With Tom Brady retiring a few years ago, a new face of the NFL was needed. Good thing there was already one winning championship. Patrick Mahomes has stepped into that spotlight. And while he’s not quite as charismatic as Brady was off the field, he still draws eyeballs.
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That’s why GQ brought the Kansas City Chiefs QB on to discuss the details of a few movies about football. So they could see what a professional football player thinks of the portrayals. There have been dozens of Hollywood movies made about football. It is the most popular sport in America, after all.
However, whether it’s high school, college, or professional, the films always seem to struggle somewhat with putting real hard-hitting football on screen. While arguably the greatest football film of all-time, the Denzel Washington-led Remember the Titans, didn’t get much criticism from Mahomes, it didn’t escape completely unchecked.
“Remember the Titans is honestly—other than the last scene, when my guy Sunshine blocks like three guys—it’s pretty accurate as far as all the football scenes. A great movie, one that I’ll still watch to this day because it teaches you more than just football.”
Sunshine, a quarterback, blocking three players is slightly unrealistic, but as Mahomes said, they did a pretty good job with the football aspect overall. Even if the actors do look a little bit silly running around the field in those ill-fitting pads. What makes that Denzel classic so good, however, is that the story is much bigger than football. It’s all about how a school in the South was forced to integrate its football team towards the end of segregation.
Another movie Mahomes reviewed very positively was another one in the “greatest football movie all-time” conversation, Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday. It’s a much more raw and realistic depiction of pro football, which meant it’s one of the few that didn’t use any real-life stories, players, or teams.
Mahomes appreciated the quarterback’s ability to “spin it” in Varsity Blues. However, the QB did take the receivers to task for their route-running, which was far from crisp.
Mahomes also took a look at Rudy, Little Giants, and both the movie and TV versions of Friday Night Lights. He had small criticisms for most of them, but overall, he seemed to be taking it easy on most of these classic films.
The Chiefs QB will show actors across the nation how it’s done when he takes the field to kick off his team’s season on Friday night in Brazil against the division rival Los Angeles Chargers, with kickoff at 8 PM ET.
