National Football League

Mahomes, Allen show future of the NFL is in great hands

Updated Jan. 24, 2022 5:27 p.m. ET

By Charlotte Wilder
FOX Sports Columnist

Nobody lost the AFC divisional-round game between the Buffalo Bills and the Kansas City Chiefs.

The Chiefs simply won.

Patrick Mahomes and his Kansas City cronies secured the win with a touchdown in overtime before Josh Allen and his rowdy Buffalo Bills could even put their hands on the ball.

Thanks to the NFL’s overtime rule that the first touchdown wins, and given that the entire game had been a shootout, it was clear whichever team won the coin toss was going to advance to the AFC Championship. The Chiefs got lucky on the coin flip, and so Mahomes marched down the field, found tight end Travis Kelce in the end zone, and the rest is history.

Kansas City is on its way to a fourth conference championship in as many years.

"They made one more play than we did, and that’s what it came down to," a very somber Allen said in his postgame news conference. He sat in the depths of the Chiefs' stadium, beamed out to reporters through a computer screen.

It was fitting that his image was in only 2D, thanks to COVID protocols, because Allen was a flattened man. He never wants to feel the way he has felt at the end of the past two seasons, when the Chiefs knocked him and his team out of the playoffs. Allen kept saying he was going to take what he'd learned Sunday and use it to make sure he doesn’t experience those emotions for a third year in a row.

It was a feeling Bills coach Sean McDermott described as "sick to our stomachs."

But it was unclear what Allen could learn from the experience. Because the Bills seemed to do all they could. Even Kelce, in his joyful postgame news conference, said, "It kind of was just whoever had the ball last that was going to win that game."

Allen was transcendent, and so was Mahomes. So were their teammates. Tyreek Hill, Jerick McKinnon, Travis Kelce, Mecole Hardman and every other player from Kansas City put his body on the line to grind it out for the home crowd. And that was after star defender Tyrann Matthieu left the game with a head injury early in the first quarter.

The entire Bills team was on fire as well. For example, wide receiver Gabriel Davis caught FOUR TOUCHDOWNS. That’s a playoff record. No guy had ever done that in a playoff game.

It felt unfair that this matchup wasn't the AFC Championship — and, in fact, that it wasn’t the Super Bowl. That might’ve been the single best football game I have seen in my entire life. The final score was 42-36, and it was more like a tennis match than a football game. The Bills would score, then the Chiefs would score, then the Bills would score, then the Chiefs would score.

The game was tied 14-14 at the half, which set up the last two quarters to be just as much of a battle, featuring the kinds of touchdowns, scrambles and passes that make you scream "WHAT!?" at your television and say "I can’t believe it" over and over again. The cherry on top came when Allen led his team on a final drive that resulted in a touchdown to take the lead with 13 seconds left.

Thirteen seconds, however, is too many seconds when Patrick Mahomes is on the other side of the ball. In another "WHAT?!" moment, he marched right down the field, putting his team in field-goal range, and kicker Harrison Butker nailed one through the uprights (luckily for K.C., considering he missed an extra point and a field goal earlier).

The Chiefs sent the beautifully chaotic game into overtime and then beat the Bills with that Kelce touchdown.

While this game was incredible, there have been many incredible games in NFL history, so maybe I shouldn't say this was the best I’ve ever seen. But one thing I can say with certainty is that this entire divisional round was the best of all time.

This past weekend was "The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Good Football." By the time the Chiefs won, I’d already forgotten that the Bengals narrowly beat the Titans in Tennessee, that the Niners knocked out Aaron Rodgers’ Packers at snowy Lambeau and that Tom Brady had Undertaker-ed himself back to life, only to lose by a field goal at home to the Rams.

By the time the last game of the weekend began, I felt like I’d ridden a roller coaster after eating ice cream.

And feeling dizzy was a tough place to start with this game, because if Rams-Bucs was a roller coaster, Bills-Chiefs was the second night of a bachelorette party in Vegas for that one friend who always does too much. After that game, all Americans have to get new cell phones, cancel our credit cards and pledge to drink a green juice every morning for the next two weeks. This game was like the scene in "Matilda" in which the evil principal makes that kid Bruce Boggtrotter eat an entire chocolate cake in front of the school.

We were blessed with too many good things — a gluttonous amount of overstimulation — which leads me to believe we will pay for all that fun with a Super Bowl featuring a final score of 10-3.

But as exhausting as these games were to watch (let alone play in, I would imagine), they were also refreshing. They felt like an ice bath. Rodgers and Brady are no longer in the mix. We don’t have to talk about their legacies. We don’t have to talk about their futures or the beginning of the end every time those guys with gray in their beards take the field for a game or the stage for a media conference on the march to the Super Bowl.

To end this weekend with a game between two of the most gifted young quarterbacks (one who already has a championship ring) felt like turning a page. Sports media has spent so many years — 21 in Brady’s case, 17 in Rodgers' — talking about Brady's and Rodgers’ transcendent abilities that it was a true delight to revel in somewhat fresher faces.

Even though Allen and Mahomes have already more than proven their athletic ability, Sunday felt different. They exhibited true mastery of their craft and growth in their playing styles. Allen threw balls away instead of getting sacked for 15-yard losses, and Mahomes came into the last 13 seconds with the steely resolve of a leader who knows without a doubt that he is not about to screw up anything.

They seemed to reach new levels in this one. Afterward, Allen said the matchup had "video-game numbers."

But it wasn’t just the numbers. It was also that Allen has an actual cannon for an arm and can defy gravity. On Sunday, he threw a 75-yard touchdown pass that looked as easy as if he were tossing a piece of paper in a trash can. And it was that Mahomes is a shape-shifter who can bend space and time. He slithered out of tackles and threw sideways as though he were tossing a Frisbee at a barbecue.

The most beautiful aspect of this game is that the Chiefs are going on to face the Bengals.

Is that team as complete as Kansas City? No. The Bengals haven’t been to the AFC Championship since 1988. But Joe Burrow is on his way to becoming as much of a physics-denier as Allen and Mahomes. He has the "it" factor. His team won't be favored in Sunday's game at Arrowhead, but Burrow is quickly entering "don’t count that guy out" territory.

What a future we’ve got in this league. There is incredible talent in the AFC — don’t forget how amazing the Chargers’ Justin Herbert is (like Allen, he lost by the skin of his teeth a few weeks ago).

The last men standing in the NFC aren’t too shabby, either: Jimmy Garoppolo might not be the same kind of talent as these young guns, but he’s great at playing musical chairs and somehow being left with a seat, which has to count for something (well, maybe what really counts is wide receiver Deebo Samuel, but I digress).

And in the past two weeks, Matthew Stafford has proven that maybe a change of scenery does make a difference. He secured his first two playoff wins in his first season with the Rams after leaving the Lions, the team that drafted him in 2009.

The point is that these NFL postseason storylines and faces are somewhat fresh, the football is being played on another planet, and the product on the field is as good as it has ever been.

It’s a shame that someone has to lose, but it’s a beautiful thing to be able to say that.

Charlotte Wilder is a general columnist and cohost of "The People's Sports Podcast" for FOX Sports. She's honored to represent the constantly neglected Boston area in sports media, loves talking to sports fans about their feelings and is happiest eating a hotdog in a ballpark or nachos in a stadium. Follow her on Twitter @TheWilderThings.