In 13 days, I’ll be on the ground in Indianapolis. Viva Las … 2024 season …• As I was walking through the expansive area the Kansas City Chiefs had cordoned off in the Resorts World complex Sunday night,

past trays of pasta and sliders, a couple of sports bards, and into the club area where the players and coaches were, I bumped into Ryan Petkoff, a senior vice president for Kansas City owner Clark Hunt, and someone I’ve known a while. He was smiling ear-to-ear, and he wasn’t going to waste words getting to his point.

Patrick Mahomes has three titles at 28. Tom Brady was 27 when he won his third, but he didn’t win another until he was 37. Jordan won his third NBA title at 30 years old, and another when he was 33. Wayne Gretzky had four at 27 years old but was traded that summer and never won another. From there, we can get into MVP awards

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Mahomes has as many as Jordan had at 28 (2), one more than Brady, and actually seven (!) fewer than Gretzky. But the deeper you dig, the more the overarching point is reinforcedMahomes is so good, so young that he’s already in an argument crossing over sports.

That, by the way, doesn’t mean that Joe Burrow (who I believe is the top contender to Mahomes’s throne, among his contemporaries), Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Trevor Lawrence or C.J Stroud couldn’t eventually challeng

Mahomes’s place as king of this era of quarterbacking. What I am saying is that Mahomes is now at the same place Brady and Jordan and Gretzky were in their sports—where a single athlete becomes the very mountain the rest have to scale to win a single championship.

And if you want to know what that can do to teams, just take a look at the AFC East of the Brady era, and how the Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins and New York Jets became completely destabilized, firing coaches and banishing quarterbacks over and over, in large part because simply winning the division was so unrealistic for so many different iterations of those teams.

The monster that was Brady’s New England Patriots affected the legacies of peers like Peyton Manning and Aaron Rodgers, who might’ve won more titles in another era, the same way Jordan’s Chicago Bulls suppressed Patrick Ewing’s New York Knicks and Karl Malone’s Utah Jazz and Gary Payton’s Sonics (do they stay in Seattle if they win a title in that era?). And just as Gretzky’s Edmonton Oilers swallowed a five-year period in the NHL whole.