Sometimes you get a game like this and a matchup like this in pro football before you get to the big game. Sometimes you get one like we get in Buffalo on Sunday night when it is Josh Allen and the Bills going against Lamar Jackson and the Ravens. One MVP candidate against another. This is exactly what it used to feel like when it was Tom Brady going against Peyton Manning in their primes, even if neither Allen nor Jackson has won the biggest game yet.
Even in a weekend when we have Patrick Mahomes and Super Bowl quarterbacks like Matthew Stafford and the kid Jayden Daniels and last year’s hot kid C.J. Stroud — even with all that talent in these four games, the headliners are Allen and Jackson. And please remember that Mahomes might be well on his way to someday being called the best to ever play the position, which means even better than Brady.
The two of them have been the stars of this NFL season. Neither one of them has ever been better than they were across 17 regular season games and through their first postseason games. In so many ways, they are as physically talented as any of the great quarterbacks of the past. Allen plays like a young John Elway, just even bigger, running like a fast tight end when he pulls the ball down, and with all the arm strength in the world.
Lamar? Well, you know how it goes with him. He’s not the new anybody. He’s just Lamar.
Now both of them show up for a game like this, after seasons like these, with something other than their MVP candidacies in common:
They have as much to prove as they ever have in their heartbreak-kid postseason careers. Allen is still chasing his first Super Bowl appearance. Jackson, who has done everything in his dazzling career except win enough playoff games, is chasing his first Super Bowl. Allen has never been able to get past Mahomes. The Bills played the Chiefs at home one year ago and lost. Then Mahomes and the Chiefs went to Baltimore and beat the Ravens in the AFC championship game. It was still Patrick Mahomes’ ball, and both Allen and Jackson were still understudies.
But on Sunday night, in the glamour game of the entire pro football season, Allen’s team and Jackson’s team are balling against each other in Buffalo which, in so many ways, is the heartbreak capital of the entire sport because of those four straight Super Bowl losses in the early ’90s.
It’s never a one-on-one game between quarterbacks in football, of course. It’s not like Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain banging against each other in the low blocks, or even Bird vs. Magic when they’d sometimes end up guarding each other. But it’s going to feel like one-on-one like that in Buffalo when it’s Allen vs. Jackson.
Who should be the MVP for the regular season? I think it should be Allen, even with the video-game numbers Jackson has put into the books. And even though the Bills can run the ball when Allen doesn’t have the ball and the game in his hands, Jackson has Derrick Henry and Allen sure does not. They’ve both had a lot with which to work, no question. Lamar has just had more this season.
They have come all the way to a moment like this and a night like this from the same draft. That would be the 2018 NFL Draft, one of the most famous in New York football history because it’s the one in which the Giants took Saquon Barkley at No. 2 and the Jets took Sam Darnold at No. 3. Allen went No. 7 to the Bills that night. The Ravens didn’t select Jackson until making him the 32nd pick.
At this time when neither the Giants nor the Jets have any idea who is going to be playing quarterback for them next season, you look back on that draft and think that not only did our teams miss out on quarterbacks who could have changed everything. They missed out on quarterbacks now clearly on their way to being all-time greats of the sport.
Maybe the Jets never had a chance at Jackson even when he became a free agent a couple of years ago. Maybe the Ravens were never going to let Jackson get away. But there was never really a conversation about bringing Jackson to Jersey. Jets owner Woody Johnson and his then-general manager Joe Douglas had already developed their man crush on Aaron Rodgers, and we know how well that has worked out.
Rodgers, at 41, is now in limbo following a 5-12 season. Jackson? He’s in Buffalo to play Allen. And one of those guys out of the ’18 draft is going to be MVP, and one of them might finally win a Super Bowl this season, or at least finally play in one.
Here is something Douglas said before Jackson had decided to stay with the Ravens and before the Jets had made their trade for Rodgers:
“First of all, Lamar Jackson is a fantastic player, but where we stand is, it would be disingenuous and negotiating in bad faith if we went down that path,” said Douglas, once a Ravens scout. “We have our plan, we have our process and we’re sticking to that. … We’re never going to operate in bad faith.”
