Battle of the $794M quarterbacks
It’s not right to call the Kansas City Chiefs and Houston Texans, the first NFL teams to play a game in the 2020 season, test guinea pigs.
Good gracious, they’re probably all sick of any kind of testing after six-plus weeks of submitting themselves to daily coronavirus tests — and at least four more months of it to come, save now on game days.
But in some ways, they really are test subjects.
When the Chiefs and Texans kick off tonight, they’ll be the first NFL teams in generations to play a regular-season game without benefit of pre-season warm-up contests.
They’ll also be the first teams to play amid all the changes brought about by new travel and game day COVID-19 protocols, which demand that all non-players on a team sideline — including coaches, equipment folks and medical personnel, plus game officials, chain gangs and other essential on-field personnel — wear protective masks.
And they’ll be the first NFL teams to play in a mostly empty stadium in prime time.
It’ll also be the first time in football history that a game’s two starting quarterbacks will have just signed contract extensions worth more than half a billion dollars combined.
Yup.
Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes, the Super Bowl MVP last February, in July got rewarded with a 10-year contract worth US$450 million. That’s $590 million in Canadian cash. Houston’s Deshaun Watson, just on the weekend, signed a four-year contract worth US$156 million.
Or Cdn$204 million, meaning they’ll make Cdn$794 million between them.
Not bad for a couple of 24-yearolds with three NFL seasons apiece under their belts.
All the above stuff is secondary to tonight’s game once the ball is kicked off. Then it’s just football. Yes, praise be, for the first time since the pandemic hit, an NFL game really is going to be played.
Thing is, after all in-person team activities got cancelled in the spring, and after shortened training camps featuring less padded hitting between players than ever, how close to a normal Week 1 game might we see?
“That’s maybe the unknown here,” Chiefs head coach Andy Reid said Tuesday.
“There’s always different things that happen in the first game anyway, and now you add on the fact that teams weren’t able to do much in the off-season other than virtually, so I’ll be curious like you are to see how it all rolls.
“I think we can put a pretty good show on between the two teams because of the veteran players that both teams have, and coaches. But we’ll see.”
The Chiefs won the AFC West division last year with a 12-4 record.
The Chiefs’ first of three playoff wins came against the Texans, the AFC South division champions who went 10-6 in the regular season but, just to get to K.C., needed to overcome a 16-0 third-quarter deficit, plus overtime, to slip past the Buffalo Bills in the wild-card playoff round.
Eight days later, the Texans stormed out to a 24-0 lead at Arrowhead Stadium early in the second quarter, then got outscored 51-7 the rest of the way in a 51-31 divisional-round victory by the Chiefs.
If any players in Week 1 know they’re not out of it should they fall behind by three scores, it’s the Texans and Chiefs. Kansas City became the first team in
NFL history to win all of its playoff games after falling behind in each by at least two scores.
Mahomes and Watson, to be sure, are among the most exciting new quarterbacks to enter the NFL in years.
Especially Mahomes. Under Reid’s creative play-calling, the son of former Major League Baseball pitcher Pat Mahomes has set new performance and accomplishment bars at his position after two seasons of starting.
Watson can’t top that, but if he can acquire more consistency, he possesses the abilities and moxie to similarly rise to a possible Hall of Fame career trajectory. Watson just needs to figure out how to play hot much more than cold — that is, as he did down the stretch in the playoff win over Buffalo, and not as he did in that miserable first half — not to mention the second half against Kansas City.
As for the 62-year-old Reid, in February he won his first NFL championship in 22 seasons as a head coach.
He’s 6-1 in openers in Kansas City after going 7-7 in Philadelphia. Three years ago, his Chiefs blew out the defending Super Bowl champion Patriots in New England on the league’s opening tonight.
Has Reid discovered some kind of opening-week secret in Missouri?
“Who knows how that works, or why the record or any of that has worked?” Reid said Tuesday.
“We’re focused in on this game, and you guys are asking me a lot of questions that I don’t like to delve into, and that’s the past. Because when you do that in this business, it kicks you right in the tail. So, you’ve got to move forward, and you’re only as good as your next game or play, and that’s just how it is. That’s the name of this game.”
FOOTBALL PLAYER DIES OF COVID-19 COMPLICATIONS
California University of Pennsylvania senior defensive tackle Jamain Stephens died Tuesday at age 20 of COVID-19 complications.
Known to friends, teammates and family as “Juice,” Stephens would have turned 21 on Sept. 21.
“Jamain was such a wonderful student with a smile on his face every time you saw him,” said California athletic director Dr. Karen Hjerpe in a statement.
The six-foot-three, 355-pound Stephens played in 32 games for the Vulcans from 2017-19. The school is not playing football this fall due to the pandemic.
Stephens’s father, also named Jamain Stephens, was a firstround NFL draft pick in 1996 and appeared in 40 games as an offensive lineman with the Pittsburgh Steelers (1997-98) and Cincinnati Bengals (1999-2001).