Brandon Graham hopes to strip Patrick Mahomes like he stripped Tom Brady in the Super Bowl

PHOENIX — The G.O.A.T. is gone.

Long live the G.O.A.T.

Eleven days after Tom Brady, the greatest quarterback in history, retired at the age of 45, Patrick Mahomes, the greatest quarterback alive, will play in his third Super Bowl in four years at the age of 27. It also will be Mahomes’ third Super Bowl in his first five seasons as a starter, a feat matched by only one player — the G.O.A.T. himself.

Mahomes’ second Bowl, LV, was Brady’s 10th, and last. Brady’s Bucs beat Mahomes’ Chiefs, who were defending champions. Despite the outcome that night in Tampa, the guard changed.

Meet the new G.O.A.T. Same as the old G.O.A.T.

Their legacies will be forever linked, even if their paths to the pinnacle have been different. Brady rode the coattails of superstars before he began carrying the Patriots to the Super Bowl. Mahomes has been great from the start.

“He definitely is the G.O.A.T.,” Brandon Graham said Tuesday, five days before he and the Eagles will play Mahomes and the Chiefs in Super Bowl LVII. “He’s already won one. He’s been here a lot of times already. And he’s young.”

Graham’s finest hour came in Super Bowl LII, when he strip-sacked Brady in the fourth quarter to seal the Eagles’ first Super Bowl win. He couldn’t resist fantasizing.

“Getting a strip-sack on him, too?” Graham said, looking toward the ceiling. “That’d be nice.”

Nice? Try, legendary.

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Stripping the old G.O.A.T., Philadelphia’s most hated villain, whose Patriots cheated to win a Super Bowl? Then stripping the new G.O.A.T., who brings former Eagles coach Andy Reid to the Super Bowl for the fourth time in his career? Yes. Legendary.

And, possibly, even more significant.

As accomplished as Brady became over his 23-year career — seven Super Bowl wins in 10 trips, 15 Pro Bowl appearances, three regular-season MVP awards, and five Super Bowl MVPs, with records for passing yards, touchdowns, etc. — Mahomes is the one player who can catch him.

Comparing their first five seasons as starters, Mahomes has 69 more touchdown passes, 18 fewer interceptions, and almost 6,000 more passing yards. Mahomes’ passer rating is almost 18 points higher than Brady’s, and he has won five more games, which doesn’t sound like much until you figure that it’s about 7% of the 79 games in which each of them played in those seasons.

Mahomes just made his fifth Pro Bowl. Brady went just three times early on.

To his credit, G.O.A.T. recognizes G.O.A.T.

Brady visited the Chiefs’ locker room after the Patriots beat the Chiefs in the 2019 AFC championship game. Their embrace after Super Bowl LV was a rare heartfelt and real moment for Brady on the field. Last month, Brady called Mahomes to speak with him after Mahomes played through a high ankle sprain in the AFC divisional game against Jacksonville.

Brady recently said on his SiriusXM podcast, “Let’s Go! With Tom Brady, Larry Fitzgerald and Jim Gray,” that he told Mahomes, “That’s what champions are made of at the end of the day.”

Mahomes said Brady gave him some advice, too, but Mahomes wouldn’t divulge how he was advised. Mahomes did allow that whenever Brady talks, he listens.

He has two kids and insurance and shampoo commercials, but Mahomes’ greatest challenge is ignoring his destiny as football’s G.O.A.T.-est G.O.A.T.

“What Tom has done, I don’t know if that’ll be matched,” Mahomes said Tuesday, marveling at the man 18 years his senior. “I’m still so early in my career. I’ve always thought, if you go out there and handle business the right way, and do what you do, and you win football games, that stuff handles itself. I never really think about my legacy after football. That’s something I’ll think about after I’m done playing.”

The thing is, even if he stopped playing Monday morning, Mahomes’ career would still have been amazing.

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Mahomes is known for insane improvisation and brilliant athleticism — his scrambles are balletic, and his sidearm, basketball-shot, underhand, no-look-passes remind fans of Pete Maravich — but as Mahomes’ weapons have diminished, he has been even more effective. The NFL’s all-time leader in average passing yards per game (303.0) lost Tyreek Hill to an offseason trade but still set a career high with 5,250 yards, fourth all-time. He did it with his second-lowest yards-per-completion rate.

