Thursday, March 28

Mahomes and Allen show that the future of the NFL is in good hands


For charlotte savage
FOX sports columnist

No one lost the AFC divisional round game between the buffalo bills and the Kansas City Chiefs.

The Chiefs just won.

Patrick Mahomes and his Kansas City cronies secured the win with an overtime touchdown before Josh Allen and his rowdy Buffalo Bills could even get their hands on the ball.

Thanks to the NFL’s overtime rule that the first touchdown wins, and since the entire game had been a shootout, it was clear that the team that won the toss would advance to the AFC Championship. The Chiefs got lucky on the coin toss, so Mahomes marched down the field, found tight end Travis Kelce in the end zone, and the rest is history.

Kansas City is on track for a fourth conference championship in as many years.

“They made one more play than us, and that was it,” a very somber Allen said in his postgame news conference. He sat in the depths of the Chiefs’ stadium, broadcasting to reporters through a computer screen.

It was fitting that his image was only 2D, thanks to COVID protocols, because Allen was a flat man. He doesn’t want to go back to feeling the way he felt at the end of the last two seasons, when the Chiefs knocked him and his team out of the playoffs. Allen went on to say that he would take what he had learned on Sunday and use it to make sure he didn’t experience those emotions for the third year in a row.

It was a feeling that Bills coach Sean McDermott described as “sick to the stomach.”

But it was unclear what Allen might learn from the experience. Because the Bills seemed to do everything they could. Even Kelce, in his gleeful postgame press conference, said, “He was the last one on the ball who was going to win that game.”

Allen was transcendent, as was Mahomes. So were his companions. Tyreek Hill, Jerick McKinnon, Travis Kelce, Mecole Hardman and every other player in Kansas City put their bodies on the line to work hard for the home crowd. And that was after star defender Tyrann Matthieu left the game with a head injury early in the first quarter.

The entire Bills team was also on fire. For example, wide receiver Gabriel Davis caught FOUR TOUCHDOWNS. That’s a playoff record. No man had ever done that in a playoff game.

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It felt unfair that this matchup wasn’t the AFC Championship and, indeed, wasn’t the Super Bowl. That might have been the best football game I’ve ever seen in my entire life. The final result was 42-36, and it was more like a tennis match than a football match. The Bills would score, then the Chiefs would score, then the Bills would score, then the Chiefs would score.

The game was tied 14-14 at the half, which set up the final two quarters to be one heck of a battle, with the kind of touchdowns, scrambles and passes that make you scream “WHAT!?” on your TV and say “I can’t believe this” over and over again. The icing on the cake was when Allen led his team on an 18-play final drive that resulted in a go-ahead touchdown with 13 seconds remaining.

Thirteen seconds, however, is too many seconds when Patrick Mahomes is on the other side of the ball. In another “WHAT?!” moment, he marched down the field, putting his team in field goal range, and kicker Harrison Butker nailed one through the studs (luckily for KC, considering he missed an extra point and field goal earlier).

The Chiefs sent the beautiful chaotic game into overtime and then beat the Bills with that Kelce touchdown.

While this game was amazing, there have been a lot of amazing games in NFL history, so maybe I shouldn’t say this was the best I’ve ever seen. But one thing I can say for sure is that this entire divisional round was the best ever.

Last weekend was “The Berenstain Bears and too much good football.” By the time the Chiefs won, he had already forgotten that the Bengals narrowly beat the Titans in Tennessee, that the Niners knocked out Aaron Rodgers’ Packers in snowy Lambeau and that Tom Brady had come back to life as the Undertaker, only to lose. for a field goal at the Rams’ home.

When the last game of the weekend started, I felt like I’d been on a roller coaster after eating ice cream.

And feeling queasy was a tough place to start with this game, because if Rams-Bucs was a rollercoaster ride, Bills-Chiefs was the second night of a Vegas bachelorette party for that friend who always does too much. After that game, all of us Americans have to buy new cell phones, pay off our credit cards, and commit to green juice every morning for the next two weeks. This game was like the scene in “Matilda” where the evil principal makes the boy Bruce Boggtrotter eat an entire chocolate cake in front of the school.

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We’re blessed with too many good things, a gluttonous amount of overstimulation, which leads me to believe we’ll pay for all that fun with a Super Bowl with a final score of 10-3.

But as exhausting as these games were to watch (let alone play, I imagine), they were also refreshing. They felt like an ice bath. Rodgers and Brady are no longer in the mix. We don’t have to talk about their legacies. We don’t have to talk about their future or the beginning of the end every time those gray-bearded guys take the field for a game or the stage for a press conference in the run-up to the Super Bowl.

Ending this weekend with a game between two of the most talented young quarterbacks (one who already has a championship ring) was like turning a page. The sports media has spent so many years (21 in the case of Brady, 17 in the case of Rodgers) talking about the transcendent abilities of Brady and Rodgers that it was a real pleasure to feast on somewhat fresher faces.

Although Allen and Mahomes have already amply demonstrated their athletic ability, Sunday felt different. They exhibited a true mastery of their craft and growth in their styles of play. Allen threw balls far instead of being sacked for 15-yard losses, and Mahomes entered the final 13 seconds with the steely determination of a leader who knows without a doubt he’s not about to mess anything up.

They seemed to reach new levels in this one. Afterward, Allen said the matchup had “video game numbers.”

But it wasn’t just the numbers. It was also that Allen has a real cannon for an arm and can defy gravity. On Sunday, he threw a 75-yard touchdown pass that looked as easy as throwing a piece of paper into a trash can. And is that Mahomes is a shapeshifter who can bend space and time. He slipped out of the rigging and tossed sideways like he was throwing a Frisbee at a barbecue.

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The most beautiful aspect of this game is that the Chiefs will face the Bengals.

Is that team as complete as Kansas City? No. The Bengals haven’t been to the AFC Championship since 1988. But Joe Burrow is on his way to becoming as much of a physical denier as Allen and Mahomes. He has the “it” factor. His team will be an underdog heading into Sunday’s game at Arrowhead, but Burrow is quickly entering “don’t count that guy out” territory.

What a future we have in this league. There is incredible talent in the AFC; don’t forget how amazing the Chargers’ Justin Herbert is (just like Allen, he lost by the skin of his teeth a few weeks ago).

The last guys standing in the NFC aren’t bad either: Jimmy Garoppolo might not have the same talent as these youngsters, but he’s great at playing musical chairs and somehow grabbing a seat, which has to count for something (well , maybe it’s wide receiver Deebo Samuel that really counts, but I digress).

And in the last two weeks, Matthew Stafford has shown that maybe a change of scenery makes all the difference. He got his first two playoff wins in his first season with the Rams after leaving the Lions, the team that drafted him in 2009.

The point is that these NFL postseason stories and faces are something new, football is played on another planet and the product on the field is as good as ever.

It’s a shame someone has to lose, but it’s beautiful to be able to say that.

Charlotte Wilder is a general columnist and co-host of “The Popular Sports Podcastfor FOX Sports. She is honored to represent the constantly neglected Boston area in sports media, loves talking to sports fans about her feelings, and is happiest eating a hot dog at a ballpark or nachos at a stadium Follow her on Twitter @TheWilderThings.


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