A quick and random thought about Josh Allen

The Buffalo Bills beat the Kansas City Chiefs last week, which they do just about every season when they play each other. But the last bunch of years, when the two teams have met again in the playoffs, the Chiefs have won. Two of those have come in the AFC Championship Game, and one of them is one of the most notorious playoff games in NFL history, the epic shootout in which the Bills took a 36-33 lead with 13 seconds left in the 4th quarter, but somehow they allowed the Chiefs to get to field goal range in those 13 seconds, tying the game and sending it to overtime, where the Chiefs promptly scored a touchdown to win 42-36. (In an illustration of the NFL’s ongoing stupidity when it comes to overtime rules, if the first team with the ball scores a touchdown, it’s game over…so Josh Allen never touched the ball again after he left the field with a lead.)

Even though Josh Allen has played very well in all of those playoff games, the narrative has formed: Allen is basically nothing until he beats the Chiefs in the playoffs. None of his accomplishments matter until he beats the Chiefs in the playoffs. He’s just another guy until he beats the Chiefs–no, until he beats Patrick Mahomes–in the playoffs. Try to point out that he has played more than well enough to win every one of those games, and it’s been the defense allowing Mahomes and the Chiefs the victory every time, and you get ignored. No, Allen has to beat the Chiefs. Allen has to beat Mahomes. So it must be, or he will forever be judged as less than.

Setting aside the increasingly annoying tendency in American sports discourse to vastly overrate championships as the only things that matter, the only true marks of greatness, and the only valid measure of worth…it’s been very strange to me to see this clunky narrative be forced upon Josh Allen and the Bills. It has almost reached a point where I genuinely believe that if the Bills (a) put together a playoff run, reached the Super Bowl and won it, but (b) didn’t meet the Chiefs in the playoffs during that run, the country’s sports discourse would put a virtual asterisk on the Bills’ win. I really believe that the Bills could win multiple Super Bowls, but if they somehow don’t beat the Chiefs during any of those title runs and get beat by the Chiefs every other time, their accomplishments would be downgraded. It sucks, but that’s just the way it is. It would literally almost be better for the Bills to beat the Chiefs in the playoffs but not win a Super Bowl, than to win the Super Bowl but never knock the Chiefs out.

Basically, American sports discourse is simply insane. I guess that’s reflective of the society itself, innit?