Josh Allen ready to get under TB12’s skin
ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. – Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen isn’t immune to pressure and he’s not a Teflon man when it comes to feeling nervous before a big game. If he wasn’t nervous, he wouldn’t be human.
But taking the field for an NFL playoff game as opposed to playing 12 holes of golf on national TV? Yeah, Allen said there’s absolutely no doubt which endeavor is more nerve-wracking.
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous,” Allen said last week regarding his participation in The Match, the made-forTV golf competition where he and fellow young gun Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs will be playing head-tohead against graybeards Tom Brady of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers.
“It’s a whole different racket,” Allen continued, comparing playing football on the big stage to an individual, alleyes-on-you sport like golf. “Like when you’re on the first tee – and I’ve played in a couple of these tournaments now where there’s people around – and you get up and you’re shaking uncontrollably, you’ve got to figure it out.
“And usually you start swinging a little faster when there’s people involved and that’s when the slices come, but hopefully my experience playing in some of those can help. But again, I haven’t played in something where it’s going to be nationally televised with an earpiece in my ear and hearing those guys talk and understand that there’s gonna be a lot of people watching, so it’ll be a learning adjustment.”
The match play event will take place at 6:30 p.m. ET today from the Wynn Las Vegas resort course and can be seen on cable network TNT. Since its inception in 2019, the event has raised more than $33 million for charity.
This will be the first time The Match will not feature a PGA Tour star, but the presence of arguably the four best quarterbacks in the NFL should produce impressive TV ratings.
Brady and Allen have been going back and forth on Twitter, getting digs in on each other, and while Allen has been playing plenty of golf with Bills backup quarterbacks Case Keenum and Matt Barkley to get ready, he’s also sharpening his verbal daggers.
“I don’t know if I’ll be the best golfer there, I hope to be, but I’ll be the best trash talker when we’re on the course,” he said with a smile. “There’s some things I’ll have to tone down and try not to cross the line because they’re two of the greatest quarterbacks of all time and guys that I’ve grown up watching, but I gotta get in their heads somehow. We’ll see what we can do.”
Allen revealed that Nike has hooked him up with apparel and specially designed cleats, and the golf bag he’ll be throwing on the cart is one, he said, that BillsMafia will greatly appreciate.
Allen has played the past two years in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, a PGA Tour event where amateurs play with tour professionals, and he hopes to draw on the way he quelled his nerves while playing in that event.
Of course, Allen and Mahomes are fierce rivals on the field, especially since Mahomes’ Chiefs have ended the Bills’ season each of the past two years in the playoffs.
“I talked to him quite a bit actually and I don’t think it’s gonna be weird at all,” Allen said of playing on the same team as Mahomes for once. “We get along extremely well outside of football; we’ve got a lot of respect for each other inside of football and on the field.”
Allen then lobbed a grenade at Brady and Rodgers, saying, “I think that me and Pat will have a better rapport than those other two guys that have been fighting and clawing against each other for the last 18 years where me and Pat are just starting to go at it.
“I think the relationship is in a better spot than theirs is. We’ll be happy to see each other’s putts go in where I don’t think the other guys are going to be happy when the other guy makes a putt because they’re going to be the one that wants to make it.
“Those guys are older and they’ve been in a couple of these so they’ve got the experience, but me and Pat, we’ve got the youth on our side.”