Sports and Luck: Brady, Mahomes on equal footing

Some things are stranger than fiction, including pro sports.

With the injury that KC Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes sustained Sunday, torn ACL (similar but different from the Achilles tendon), he’s now on the exact protectory as Tom Brady, the NFL’s QB GOAT, if one uses Super Bowl wins as the defining factor in who is the greatest quarterback of all time in the NFL.

Brady has seven SB rings. The closest second, with four Super Bowl wins, are Terry Bradshaw and Joe Montana.

Until this year, sports analysts were begging the question – can Mahomes win more championships than Brady? Will he be better than Tom Brady when all is said and done?

Mahomes won three Super Bowls faster than Brady, along with three MVPs. His raw passing numbers in his first six seasons as a starter far exceeded Brady’s numbers in his first six seasons.

Hence the question – who will end up as the GOAT when Mahomes’ career has passed?

Luck, the Deciding Factor

What’s uncanny are the similarities between the two at this exact moment in their respective careers.

In 2008, Tom Brady missed the entire season with a torn ACL.

This past Sunday, Mahomes and the Chiefs will miss postseason play after the stellar QB suffered a torn ACL.

Both had three Super Bowl wins under their cleats when they fell to injury, and both were in their ninth season in the NFL when they took an unfortunate hit. The one thing that no one can control is the luck involved in professional sports since injuries are so common, especially in the NFL where colliding bodies are part of the game.

For anyone who has played high school football, sustained one or two serious injuries, the idea of playing college ball and then professional football for at least a decade, even five years, says only one thing — some people have all the luck.

No other way to explain it. The legs, ankles, knees, for example, are so delicate in a sense. A player can run all he wants, lift weights all he wants, but if an opposing player, or even one with his own team, happens to fall wrong on the knee, the ankle, there goes the season, maybe the career.

The fact that Tom Brady could play 23 seasons in the NFL despite other injuries like a shoulder, which required surgery in 2003; three broken ribs and a broken finger in 2009; ligament damage in his throwing hand (2013); a sprain to his right thumb in 2017; and a partially torn knee ligament during the entire 2020 season with Tampa, where he won his last and final Super Bowl speaks to both the physical and mental toughness of the QB GOAT.

Will Mahomes recover and go on to win more than Brady’s seven Super Bowl rings?

He’ll recover, but he won’t match Brady’s championship record when all is said and done.

Ka-Boom

There will only ever be one Tom Brady, the once skinny kid from California who wasn’t drafted until the sixth round of the 2000 NFL draft, the 199th overall pick.

His combination of physical toughness, mental toughness, his work ethic, not to mention a hefty dose of luck, no one will ever match that.

On YouTube, there is one video of him looking at an iPad, watching some of the hardest hits he ever took throughout his pro career.

“That one definitely hurt,” he says, wincing at the hit.

Maybe it’s Ray Lewis that hit him.

“The thing I always did was get up as fast as I could, no matter how much pain I was in, just to show the defense that the hit didn’t hurt.”

Watching the replays of all the hard hits he took throughout his career, Brady had one question while watching his spine get pummeled.

“Why does my helmet keep coming off?”

Because you just had two guys on defense hit you at the same time, both weighing approximately 280 pounds each, running at full speed, eager to rip off your head.

How does one body sustain that for more than two decades?

Luck.