Expecting Patrick Mahomes’ Career to Match Tom Brady’s Is Unrealistic
Sure, it's possible for K.C.'s already legendary QB to catch the GOAT. But almost everything would have to go right from here.
If ever there was a doubt that Patrick Mahomes is capable of raising his game and doing whatever he needs to, whenever he needs to, those notions have been erased in the 2023-24 NFL postseason. As
wrote after Mahomes’ Chiefs beat the Baltimore Ravens (and their top-ranked defense) in the AFC title game, the Kansas City QB is forging a remarkable playoff legacy by performing at his best when the lights shine brightest. On Sunday, Mahomes will play in his fourth Super Bowl in six seasons as a regular starter, and try to add a third championship to his trophy case by age 28.Before Mahomes, only Tom Brady could ever make that claim, which is partly why we’re seeing a lot of comparisons this week between Mahomes and other GOATs: Brady, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, etc. It isn’t often that someone comes along who even has the potential to realistically challenge for the mantle of their sport’s greatest ever,1 and it’s extremely exciting to watch greatness chase greatness.
However, I also think back to something Slate’s Josh Levin wrote about LeBron James and Michael Jordan a long time ago. In the wake of The Decision in 2010 and James’ subsequent Finals loss to the Mavericks in 2011, here’s what Levin had to say about LeBron’s MJ problem:
“Why do we keep on believing that we’ll see the arc of LeBron James’ career just around the next corner? It’s all Michael Jordan’s fault.
His Airness isn’t just the best player in NBA history. He also had the least ambiguous career trajectory—early defeats followed by unending success—of any athlete in the history of pro sports. Yes, LeBron James has (as of yet) not won an NBA title. But the reason his path seems so troubling is that it’s been the exact opposite of Jordan-esque—less of an arc than a flat line, one that’s missing both Jordan’s formative struggles and subsequent triumphs.”
In other words, Jordan’s career is almost impossible to replicate not just because his skill and tenacity were the greatest — they were — but also because his narrative value is unmatched. In order to unseat MJ, an upstart must offer an equally compelling storyline in addition to matching Jordan’s success. And especially at the end, they must craft an aura of unbeatability on the championship stage, no matter the odds.
Brady’s story is similar. The former sixth-round afterthought-turned-surprise starter-turned-Super Bowl MVP had the early success that Mahomes is trying to replicate, but he also had a mid-career drought that was, remarkably, followed by more Super Bowls after age 36 than almost every player in NFL history had in their entire careers. (That’s on top of the Atlas Shrugged-length list of league records he owns outright.) In order to match Brady, Mahomes will have to follow a similar path, weathering the inevitable ups and downs and forging his own story of longevity to keep piling up Super Bowls well after his prime.
He could do it, without question. But the odds are far more against him than we might think just from seeing Mahomes potentially match what Brady did at the same point early in their respective careers.
Consider this: Even if Mahomes wins his third Super Bowl against the 49ers on Sunday, he’ll still need to tack on another entire Joe Montana career of titles (Joe Cool had four rings) just to tie Brady — and even then, people will still probably use Brady’s head-to-head win in Super Bowl LV as a tiebreaker to tip the scales in TB12’s favor. So Mahomes might need to get to EIGHT Super Bowls — a win on Sunday plus an entire Charles Haley career (5 rings) — to have a realistic shot at GOATdom.
Needless to say, doing that will be extraordinarily difficult. To analyze the odds, I took the careers of every QB who had at least 50 points of Approximate Value (AV) through age 28 — Mahomes has 109, which ranks third all-time — and looked at their frequency of winning Super Bowls at each remaining age up to 43 (Brady’s age in 2020), weighted by their AV to give better QBs more influence. After adjusting slightly for changing league sizes over time and smoothing out the curve, we arrive at the following odds for Mahomes-like QBs winning a Super Bowl by year over the rest of their careers:
If a top QB has a 5% chance of winning at age 29 — the equivalent of next season for Mahomes — that number dips to 4% by age 31, 3% by 33, under 2% by 36 and below 1% by 40. (It’s also worth noting that Brady himself is basically propping up those odds; he’s the only QB in the sample who won after hitting 40, as most great QBs were done playing at all by that age.) In turn, using those odds to simulate the rest of Mahomes’ career — again, up to age 43 in 2038 — 5,000 times, while also assuming the Chiefs win on Sunday, we get the following distribution of career championship totals:
Incredibly, more than seven times out of 10, our simulated careers ended with Mahomes winning zero more Super Bowls after this upcoming Sunday. That may sound crazy, but remember — Brady himself needed an unprecedented late-career flurry of titles to avoid that same fate. A quarter of the time, our simulated Mahomes only added one more title; a shade under 5% of the time he added two more, and only nine times in 5,000 sims (0.2%) did he add three more. Just once in 5,000 simulated universes did Mahomes win four more Super Bowls after Sunday, bringing his total into a tie with Brady’s.
Now, we might quibble some with these baseline odds. Even relative to the greatest QBs of the past six decades, Mahomes is atypically brilliant, and Kansas City went into 2023 with an implied 11.9% probability of winning the Super Bowl, so it’s hard to see them sitting much lower than that going into next season if they win it all this year. If we raise his odds next year to, say, 10%, and taper them along the curve down to 1% by age 43, our simulated Mahomes wins at least one more Super Bowl after Sunday 48% of the time and he ties Brady at seven rings in total 0.5% of the time.
Those are better odds, to be sure… but they still help illustrate the GOAT-chasing challenge in front of Mahomes. Even if he beats San Francisco on Sunday — which is no sure thing, as the Chiefs are underdogs to win — he could go into the rest of his career with far better yearly Super Bowl odds than history’s typical great QB, and still be overwhelmingly unlikely to match Brady’s career ring count.
In that sense, then, maybe the comparison to Woods is the most apt — and the most cautionary. For the majority of Tiger’s career, he was actually a favorite to pass Jack Nicklaus for the most major titles in men’s golf history, assuming he followed the usual aging curve of a championship golfer. But even a fate that seemed so destined to happen for so many years ended up going unfulfilled. From age 34 onward, Woods won just a single major (his incredible comeback victory at the 2019 Masters), leaving him three shy of Nicklaus in the final tally.
Mahomes has begun his career in as Woods-like a fashion as seems possible for an NFL QB, bursting onto the scene with equal parts dominance and panache. His future possibilities currently seem limitless, especially if he wins another Super Bowl this weekend. But he’s still going to need an uncommon amount of luck and longevity to go with his talent if he hopes to cash in all of these Brady comparisons by the time his career is over.
Filed under: NFL, Super Bowl
I agree with Gilbert Arenas here that it should be a small group who can even be in the GOAT debate at all; we sometimes throw that term around so much now that it has lost all meaning.