With two of the league’s top young quarterbacks, the Chiefs and Bills have become de facto rivals in the AFC.
Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen will meet again on Sunday when Buffalo goes back to Kansas City for the first time since losing a lead with 13 seconds left in the divisional round of last year’s postseason.
Mahomes and Allen were golf buddies during the offseason. But they’ll be competitors on opposite sidelines once again for one of Sunday’s marquee matchups.
“Yeah, when you go up against the other great quarterbacks in the league, you always want to win. You always want to compete,” Mahomes said in his Wednesday press conference. “Josh is a great guy. He’s a great quarterback — physically talented, he can throw, can run, he can really do it all. But he’s a great dude too.
“And so, obviously when we’re on the football field, we are competing against each other and we want to beat each other’s teams, but I have a ton of respect for him the player and person that he is.”
As for the last time the two teams shared a field in January, Mahomes said what comes to mind is battling through adversity and finding a way to win no matter what it took.
“That’s a great football team — still a great football team — and we know it’ll come down to the wire every single time that we play them,” Mahomes said. “And so, to see the guys respond even when it kind of looked like it was all over, that’s something that you’ll always have.”
Including the postseason, Mahomes is 3-1 over Allen. The Bills beat the Chiefs 38-20 during the regular season last year.