SUPER SUNDAY
Two of the NFL’s top quarterbacks to face off in Super Bowl LV as Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs take on Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
We’ve seen it time and again throughout sports history. The mantle is passed. The torch is handed off. The hunter becomes the hunted. Choose any cliché, and it’s apt in these situations — if all too rare. For the past two decades, Tom Brady has been the NFL’s ultimate alpha male. He led the Patriots to six Super Bowl titles in nine appearances. He’s won three Most Valuable Player awards and been named MVP in the Big Game four times. He’s widely considered the GOAT. Despite all those accolades, he enters Super Bowl LV as a slight underdog to a player viewed as his likely heir to excellence. If the Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes wants to one day join the conversation as one of the greats, vanquishing Brady and his new team, the Buccaneers, would be a good start.
There has never been a Super Bowl matchup of accomplished quarterbacks quite like the one coming up Sunday between Tampa Bay’s Tom Brady and Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes.
This will be the sixth Super Bowl matchup between former AP NFL MVPs, the second between former Super Bowl MVP winning quarterbacks and the first between players who had previously won both awards.
Brady has won a record six Super Bowl titles, four Super MVPs and three league MVP awards since becoming starter in New England in 2001.
Mahomes is just getting started in his career and already has one league MVP and one Super Bowl MVP to his credit and is back in the title game for the second time.
The first Super Bowl matchup of former league MVPs came in the 1976 season when Oakland’s Ken Stabler (1974 winner) beat Minnesota’s Fran Tarkenton (1975 winner).
Denver’s John Elway was part of the next two MVP matchups, losing to San Francisco’s Joe Montana after the 1989 season and beating Green Bay’s Brett Favre eight years later.
Then it happened again in back-to-back seasons in 2015-16 with Denver’s Peyton Manning besting Carolina’s Cam Newton and Brady beating Atlanta’s Matt Ryan.