How Mahomes and His AFC Contemporaries Are Generating Déjà Vu

Now that the NFL has gone from the Aaron Rodgers of old to an old Aaron Rodgers, the Super Bowl’s future seems to revolve around Patrick Mahomes and everyone else. In the AFC, most agree that the top tier of the rest includes Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, and Joe Burrow.

Thanks to Mahomes, those three are desperately fighting to avoid the ever-never question fans ask at bars: Who’s the best player you ever saw that never won a Super Bowl? It's remarkably familiar to what the NBA experienced in the not-too-distant past.

“We have this conversation in basketball all the time,” said former Super Bowl winner Ryan Clark on Tuesday’s edition of Get Up. “The AFC is what the NBA used to be with Michael Jordan, because of Patrick Mahomes, because of Andy Reid.

“How many guys are we going to be like, ‘You're like Patrick Ewing, you're like Reggie Miller, you're like Charles Barkley,’? That's what we're seeing with these quarterbacks. … It's about which one of them becomes the first guy to win a Super Bowl.”

In the postseason, Mahomes is a combined 6-1 against those three AFC rivals. He’s 4-0 against Allen, 1-0 against Jackson and 1-1 against Burrow. And once Jordan finally overcame the Bad Boy Detroit Pistons in 1991, he enjoyed similar dominance over Ewing, Miller and Barkley.

Jordan’s string of NBA titles ended when Ewing and the New York Knicks overcame the Chicago Bulls in the 1994 playoffs. Hakeem Olajuwon and the Rockets won the crown that year.

It was also the year Jordan opted to dip his size-13 cleats into the world of professional baseball. Mahomes played baseball at Texas Tech and currently owns a share of the Kansas City Royals. Should the AFC hope the Chiefs’ quarterback steps away and becomes a player-owner, giving those other teams a chance?

“No,” said Mike Greenberg. “Look, we made this analogy last year, and the players I used were Karl Malone, Patrick Ewing, and Charles Barkley. In any order you want to put them, they're three of the greatest players ever.

“They were three first-ballot Hall of Famers, and all three of them have in common the misfortune of having had their prime at the same time as Michael Jordan, so none of them won a championship.”

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