Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson have both had main character energy this NFL season. From MVP debates to highlight reels to conversations about which teams are most likely to make the Super Bowl, they’ve all centered on the Bills and Ravens—and their respective quarterbacks.
Allen has spent the season making historic feats seem routine and ridiculous plays feel commonplace. In a snow-dusted Week 13 Sunday Night Football game, for example, Allen threw an off-target slant route to receiver Amari Cooper and then trailed the bad pass like a basketball player following his shot for a rebound. Cooper snagged the pass but was immediately stalled by two San Francisco defenders, so he tossed the football back to Josh, who ran it into the end zone. Officially, Allen registered a 9-yard touchdown pass and also a 9-yard receiving touchdown on the play.
In Week 14 versus the Rams, Allen became the first player with three passing touchdowns and three rushing touchdowns in the same game. He also scored 52 fantasy points, the most for a quarterback in the history of fantasy football.
The following week, Allen threw for two touchdowns and ran for another two as Buffalo beat Detroit 48-42, giving the Bills eight straight games with 30-plus points, tied for the longest streak in NFL history. That win also gave Buffalo victories over the eventual no. 1 seeds in each conference, as the team had beaten Kansas City earlier in the year on the back of a fourth-and-2, 26-yard, game-sealing touchdown for Allen. Nobody has had more jaw-dropping moments this year than the Bills quarterback. Except, maybe, Jackson.
Jackson is already the youngest player in NFL history to win two MVPs and is currently playing the best football of his career. He became the first player in NFL history to lead all qualified players in yards per throw (8.8) and yards per rush (6.6) this season. He threw more than 10 touchdowns for every interception; his 41 touchdown passes were just two behind Joe Burrow for the league lead, even though Jackson had 178 fewer passing attempts; and his adjusted net yards per pass attempt, one of the most comprehensive quarterback stats there is, was 9.38, which historically sits behind only Peyton Manning’s mark in his 49-touchdown season in 2004 and Aaron Rodgers’s in his 2011 MVP season.
Jackson’s Ravens humiliated the Houston Texans on Christmas Day 31-2. They also beat Allen’s Bills 35-10, one of the reasons that Jackson may beat Allen in MVP voting (Jackson already has been named first-team All-Pro by the Associated Press voters, and the same pool decides MVP). If he wins, Lamar wouldn’t just become the MVP, but the MV3.
Allen and Jackson have defined this season. And yet both players would surely trade any individual awards for a win when they face each other this weekend, as Baltimore will travel to Buffalo for an epic divisional-round matchup. The stakes of this game are massive for both teams and both quarterbacks—and a win would be a step toward them taking control of their own postseason narratives.
So far in their playoff histories, Jackson and Allen have merely been characters in Patrick Mahomes’s tale. Mahomes, 29, could retire after this season and have a case as the third-best quarterback of all time (only Tom Brady, Joe Montana, and Terry Bradshaw have won more Super Bowls). In seven seasons as a starter, his worst postseason outcome has been losing in overtime in the AFC championship game. Mahomes has eliminated Allen in three of the past four seasons. And he took down Jackson’s Ravens in the AFC championship game last year—the first time in Lamar’s career that his team even made it far enough to face Kansas City in the playoffs.
If the Chiefs complete their quest to become the first NFL team to three-peat in the Super Bowl era, the 2020s NFL may resemble the 1990s NBA. There are three kinds of players NBA fans generally remember from the 1990s:
- Michael Jordan
- The people who played with Michael Jordan
- The people who lost to Michael Jordan
But Allen and Jackson have a chance this year to change the NFL narrative. On Sunday, the two will duke it out for the chance to (probably) challenge the NFL’s final boss in the AFC championship game. The MVP race is over, but this weekend’s game will go much further in defining these two players’ legacies.
“MVP, MVP,” Ravens fans chanted as Baltimore throttled the Pittsburgh Steelers toward the end of their 28-14 wild-card win on Saturday. In the stadium, fans were jubilant about the win. In the locker room after the game, though, players’ initial jubilation turned into a businesslike attitude, knowing that they had much further to go to vanquish their playoff demons. Consider Jackson’s NFL postseason history:
- In Jackson’s rookie season, he became the youngest quarterback to ever start a playoff game, but he looked overmatched in a 23-17 loss to the Chargers.
- The following season, the Ravens went 14-2 and earned the no. 1 seed in the AFC, and Jackson became the youngest MVP winner since Jim Brown in 1957. But after their first-round bye, the Ravens were rocked by Derrick Henry and the Titans and lost 28-12.
- Baltimore met Buffalo in the divisional round the next year, and Jackson threw a pick-six toward the end of the third quarter to give the Bills a 17-3 lead. Three plays later, he suffered a concussion and didn’t return as Baltimore lost by the same score.
- The Ravens made it back to the playoffs the following season, but Jackson—who was nursing a knee injury and staring down a tense contract negotiation—missed the final six games, including the Ravens’ playoff loss to Cincinnati.
This season, the phrase everyone around the Ravens uses to discuss Lamar is “locked in.” The day of the Steelers game, Jackson stayed off his phone and said he was much calmer than he had been going into previous playoff games. “My mom called me and I said, ‘I don’t want to talk,’” Jackson said after the win. “No disrespect. Never disrespect. But I don’t want to talk. I’m just ready for the game. Let me get to the game.”
