Patrick Mahomes is getting a lot of comparisons to Tom Brady as he prepares to play his fourth Super Bowl in the last five years Sunday.
But as he points out, he has a long way to go before he gets close to Brady’s seven Super Bowl wins if he ever gets here.
But the emphasis on chasing Brady obscures the fact that Mahomes can join the ranks of the best quarterbacks of all time if he wins his third in the last five years.
Since the NFL started playing title games in 1933, winning three titles has been the mark of greatness. Brady won three in first four years as a starter and then went nine years without winning one until he won three in five years for the Patriots before leaving for Tampa Bay where he won the seventh.
Except for Brady, no quarterback has won more than five titles, which Bart Starr did with the 1960s Packers.
Terry Bradshaw, Joe Montana and Sid Luckman won four while Troy Aikman and Otto Graham won three NFL titles after winning four in a row with the AAFC, but the NFL doesn’t count their records the way it counts the AFL records.
So that is just seven quarterbacks who won three or more titles. Mahomes can be the eighth. Then there is John Unitas who started three title winning games, but was injured in Super Bowl V and Earl Morrall finished up.
A Mahomes victory would also give him his first repeat and the first since Brady did it in 2003-2004. Bradshaw was the last one to repeat twice and last one to win four in six years. Starr also repeated twice and is the only quarterback since title games were started to win three in a row. The Green Bay Packers won three titles in a row from 1929-31 when Red Dunn at quarterback in the days when the team with best regular season record was the champion. That was before the Bears and Luckman popularized the T formation. The Packers under coach Curly Lambeau used what was called the Notre Dame Box and mostly ran the ball.
Here is the list in the order of the quarterbacks who have won three or more titles since the NFL went to title games:
–Sid Luckman won 4 in 7 years from 1940-46 with the Chicago Bears.
–Otto Graham won 3 in 6 from1950-55 with the Cleveland Browns after winning four AAFC titles in a row from 1046-49 before the team joined the NFL.
–Bart Starr won 5 in 7 from 1961-67 with the Green Bay Packers.
–Terry Bradshaw won 4 in 6 from 1974-79 with the Pittsburgh Steelers.
–Joe Montana won 4 in nine years from 1981-89 with the San Francisco 49ers.
–Troy Aikman won 3 in four years from 1992 to 1995 with the Dallas Cowboys.
–Tom Brady won 7 from 2001 to 2020. He won 3 in four years from 2001-2004 and 3 more from 2014 to 2018 with the Patriots. He then won his his seventh in 2020 with Tampa Bay.
–John Unitas started three title winning games for the Baltimore Colts in 1958-59 and in Super Bowl V But he was injured in the Super Bowl and Earl Morrall went the rest of the way although the starter usually gets credit for the win.
Now the question is whether Mahomes will get added to the list this Sunday.
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