Troy Aikman is closing in on 30,000 retweets and 200,000 likes for his tweet this week scoffing at a comparison between himself and Patrick Mahomes.
Aikman, the three-time Super Bowl winner with the Cowboys, responded to a tweet noting that Mahomes already has 36 percent of Aikman’s career touchdowns, in 8 percent of the games by writing, “Talk to me when he has 33% of my Super Bowl titles.”
In an interview with KTCK, Aikman said he wasn’t taking a shot at Mahomes but was taking a shot at comparisons between eras that he doesn’t think are apt.
“You can’t compare anything that’s happening in today’s game to any other era,” Aikman said, via the Dallas Morning News. “[Pat Mahomes]’s been phenomenal. Great kid, love everything about him. I just don’t like when we start trying to look at numbers and saying ‘this is why this guy’s greater than this particular player, this former player,’ whatever it is. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
The league average passer rating when Aikman entered the league in 1989 was 75.6; last year when Mahomes was league MVP, the league average passer rating was 92.9. So the passing game has changed significantly since Aikman’s days, and he’d like to make sure anyone making comparisons knows that.