 1-3 (.250) against the Bengals and 72-16 (.818) against everyone else.
Even though the quarterbacks aren’t on the field at the same time, it feels like Burrow has Mahomes’s number, doesn’t it?
In three starts against Kansas City, Burrow is 3-0 with 982 passing yards, eight touchdown passes, and one interception for a 121.0 passer rating.
The LSU product is also 3-0 on the road in the playoffs in his career and will become the first No. 1 overall pick to play in the Championship Game twice in his first three seasons. With a win, he’ll join Russell Wilson as the only quarterbacks with six postseason wins through three seasons.
Burrow is 5-1 in the playoffs, as the 2021-22 Bengals have matched the franchise’s previous postseason win total of five before they selected Burrow.
With all due respect to Josh Allen, Mahomes and Burrow are the class of the AFC, and this is the matchup we deserve. Unfortunately, Mahomes will be less than 100 percent.
Last week, the QB youth movement was most prominent in the AFC, but with elder statesman Dak Prescott (29 years old) and Daniel Jones (25) sent home, the NFC Championship Game will feature the youngest pair of starting quarterbacks in Championship Game history.
When the Philadelphia Eagles host the San Francisco 49ers, Hurts will be 24 years old and Purdy 23, the first time both starting passers in a Conference Championship Game were under the age of 25.
This will be their first meeting as pros, but not the first time they’ve started against each other. The two went head-to-head in 2019 when Hurts led his Oklahoma Sooners to a 42-41 win over Iowa State. The senior accounted for 341 total yards and five touchdowns, while Purdy threw five TDs and ran for a sixth while posting 337 total yards.
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