The last part is funny, actually. Why shouldn’t the Jets be as bad at faith as they are everything else?
So Jets fans will watch Bills vs. Ravens on Sunday night. Giant fans will watch. All football fans will watch, and with tremendous interest, the final game of such an interesting playoff weekend. Again: Look at the quarterbacking talent on display in these four games:
Mahomes.
Allen.
Jackson.
Goff.
Daniels.
Stafford.
Hurts.
Stroud.
The main event, though, at least going in, is in Buffalo. Jackson tries to go in there and get the road win that Mahomes got in the January before this one. Maybe it is time for one of them, Allen or Jackson, to punch a ticket to New Orleans; to finally go all the way. It’s not Mahomes in Allen’s way on Sunday night. It’s Jackson. It’s not Mahomes in Lamar’s way. It’s Allen.
They have both outplayed Mahomes during this regular season because they’ve out played everybody, which is saying plenty when you look at what Goff has done in Detroit and the way Daniels has resurrected a franchise and a football city like Washington, D.C.
Maybe neither one will be at his best on Sunday night. Maybe it will be the Buffalo weather that ultimately wins this game. It is still the dream matchup of the season. It would be a dream matchup in any season. As the great Vin Scully used to say in his sport: Pull up a chair.
REMEMBERING THE GREAT BOB UECKER, JERRY IS NO TITAN OF THE FOOTBALL WORLD & EASE UP ON SAM …
I was on the phone one day with Bob Uecker in July of 2020, baseball’s COVID season about to finally begin, and here is one of the things he said about a season of mostly empty ballparks:
“I’ve missed all of it. Just going to the park, that was the biggest thing of all. Not just talking to the players. Talking to the ushers and the people in the press box. I used to stop at the grounds crew office every single day. I’d talk to the security guys. It was all part of my family life. The family of baseball, I guess you’d call it.”
It is another reason why his passing the other day, at the age of 90, truly did feel like a death in the family of baseball.
Ueck said something else that day that spoke to the beauty of him being the radio voice of the Brewers for as long as he was, all the way until he called Pete Alonso’s home run in Game 3 of the Brewers-Mets series three months ago; and the enduring beauty of baseball on the radio:
“They don’t know anything until you tell them.”
By the way, after the passing of Mr. Uecker, Alex Rodriguez tweeted this:
“He brought joy not only to Cleveland, but to baseball.”
After he did, my buddy Pete said, “Alex knows that was only pretend baseball in Cleveland, right?”
Bill Parcells once said that it wasn’t his job to take his team’s temperature for the media every day.
Maybe Josh Hart could think about that himself once in a while.
Because as admirable a player as Hart is, as much of a glue guy as he is with these Knicks, it sometimes seems as if the guy never has an unspoken thought.
Did I miss the part when Mike McCarthy became the second coming of Vince Lombardi?
This is a guy that only won one Super Bowl in Green Bay when Aaron Rodgers was in his prime, right?
Jerry Jones’ team hasn’t won a Super Bowl in 30 years, but somehow people still discuss him as a titan of the industry.
What he’s really become is the executive producer of a reality series.
Sometimes I worry I might coach North Carolina before Bill Belichick does.
Tom Brady says he’s going to stay in broadcasting and I’m kind of wondering what the good news is.
Speaking of broadcasters?
Even doing the NBA for as long as he has, Mike Breen’s level not only never drops, he just keeps getting better, no matter with whom he’s working network games.
Here’s the deal on Scott Boras:
You know who could have negotiated the Soto deal with the Mets?
You and me.
You know who needs Scotty B. to actually act like a great agent now?
Pete Alonso.
So does Alex Bregman, maybe after Boras stops acting dizzy enough to think he’s going to get Bregman seven years?
Maybe Pat Riley and Jimmy Butler could try couples counseling.
One more thing:
Has the Aaron Rodgers pep squad in the media been completely disbanded at this point?
If Sam Darnold is supposed to be a bum now because he looked bad in the playoffs does that make Justin Herbert a bum, too?