Patrick Mahomes vs Josh Allen is a legacy-defining matchup in AFC Championship game

The Kansas City Chiefs will face the Buffalo Bills in the AFC Championship Game next Sunday at Arrowhead Stadium. It's only fitting that these two teams face off once again.

This season, Mahomes and Allen have been consistently viewed as two of the top teams in the NFL and they are led by two of the best quarterbacks of this generation. This will be the fourth time in five years that Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen will go head-to-head in the playoffs, and Chiefs fans hope that history will repeat itself once again.

While Josh Allen and the Bills have bested the Chiefs multiple times in the regular season, they are 0-3 in the playoffs vs KC during the Mahomes/Allen era. Their first meeting was also in the AFC Championship Game after the 2020 regular season. The Chiefs came out on top 38-24 in Arrowhead Stadium and then lost to the Buccaneers in the Super Bowl.

The second time Mahomes and Allen faced off in the playoffs might be the most memorable. That was the famous "13 seconds" game in the divisional round after the 2021 season. The Chiefs won in Arrowhead once again, this time by the score of 42-36. Once again, the Chiefs would lose their next game, this time in the AFC Championship to the Cincinnati Bengals.

The third time they met in the playoffs was just last season when the Chiefs had to go on the road to Buffalo in the divisional round and came away the winners by the score of 27-24. This time, Kansas City would not only win the following week in Baltimore but would go on to win their second consecutive Super Bowl and cement their status as one of the NFL's true dynasties.

These playoff matchups have done so much to write the legacies of these two quarterbacks. Mahomes is now viewed as one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time and Allen is seen as an incredible regular-season quarterback who has never even made it to a Super Bowl. If it wasn't for Mahomes, would Allen already have a Super Bowl win or two? It's hard to say, but these two quarterback's stories are certainly intertwined—and now they are going to write another chapter on Sunday.

For the fourth time in five years, Mahomes and Allen will face off with their seasons on the line.

Both quarterbacks have played well in these playoff matchups. Allen has completed 65.3% of his passes, thrown for 267.3 yards/game with 7 touchdowns and 1 interception, and averaged 76 yards rushing with 2 rushing touchdowns. Mahomes has completed 75.2% of his passes, thrown for 306 yards/game with 8 touchdowns and 0 interceptions, and averaged 31 yards rushing with 1 rushing touchdown. So Mahomes has just edged Allen out in the stat categories while leading his team to a 3-0 record in these games.

While Lamar Jackson has to deal with the allegations of choking in the playoffs after a great regular season, that hasn't been the case with Allen. In the past five seasons, he's lost in the playoffs to Mahomes three times and Joe Burrow once. He's simply been slightly out-dueled by one of the other elite quarterbacks in the NFL. Now, eventually, you have to win one of those duels to be considered an all-time great, but right now, Josh Allen's career resembles someone like Charles Barkley in the NBA— truly great player who just couldn't beat Michael Jordan when it mattered.

These two quarterbacks were the top two quarterbacks in my Playoff Quarterback Power Rankings last week for a reason. The winner of this game will find themselves in the Super Bowl with a chance at history. For Mahomes, he is trying to complete the NFL's first-ever Super Bowl three-peat and get his fourth overall Super Bowl win. That would cement him as one of the best quarterbacks of all time. Allen is trying to prove that he is not just a regular-season quarterback and that he can go into the history books as a champion, officially changing his narrative forever.

These two quarterbacks have a lot of shared history in the playoffs. Their stories are intertwined and the next chapter has a chance to be arguably the biggest for each of them. This is obviously a team game and the winning team will need all-around performances from all three phases of the game to advance to the Super Bowl, but there is no denying that the biggest spotlights will be on Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen and I can't wait to see what they do when the lights come on.