Graham might dream of hitting Mahomes, but only quick-trigger artists Jared Goff and Brady were sacked less than Mahomes, who holds the ball almost a half-second longer but went down just 26 times this season. The Bengals sacked him three times in the AFC championship game, but he was playing on a week-old ankle sprain, and he still threw for 326 yards and two touchdowns. Of course, Mahomes’ release is getting quicker, too.

“He’s getting really hard to get to,” said Eagles tackle Fletcher Cox. “He knows where he’s going with the ball before it comes out of the center’s hand.”

Like Brady, Mahomes takes what is given and fights past his mistakes, like his third-quarter fumble against the Bengals that helped them tie the game.

“The best thing I’ve learned is not trying to do too much. You can’t do it all by yourself. It takes your teammates and the team around you,” Mahomes said. “And whenever stuff’s not going your way, like the last game, the Bengals game, when I had that fumble, that dumb fumble in the fourth quarter, not letting those mistakes compound on each other.”

Indeed, Mahomes played conservatively the rest of the game, and a big punt return, a Mahomes scramble, and a Bengals penalty framed the game-winning field goal with three seconds to play.

That 5-yard scramble on his bad ankle exemplified the progress Mahomes has made in the last half-decade. Like Brady, who needed four years as a starter to throw for 4,000 yards in a season, Mahomes needed time.

“It took me until year three or four to master the offense,” he said. “I could run the offense and make plays because we had so many talented players around me, but to be able to understand the offense, to know where those little free plays are, where I could get those easy yards, that took me a while. It’s hard to learn where those sneaky, freebie plays are in the offense.”

He discovered how to scramble in the proper direction, away from where the offensive scheme had pushed the defensive flow, and turn a 5-yard sack or a throwaway into a 5-yard gain, or, given his elusiveness, fearlessness, and his powerful arm, something much, much more.

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Like Brady, Mahomes has input on the roster. In the winter of 2007, after Brady’s sixth season as the starter, Bill Belichick asked Brady if he thought Randy Moss would fit with the Patriots. (He did, and they went 16-0.) In the winter of 2021, the Chiefs informed Mahomes that they were trading Hill. Mahomes wasn’t happy.

“My initial reaction was, ‘Uh, why?’“ he said. “You never want to lose a generational player.”

But when the generational player wants $120 million, and you’re making more than $500 million, and there’s a salary cap, something’s gotta give. Mahomes understood, and he helped Reid and GM Brett Veach rebuild.

“We had a plan to replace his production,” Mahomes said.

He sees things through an organizational lens, if not an industry lens. Which players are playing where, and why, and how do they fit in? Which free agents might fit in Kansas City? Which players in the draft would make good Chiefs?

“I’ve always said that when I’m done playing I might want to go to the GM role,” he said. He pesters Veach when he returns from scouting: “‘How was the Senior Bowl? How was the East-West Shrine Game?’ I like looking at guys, and future guys. I like to see who the good players are and what [we] think about them.”

With more inclusion comes more responsibility. As veterans have moved on and his star has risen, Mahomes isn’t just the kid QB anymore.

“I had to become more vocal. I had to set an even higher standard when I came through the locker room,” Mahomes said. “Then when you’re at practice, and you can feel stuff kind of slipping, not being great, just kind of taking command and making sure everything’s being done the right way. I’ve taken a little more command this last year.”

Just like the G.O.A.T. — to a degree.

In many ways Mahomes is very unlike Brady, who is measured, awkward, and generally humorless; his pre-Super Bowl news conferences were notoriously robotic. Mahomes, on the other hand, enjoys giving peeks into his personality, even on the biggest stage.

Already invested in the Kansas City Royals and Sporting Kansas City, the town’s MLS team, Mahomes was asked Tuesday if he might one day want to own a piece of an NFL team, too. He did, after all, sign a $503 million deal in 2020, which could be the richest contract in sports history. Not nearly enough, he said:

“I’m going to have to find a way to make more money off the field. More State Farm commercials.”

Later, when shown a photo of himself by a foreign journalist in a whimsical Super Bowl media moment, Mahomes was asked how he would describe himself. He didn’t miss a beat:

“I would say, fast. I would say, strong. And handsome.”

He would not be wrong.