Ravens guard Daniel Faalele said Jackson has been more vocal in the locker room this season. Cornerback Tre’Davious White echoed that the quarterback has been more focused. But left tackle Ronnie Stanley put it best when asked what, exactly, being “locked in” looks like.
“An example would be winning the AFC North and not really caring,” Stanley said. “We’ve been through these things enough throughout the years to understand we can celebrate those things after it’s all said and done. Our focus is on the big goal.”
Ravens coach John Harbaugh said he believes Jackson is more “in control” this year. “He has a great handle on the game plan, but when the play starts, he’s just seeing things,” Harbaugh said on Saturday. “He has a good grasp of the coverage, he sees the coverage; he keeps it kind of simple in terms of what he’s looking for. He studies a lot of tape. He’s just seeing the field really well.”
But perhaps the biggest change for the Ravens this season hasn’t been Lamar-related at all, but rather bringing in Derrick Henry. When the Ravens fell in the AFC championship game last season, the easy answer for why they lost was Zay Flowers’s well-intentioned goal-line stretch that turned into a turnover. But really, the Ravens lost because they had fewer designed carries for running backs in that effort than in any other game in the history of the franchise. Signing Henry this offseason meant they would go from a team that couldn’t run down the stretch to a team that could run on anyone. And they did just that, with Henry piling up 1,921 rushing yards and a league-leading 16 touchdowns.
Against the Steelers, the Ravens had a 13-play touchdown drive on which all 13 plays were runs (including a couple of dropback passes that became scrambles). On Baltimore’s opening drive, Jackson ran on five straight plays as the Steelers tried to take Henry out of the read-option equation to force Jackson to keep the ball. Henry and Jackson had nearly as many rushing yards in the game (267) as the Steelers had total yards (280).
Jackson said after the game that having Henry on the field to help him close things out feels like watching a movie.
“Do you watch the movie Cars?” Jackson asked on Saturday. “You know when Lightning McQueen is just flying and flashing past, and it’s like [whooshing sound]? That’s how Derrick looked when he was running past all those guys. It looked like a movie.”
Rushing is back this NFL season. Running the ball was a dominant theme throughout 2024 and is core to the identity of the remaining playoff teams. Jackson led the NFL in yards per carry this season, and Henry led in rushing touchdowns. Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts led the NFL in rushing touchdowns through the first 15 weeks of the season, and running back Saquon Barkley had 2,005 rushing yards in 16 games—and the most rushing yards in the second half of games in NFL history (1,245). The Lions’ David Montgomery and Jahmyr Gibbs are the first running back duo to each have 1,000 scrimmage yards and 10 touchdowns in back-to-back seasons since Jim Brown and Bobby Mitchell in 1959-60.
But amid all these incredible rushing offenses, the team that led the NFL in rushing touchdowns was … the Buffalo Bills, with 32. And that running game could be what helps both Allen and the Bills rewrite their respective playoff histories.
In the wild-card round a couple of years ago, the Bills hosted the Bengals in the snow, and Cincinnati embarrassed Buffalo 27-10. The Bills did not have a true running game to rely on in the cold that time, and therefore they couldn’t hang in tough conditions. This year, though, Buffalo smothered Denver 31-7 in the teams’ wild-card matchup in large part because of a dominant rushing attack that allowed the Bills to hold on to the ball for more than 41 minutes. Buffalo ran for 100 total yards on its first two drives, the most rushing yards on the first two drives of a playoff game in 10 years.
But one wild-card victory isn’t enough to overlook the flaws in Buffalo’s recent—or historic—playoff résumé. Outside of that Bengals game, every Bills season since Allen became a superhero in 2020 has ended with a loss to the Chiefs in the playoffs. In the 1990s, the Bills were the team that was always good enough to win the AFC but never good enough to win the Super Bowl, losing four straight. Now, Allen’s Bills are stuck in a similar rut: good enough to beat the Chiefs in the regular season for four straight years but vulnerable enough to be eliminated by the Chiefs in three of the past four seasons. The best Bills team of this era was the 2021 squad that allowed Kansas City to tie their divisional-round game in the final 13 seconds of regulation and then lost in overtime. But this Bills team is the best Buffalo has had since then—and they’re still on the rise.
These Bills have a running game fit for outdoor games in Buffalo in January and an unselfish passing attack that’s transformed from Stefon Diggs–centric to one where nobody needs the ball, and everybody blocks. Buffalo was the only team this season to throw a touchdown pass to 13 different players. Nobody on the team had more than 821 receiving yards. The biggest catch of the wild-card game was made by their third-down running back, Ty Johnson. The biggest play a Bills wide receiver made, outside of Curtis Samuel’s epic touchdown catch, was Mack Hollins’s tackle on a punt. The identity of this Bills offense, like Baltimore’s, has become harder, colder, and more physical. But now Buffalo has to play the Ravens, who rocked the Bills on Sunday Night Football in Week 4.
We are in a golden age of NFL quarterbacking. We may eventually look back on this era of Mahomes’s, Allen’s, and Jackson’s overlapping primes in the same way we look back on the Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic era in tennis, where one of them would win every major tournament and everyone else got to watch.
But until Allen or Jackson—or someone else—stops Mahomes from three-peating, the NFL will inch closer and closer to re-creating the feel of the ’90s NBA. And these QBs will be remembered for losing to the greatest. There is no vanquishing Mahomes for Allen or Jackson unless they win this week. And regardless of who actually gets the trophy, the real MVP of this season is going to be decided on Sunday.
