AS MUCH AS RACE, SUNDAY IS A SHOWCASE OF QB EVOLUTION ... AND MAD FUN
Mahomes and Hurts make history in the first Super Bowl of dueling Black quarterbacks, but society has come far when the racial significance only underscores a fascinating progression at the position
Notice how this Super Bowl is being billed. It’s celebrated as a collision of nuclear centerpieces who are revolutionizing their sport, more as all-orbiting playmakers and inspirational forces than traditional elite quarterbacks. Patrick Mahomes, already the owner of two league MVP awards in five seasons as a starter, attacks defenses with the cold wizardry of a Stephen Curry barrage. Jalen Hurts is a Michael Jordan-obsessed overachiever, though born two months after the Chicago Bulls’ final title, who cites Bible verses to explain how he overcame past slights.
They are football stories first, with basketball and Disney influences, each eyeing a championship that would catapult him higher in the sports universe as 110 million watch and advertisers pay $7 million for 30 seconds of air time.
They are showmen, both from Texas. They’re built like chiseled weapons, Mahomes at 6 feet 2 and 225 pounds and Hurts an inch shorter and the same weight. One or the other will be centrally responsible for winning Super Bowl LVII with his arm, legs and mind. My dollars, figuratively as a non-gambler, are on Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs. I know smart people expecting a beatdown in the Arizona desert, bloodier than a face full of cactus, from Hurts and the Philadelphia Eagles. Rihanna, the halftime performer, was said to be agreeing with me.
“Whatever Rihanna says is like the gospel,” said a thrilled Mahomes, “so I’m glad she went with me for that honor.”
Except she didn’t. He was being pranked by Brandon Marshall, the former NFL receiver, now posing as a media hack. “Man,” said Mahomes, “you got me up here smiling and smirking.”
Welcome to the NFL experience near the quarter pole of the 21st century, the mad-fun evolution of the most vital function in all team sports. If we’ve always viewed quarterbacks as an enviable species since walking our high-school hallways, now they’re the greatest and most compensated entertainers in show business. Far more importantly in any social context, come Sunday, Mahomes and Hurts also will be the first Black quarterbacks to face each other in a league championship game. But consider how racial significance is just one element in a larger Super Bowl storyline farm. Doesn’t this constitute existential progress in America, a country that needs communal victories?
A slow-to-awaken populace has come a long way, if still not the necessary light years, from thinking a Black athlete couldn’t play the position because he wasn’t smart or nimble enough. That trash should have been discarded back in 1988 — yes, 35 years ago — when Washington’s Doug Williams threw for 340 yards and four touchdowns and became the first Black QB to start and win a Super Bowl. The bigotry didn’t end, in football or life, but gradually, as decades passed and the roman numerals heightened, we saw Steve McNair and Donovan McNabb play for Vince Lombardi Trophies. We watched Colin Kaepernick come close to winning before mounting a kneeling campaign against racism. Russell Wilson won one and lost one. Cam Newton lost.
And then came Mahomes, who has turned early February into his personal showcase. He’s the presumptive heir to Tom Brady as the eminent QB of a new generation, providing he wins his second title and doesn’t start wandering down Peyton Manning lane with his second Super Bowl loss in three attempts. And if he continues to stalk Brady’s G.O.A.T.-dom into well the next decade, he won’t be referenced anymore as a “Black quarterback.” He will be referenced, as he was the other night during the MVP presentation, as the best football player on the planet. I would regard that as substantive societal advancement, having grown up in Pittsburgh when a Black quarterback named Joe Gilliam generally was seen as unfit to start for the Steelers regardless of talent. Mahomes, blessed with a savant’s creativity and a right arm as accurate as it is potent, thinks on his feet and improvises acrobatically better than anyone who has played the position. Hurts shows regular glimpses of the same modus operandi. They haven’t completely blown up conventional images, of course, nor will they.
“You still see the stereotypes when guys come out in the draft,” Mahomes said this week. “I think it just takes us to keep talking about it honestly, to be on a platform like this and for guys like me and Jalen to be in this game and show that we can have consistent success every single year.”
“That 4-year-old, 5-year-old kid back in Houston, back in Philly, back in Texas, Louisiana, wherever across the world, regardless of what someone might say or have an opinion about you: ‘You can do it. You can do it, too,’ ’’ Hurts said. “We just want to inspire the next people.”
They are doing precisely that, without saying so until they’re asked in media sessions. Certainly, they understand what they represent historically. “I think about it a lot,” Mahomes said. “To be on the world stage and have two Black quarterbacks start in the Super Bowl, I think it's special, and I've learned more and more about the history of the Black quarterback since I've been in this league. The quarterbacks that came before me — Shack Harris, Doug Williams — laid the foundation for me to be in this position. It goes across all sports. If you think about Jackie Robinson and the people who broke the color barrier in baseball, I wouldn’t be standing here today if it wasn’t for them. To be lucky enough to be in this position — and play against another great guy like Jalen — it will be a special moment. I’m glad we’re here today, but how can we keep moving forward? How can we motivate kids who are younger, who want to follow their dreams to be a quarterback?”
“I think it’s history. It’s something worthy of being noted,” Hurts said. “It’s come a long way. There’s only been seven African-American quarterbacks to play in the Super Bowl. To be first in something is pretty cool. There have been so many quarterbacks before me who didn’t have this opportunity.”
Yet once the game starts, swaths of the tens of millions won’t be thinking about skin color. They will watch Patrick Mahomes, with a healthier ankle, and see if he can escape Haason Reddick and a fearsome Eagles pass rush. They will watch Jalen Hurts and see if he maximizes his many weapons, if he can outduel Mahomes and an unguardable Travis Kelce in the fourth quarter. This will be a rave-up of nonpareil quarterbacking in 2023, the end game of a social undertaking that started with Doug Williams and took too long “probably for all the wrong reasons,” as commissioner Roger Goodell said.
“I think any athlete wants to be the best at their position ever,” said Mahomes, not shying from Greatest Ever dialogue. “And I want to be, but I understand how hard it's gonna be. I know that Tom being in 10 Super Bowls and winning seven of them is something that seems impossible.”
“I had a purpose before anybody had an opinion,” said Hurts, who stares into his locker back in South Philly at a poster of his idol, Jordan, and an accompanying MJ quote from yesteryear: “Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, and others MAKE it happen.”
Whether the night ends with Mahomes’ second trophy or Hurts’ first, we’ll be talking and texting about what they did or didn’t do Sunday. We’ll discuss them as quarterbacks in the ultimate proving ground, just as we discussed Brady and Manning and Joe Montana and Doug Williams and all the others over 56 previous Super Bowls.
“I’m really excited for both quarterbacks, what they can represent to a ton of kids,” said Eagles coach Nick Sirianni, putting it best. “Not only are they two African-American quarterbacks, but they’re the two best quarterbacks in the NFL this year. First-team All-Pro, second-team All-Pro. They both play at the highest level.”
I am excited the sport has moved on. Brady is in a post-career, post-divorce think tank. Manning is a media mogul. Drew Brees is into pickleball. Aaron Rodgers is about to contemplate life on a four-day, four-night “darkness retreat,” which may or may not involve ayahuasca. It’s time to embrace and enjoy a quarterbacking reinvigoration, a full-blown transformation of how the position is played.
Dwelling on race is missing the point. On Sunday, we’re all human beings, as we’ve always been.
###
Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.