Would you rather … have a Broncos Super Bowl win if it came with more Chiefs titles … or none for either?
Jun 18, 2024, 4:00 PM | Updated: 4:01 pm
The Super Bowl ring is the thing, no doubt.
But what if a fourth Denver Broncos world title came with a catch … that in the rest of the Patrick Mahomes era in Kansas City, the arch-rival Kansas City Chiefs were to add four more Super Bowl wins to their total?
The alternative choice, as discussed in the latest Orange and Blue Today, is for neither team to win it all for the rest of Mahomes’ career.
“Would you rather …” is not designed to be comfortable.
The career of Patrick Mahomes could be a lengthy one, of course. The long NFL career arcs for other great quarterbacks who played into the 21st century — 18 seasons for Peyton Manning, 20 for Brett Favre and Drew Brees, 20 and counting for Aaron Rodgers and 23 for Tom Brady — reveals that we might be in for a lot more of Mahomes, who has racked up three world championships in his first seven NFL seasons.
If Mahomes maintains his current success level, the Broncos are faced with a daunting problem for the foreseeable future — which is very similar to what the AFC East faced for two decades.
Mahomes and the Chiefs are in their imperial phase. But as Brady and Bill Belichick demonstrated together, such a phase can ebb, then return. Brady and Belichick had three Super Bowl wins in a four-season span of the mid-2000s. Then, after a nine-year stretch in which they and the New England Patriots never failed to win 10 games but didn’t hold up any Lombardi Trophies, they claimed three more Super Bowl wins in a 5-year stretch.
By making six-straight AFC Championship games, the current Chiefs are 75 percent of the way to matching the Patriots’ 2011-18 run of eight-straight title-game appearances. New England won five of those eight; the Chiefs are 4-2 in their run.
This is what makes Sean Payton’s task difficult.
Lombardi Trophies are forever. But would another one for the Broncos be worth the Chiefs adding four more with Mahomes to become the only 8-time Super Bowl winner in NFL history — while also allowing Mahomes to match Tom Brady as the NFL’s all-time Lord of the Rings?
I don’t envy this choice for Broncos fans.
Watch the June 18 edition of Orange and Blue Today on YouTube and chime in via the comment section, or respond to @MaseDenver or @cecillammmey on the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter.