Forget Tom Brady: We Should Have This Patrick Mahomes Debate Instead

The Patrick Mahomes legacy took a major beating Sunday night in one of the worst Super Bowl showings in recent memory.

Mahomes’ final line looks respectable — 21-of-37, 257 yards, three touchdowns — but he and the Kansas City Chiefs were taken to the woodshed. The threepeat was not meant to be, as Mahomes was left largely helpless in the Eagles’ 40-22 rout that wasn’t nearly as close as even that final score looked.

In hindsight, all of the Tom Brady comparisons feel silly. Brady remains in an entirely different stratosphere. As The Athletic’s Jeff Howe noted, at least Brady’s losses were competitive. Mahomes now has the bad side of two beatdowns on his resume. The Brady ship has sailed, at least for the next decade. Instead, the conversation we need to start having about Mahomes is whether he can surpass Joe Montana, the original greatest of all time.

Sure, if Mahomes and the Chiefs won their third consecutive title it would have put them in rarified air. But there still would have been a lot of ground to make up when trying to chase down Brady for greatest of all time status. For some reason, we insisted on having that debate when coming into this game — and now coming out of it — Brady had more than twice the number of championships Mahomes has.

Instead, we should be putting Mahomes’ accomplishments through the same ringer we put Brady’s before he left no doubt about his standing compared to Montana.

Montana’s bona fides have lost some luster over the years, largely because Brady was so freakishly good and accomplished so much that even his three Super Bowl losses have been explained away. Facts are facts, though. Montana’s 49ers in the 1980s went 4-0 in the big one with Montana playing his face off in each. Montana won Super Bowl MVP in three of the Niners’ four triumphs, and he never posted a QB rating below 100.0, a feat made even more impressive by the era in which he played.

Contrast that with Mahomes, who now has three Super Bowl appearances in which he posted a passer rating below 100, including Sunday night, and that number (95.3) would have been a lot worse if it weren’t for garbage time. Mahomes now has 10 Super Bowl touchdown passes and seven (!) interceptions. Montana never threw a Super Bowl interception. Brady, with 225 more passing attempts than Mahomes, threw fewer interceptions.

Mahomes is not yet 30, so there’s time left. Montana won two of his titles in his 30s (so did Brady … and then two more in his 40s because he’s a freak). And Mahomes does get some credit for already making the Super Bowl more times than Montana. The blemishes are hard to reconcile, though, especially the nature in which they happened. We probably have taken some of the Chiefs’ inevitability for granted, too. It’s hard to get back to this spot so often, and there’s merit in that.

But it’s also hard to win it when you get there, as Mahomes and the Chiefs were reminded in the harshest of ways Sunday night.