Patrick Mahomes probably still has a few more rings to earn before anyone anoints him as the greatest quarterback of all time. For now, that honor still belongs to Tom Brady, with his 10 Super Bowl appearances and seven championship rings.
But on Sunday night, in Super Bowl LIX, the 29-year-old Mahomes might force his way into a seat at that "GOAT" table. If he becomes the first quarterback to achieve the Super Bowl three-peat, he'll have done something that even Brady couldn't do.
And when Brady sat down with Mahomes on Wednesday morning for an interview that will air on FOX's Super Bowl pregame show, he told the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback that a three-peat is something he'd love to see.
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"I said ‘Look, nobody would be more happy for you than me if you go out and do something that no other team in history has ever done — that no other quarterback's ever done,'" Brady said on a FOX Sports conference call this week. "Because I love seeing other people achieve great things."
It's not that Brady is rooting for Mahomes and the Chiefs to beat the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday night. It's more about a great player recognizing greatness in others and giving him the respect he deserves. It didn't even seem to bother him that some think that if Mahomes completes this run — which would include four championships in six years, something only Terry Bradshaw and the Pittsburgh Steelers have ever done — he might be on the verge of surpassing Brady and everybody else.
If that happens, Brady said, he doesn't care.
"I think it's natural for everybody to compare teams to teams of the past, players to players of past — and none of it surprises me," Brady said. "It's been happening since I started as a young player. It's not how I view things, though.
"Anything that Patrick does, to me, I don't believe will ever detract from what I accomplished in my career. And there's going to be another player beyond Patrick, years from now, that will be compared (to us). We all have our own individual journeys, our own football careers and lives, and those are made up ultimately by what we do as individuals and how we are motivated every day to go out and achieve our team goals."
Brady, of course, achieved plenty during his remarkable, 23-year NFL career. The first-year TV analyst — who'll be calling his first Super Bowl for FOX on Sunday alongside play-by-play man Kevin Burkhardt — won an unprecedented seven Super Bowl championships. Six of those came in New England and one in Tampa Bay.
But he never could achieve the elusive three-peat — something that has never been done in the Super Bowl era. The only team that came close was the Green Bay Packers, who won the NFL championship in 1965, and then won Super Bowls I and II over the next two seasons. The only other team to win three straight NFL championships was the Packers in 1929-31.
Brady had one shot at it. The Patriots won Super Bowls XXXVIII and XXXIX, which sent them into the 2005 season as the two-time defending champions. But they were wiped out in the playoffs that season, losing 27-13 to the Denver Broncos in the divisional round. He also played in three straight Super Bowls from 2016-18, winning two. But he and the Patriots lost the middle one — Super Bowl LII — to quarterback Nick Foles and the Philadelphia Eagles, ending the three-peat chance before he even had a shot.
That doesn't mean it will hurt Brady to watch Mahomes do what he couldn't, though. In fact, Brady made it clear that he's one of Mahomes' biggest fans.
"I love Patrick as a player and as a person," he said. "Since he came onto the scene I couldn't think any more highly of a player in that position, knowing that all that he's going through and gone through and will continue to go through to try to accomplish things at the highest level."
"Not just physically," Brady added. "I appreciate the mental and emotional aspects that he brings to the game as well. He's a really great student of the game. He prepares hard. And he doesn't have an emotional volatility to the way that he plays. He's a competitor. He's driven to succeed. He approaches that in practice and in the offseason as well as the games. And that's what it takes to be truly great at what you do. He's displayed that over the first eight years of his career."
It really has been a spectacular start for Mahomes to his NFL career. In seven years as the starter in Kansas City, he's led the Chiefs to the playoffs and the AFC Championship seven times, reaching the Super Bowl in five of those seasons. He's thrown for 32,352 yards and 245 touchdowns. He's won NFL MVP and Super Bowl MVP twice each.
He's played less than a third of the time that Brady did in his career, though. And while he's on a pace to surpass the current "GOAT" in most categories, he still has a long way to go.
If he wins this Super Bowl, though, the debate — however premature — will surely soon begin.
"Where that puts him in historical context and perspective is, again, that's not something that I considered that against other players that played previously, like Joe Montana, John Elway and Dan Marino," Brady said. "That's for a different type of media. For me I just appreciate what we're really witnessing on the field—someone who is just incredibly gifted at what he's asked to do."
And if he does what Brady couldn't, and completes that three-peat, don't expect Brady to sound jealous at all.
"It's hard to win one Super Bowl," Brady said. "You talk about Dan Marino and you can look at a lot of great quarterbacks that never won one. To win back-to-back is extremely difficult. There's a lot of things that need to go your way. And the fact that a three-peat has never happened in the history of the NFL tells you how hard it is to do.
"So I am incredibly excited to see this game because no team has ever been this close."
Ralph Vacchiano is an NFL Reporter for FOX Sports. He spent the previous six years covering the Giants and Jets for SNY TV in New York, and before that, 16 years covering the Giants and the NFL for the New York Daily News. Follow him on Twitter at @RalphVacchiano.
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