Many Buffalo and Kansas City fans have had Week 6 circled on their calendars for quite some time.
For Bills Mafia, it’s the recent playoff defeats that haunt them — the past two coming at the hands of Patrick Mahomes II and Kansas City. For Chiefs Kingdom, it’s all the Josh Allen for MVP talk and the 2022 Buffalo Super Bowl selections.
In all honesty, both fanbases might label this as a grudge match and that’s when athletes tend to rise to the occasion most. In other words, get ready for some fireworks on Sunday between two young quarterbacks that have nothing but respect for one another.
Josh Allen Addresses Rematch vs Patrick Mahomes, Chiefs
“As a football fan myself, when I’m watching games, I love watching him play,” Allen told reporters on October 12. “He’s a fantastic player. He can do everything you want.”
The Bills signal-caller continued in his praise of Mahomes: “His teammates love him and I know he’s got a good grasp on the locker room over there — how he carries himself, the things he does off the field for his charity. He’s a special football player and a special guy and anytime he’s playing I think people are watching.”
“All that aside, we’re just trying to go out there and execute a game plan,” Allen concluded, speaking more on the weight of this rematch throughout the press conference.
“We’ve moved on,” he voiced earlier, “we’re ready to focus on this week and I know everybody in the media is going to make a big deal of it but as players, it really is just our next game on our schedule. It’s the biggest one we’re playing because it is the next one.”
“Nothing that we did last year carries over to this year,” Allen added. “So, we just gotta go out there again in a hostile environment. We know how their crowd is. It’s a fantastic place to play in, it’s one of the special places you can play in the league. Looking forward to the challenge and it’s a really good team that we’re about to go play.”
Allen may downplay the gravity of this matchup in front of the cameras but it’s impossible not to feel some pressure after the 13-second collapse in 2021. Based on their golf outings this summer, it appears the two superstars have become friends off the field but every great athlete is also competitive and there’s no doubt that the Bills want some vengeance in Week 6.
For Mahomes and Kansas City, it’s about weathering that incoming storm at Arrowhead Stadium in front of Chiefs faithful.
Patrick Mahomes Shows Josh Allen Love
It was a lot of the same from Mahomes this week during his press conference.
“When you go up against the other great quarterbacks in the league, you always want to win, you always want to compete,” the Chiefs quarterback stated. “Josh is a great guy. He’s a great quarterback. Physically talented, he can throw, he can run, he can really do it all. But he’s a great dude too.”
Mahomes continued candidly: “Obviously, when we’re on the football field, we’re competing against each other and we want to beat each other’s teams. But I have a ton of respect for him and the player and the person that he is.”
As for the AFC postseason outing that some have thrown into the history books as one of the greatest NFL games of all time, Mahomes had this to say:
“To me, it was battling through adversity, it was finding a way to win no matter what it took. [Buffalo’s] a great football team, still a great football team, and we know it’s going to come down to the wire every single time we play them. And so to see the guys respond even when it kind of looked like it was all over, that’s something that we’ll always have.”
No bulletin board material here, just mutual respect from two of the league’s top talents.
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Bills’ Josh Allen Breaks Silence on Patrick Mahomes Rematch vs Chiefs