It didn’t take long for seven months of NFL offseason narratives to get full validation. Tom Brady gave that to all of us eight days ago in the very first game of the 2021 season. Patrick Mahomes further backed it up three days later, in the late-afternoon broadcast window of the first full Sunday of the year. And Aaron Rodgers’s failure to do the same was so newsworthy it further bolstered the idea:
How good you are at quarterback has never mattered more.
That premise may seem oversimplistic, and maybe it is. But dive into what Brady and Mahomes pulled off last week, and what Rodgers couldn’t, and sitting there in plain sight is a full illustration of what these guys are doing to the sport.