Paylor on Super Bowl: This is 2013 LeBron versus 1998 Jordan

Patrick Mahomes Chiefs
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With Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes, Super Bowl LV certainly won’t be shy on star power. But as Yahoo Sports senior NFL reporter Terez Paylor observed, the outcome of this game could reverberate for years to come.

“I call this a delayed legacy game,” Paylor said on Reiter Than You, “and these are pretty rare where an all-time great player faces a great player who’s really, really young and could be as great one day. When we compare them, this game might be the tiebreaker – or this series might be the tiebreaker.”

Need a comparison? Paylor provided one.

“This would have been like 2013 LeBron facing Michael Jordan in his very last NBA Finals,” Paylor said. “This would have been LeBron’s second possible ring versus Michael going for his seventh. That’s what this would have been like. It’s a delayed legacy game. Let’s say Jordan and LeBron met in the Finals at one point. Well, wouldn’t that be pretty helpful right now to solve this argument?”

In a word, yes.

“All we do is talk about . . . which guy is greater,” Paylor said. “Well, I guess you could say Jordan was a lot older and LeBron was a lot younger, but you literally could have seen it. If the older guy wins, that’s a pretty big thing, and if the younger guy wins, that’s a pretty big thing. 

“So it’s a delayed legacy game,” Paylor continued. “They very rarely happen where it’s going to end up being a tiebreaker, possibly, in a decade or two, even though the younger guy’s got a lot more work to do.”