It didn’t take long for seven months of NFL offseason narratives to get full validation. Tom Brady gave that to all of us eight days ago in the very first game of the 2021 season. Patrick Mahomes further backed it up three days later, in the late-afternoon broadcast window of the first full Sunday of the year. And Aaron Rodgers’s failure to do the same was so newsworthy it further bolstered the idea:
How good you are at quarterback has never mattered more.
That premise may seem oversimplistic, and maybe it is. But dive into what Brady and Mahomes pulled off last week, and what Rodgers couldn’t, and sitting there in plain sight is a full illustration of what these guys are doing to the sport.
The Buccaneers allowed more than 400 yards through the air to the Cowboys, with both Dallas receivers going more than 100 yards, they lost the turnover battle 4–1. On top of that, Chris Godwin dropped what would’ve been a 47-yard touchdown pass with 12 minutes left, then coughed the ball up inside the Dallas 5 with 4:52 to go in a tight game. And none of that mattered .
The Chiefs, likewise, stumbled from the gate, and got physically beaten up by a rugged Browns team early at Arrowhead Sunday. Through 30 minutes, Cleveland was averaging seven yards per carry, outgaining the Chiefs 318 to 183 with touchdowns on each of its first three possessions to seize the tempo and tenor of the game. A fearsome Browns front registered seven quarterback hits. And all this to no avail,
Similarly stark was Rodgers’s not looking like Superman, which, down the line, we’ll either see as the Saints’ facing No. 12 at the right time, an early sign of bigger cracks in foundation or something in between. Regardless, so much of what smell right with the Packers stemmed back to No. 12’s just looking off.
And therein lies all of what we saw this offseason—so many other teams trying to compete with what the last two Super Bowl champions bring to the table, and what the reigning league MVP typically does, too.
“It’s gotten to the point now where if you’ve got an average quarterback, you’ve gotta be pretty much perfect around him to have a chance,” one NFC exec said Thursday morning. “And even if you’ve got a good one, to keep up with these guys, you’ve got to be very, very good.”
This week, you heard a lot of what you hear every year at this point: There’s truth in it. The same way it’d be dangerous to write off the Packers after they laid an egg against the Saints in Jacksonville, it probably wouldn’t be particularly smart to draw up eulogies for the Bills, Titans or the Ravens. Or, for that matter, to crown the Saints, Steelers or Eagles.
So I went about trying to reverse-engineer that principle by making calls and asking folks what conclusions we actually draw from Week 1.
And the biggest one I could come up with? The stuff we spent the offseason obsessing over was, indeed, worth obsessing over. Because the trend we saw is probably here to stay.
Call it the Mahomes-ization of the NFL.
