Josh Allen was so good in the Buffalo Bills’ wild card win over the New England Patriots last week he had another NFL quarterback bare-chested cheering him on in the stands.
Allen threw five touchdowns and had a near-perfect passer rating of 157.6, and you could argue his wasn’t even the best quarterback performance of the week.
Patrick Mahomes threw for 404 yards and five touchdowns in basically three quarters of work as the Kansas City Chiefs sent Ben Roethlisberger into retirement. Joe Burrow led the Cincinnati Bengals to their first playoff win in three decades by throwing for 244 yards and two touchdowns. And Tom Brady and Matthew Stafford each threw two touchdown passes in their teams’ commanding playoff wins.
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For as noncompetitive as most of the games were, wild card weekend proved once again we are in a golden age of quarterback play in the NFL.
And as the eight remaining teams get set to kick off what looks like a sublime set of divisional-round games this weekend, that should serve as a reminder to the Detroit Lions and the rest of the league’s also-rans just how crucial great quarterback play is to sustained success.
If you have it, you’re always a threat to make a long playoff run. If you don’t, you’re always searching for it, and need just about everything else to go right in order to win.
Of the 55 Super Bowl champions, 44, or 80%, have had Hall of Fame or likely future Hall of Fame quarterbacks under center. Most of the 11 who didn’t had either a transformative defensive player (like Lawrence Taylor or Ray Lewis) or multiple Hall of Fame defenders (like Richard Dent and Mike Singletary, Howie Long and Mike Haynes, or Warren Sapp, Derrick Brooks and John Lynch) on their roster.
More recently, those who didn’t also had a quarterback on a rookie deal (the 2012 Baltimore Ravens and 2017 Philadelphia Eagles).
Only five of the 11 beat other Hall of Fame quarterbacks in the Super Bowl.
Great NFL teams usually have great NFL quarterbacks, and that’s relevant both to those left in the playoffs and those like the Lions watching from home.
Brady and Aaron Rodgers already are future first-ballot Hall of Famers, with Brady, 44, chasing his eighth Super Bowl ring, and Rodgers, 38, on the verge of winning his fourth NFL MVP award.
Mahomes certainly seems Canton-bound and can erase any doubt about that by winning his second title in four seasons as a starter.
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Burrow and Allen are too new to have Hall of Fame credentials, but leading their formerly downtrodden franchises to championships would be a step in that direction. And the Rams saw Stafford — more on him later — as the final piece to their Super Bowl.
As for the Lions, that’s why I’ve been so steadfast in saying they still need to find a long-term solution at quarterback for their rebuild to really take off.
Jared Goff has played in a Super Bowl before and might get there again. But at 27 years old, coming off a disjointed season in which he led the Lions to three wins, he’s more likely to end up in the Joe Flacco-Phil Simms class of quarterback than he is anything elite. And the Lions don’t have the type of defense Flacco and Simms had when they won their titles or the time and cap space needed to build one.
Goff played well enough after Thanksgiving that he deserves another chance to start in 2022.
But if the ultimate goal is to win Super Bowls, plural, then using history as a guide, the Lions still need to find a franchise quarterback before that’s a mountain they’re able to scale.
It does not matter where they find one — Burrow was a No. 1 overall pick, Allen went seventh, Mahomes 10th, Rodgers 24th and Brady 199th — it just matters that they do.
More on Stafford
It was nice to see Stafford win the first playoff game of his career last week. He was the Lions’ best quarterback since Hall of Famer Bobby Layne, he did a lot in and around the community and he remains a fan favorite of many here in Detroit.
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But it’s asinine to hold the Rams’ commanding win over the Cardinals up as proof the Lions did Stafford wrong, or to now absolve him of any blame for the franchise’s struggles the past 12 seasons.
The Cardinals looked disinterested while playing an all-around terrible game, not unlike the performance they had in a 30-12 loss to the Lions at Ford Field last month. Kyler Murray threw two interceptions, including one on his own goal line, and the Cardinals were lucky have 40 yards of offense in the first half of a 34-11 loss.
The Rams have gone all-in while trying to build a Super Bowl contender. They have at least two future Hall of Famers on defense (Aaron Donald and Von Miller) and maybe a third in Jalen Ramsey, one of the game’s best receivers in Cooper Kupp and a pretty darn good supporting cast.
The Lions never had enough of the right parts around Stafford at the right time to be successful, but there aren’t many teams that can match the Rams’ current talent base and there are more than a few quarterbacks who would have led their teams to wins over Arizona the way Murray and Co. played last week.
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None of that should detract from Stafford’s performance, which was excellent. He played much better than he did down the stretch of this season and in any of his three playoff games in Detroit, when it should be noted he was flanked by a first-ballot Hall of Fame receiver in Calvin Johnson and one of the NFL’s best defenses in 2014.
One playoff win — heck, one Super Bowl win, as noted above — does not automatically make a quarterback elite, but Stafford does have a chance to insert himself in that conversation if he beats Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and (perhaps) Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers the next two weeks to win the NFC.
At the risk of offending those who felt the need to make a snap judgment on Stafford’s first playoff win and have it define the rest of his career, I’ll say what I’ve always said: Stafford was a good quarterback in Detroit, but didn’t reach the level of great for a number of reasons. He and the organization parted ways at the right time.
He has the chance to have success in LA, but we need to wait and see how he and the Rams play before we decide how it defines his career.
Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.