With Caitlin Clark eliminated from the remainder of the WNBA playoffs, the sports media has naturally shifted its attention to its other favorite target: Bills superstar quarterback Josh Allen.
Former ESPN host Bomani Jones has spent considerable energy trying to revive his media career by manufacturing a race war between fans of Allen and Lamar Jackson. Last month, Jones accused unnamed “white folks” of favoring Allen, despite acknowledging on multiple occasions that he favors Black quarterbacks.
For the record, there is no evidence that white people broadly favor Allen over Jackson. That’s why Jones never gets around to naming these supposedly biased white people.
Still, it’s amusing to watch how determined he is to make Allen vs. Jackson a thing. And because his brand requires him to side with the Black athlete no matter the facts, he frequently invokes a senseless double standard in an attempt to justify his position.
Case in point: how he covered their game-losing interceptions this season.
On Monday, Jones uploaded a YouTube clip belittling Allen under the headline “Josh Allen Is Still THAT Guy…” During his critique, Jones called Allen a “moron” and suggested the Bills had made a mistake by deciding to live with his occasional recklessness.
“Look, [the Bills] cast their lot on the idea that we’re just gonna live with Josh Allen and whatever he does, but that’s not – I don’t think that’s what they’re talking about. Like the idea isn’t and every now and then be a moron,” Jones said.
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He then mocked the idea that Allen should be the MVP favorite or considered the best quarterback in the NFL.
“They still called him an MVP. We still talk that. Remember how ready everybody was to make him the best quarterback in the league and everything else. Are they still saying that now? I’m asking that.”
Hold that thought.
Now, compare Jones’ reaction to Jackson throwing a similar interception two weeks earlier in a last-second loss to the Saints.
Jones acknowledged that Jackson continues to lose games late, even with a new coaching staff, but quickly cushioned the criticism by telling viewers that Jackson “is a sure-fire Hall of Famer and all of that.”
Then came an alternative culprit: the receiver.
“I will say I felt like the way that Rashard Bateman reacted at that interception, it looked like he was the one that made the wrong move,” Jones added.
By the end, Jones emphasized that while Jackson struggled late, “he looked awesome, awesome for three quarters.”
To recap: Jackson’s interception was costly, but perhaps it wasn’t his fault. He’s still a Hall of Famer. He was awesome for three quarters. And his receiver might actually deserve the blame.
Allen throws one, and he’s a “moron.”
There was also no sarcastic questioning of whether Jackson still belonged among the NFL’s best quarterbacks, a designation Jones and his guests regularly apply to him.
Subtle.
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We first noticed this pattern in 2023, when Allen and Jackson lost in back-to-back weeks at home to the eventual Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs. Jackson played considerably worse against the same defense than Allen did. He also threw another game-losing interception. Yet Jones reserved substantially more criticism for Allen.
For background, Allen and Jackson are linked in the minds of the race idolaters for fairly simple reasons. They were drafted the same year and have spent most of their careers chasing Patrick Mahomes.
Allen is also a white quarterback from small-town America who posted inappropriate tweets as a teenager. Jackson is a black quarterback who was overlooked by at least one anonymous scout and, according to Jemele Hill, embraces his “people” like Allen Iverson.
To be clear, Jackson himself has never made his career about being black. The sports media assigned him that role. Bomani Jones is among those who insist on maintaining it.
They want a rivalry between the Big Bad White Quarterback and the Disrespected Black Quarterback. It’s an incredibly lazy framework, but they remain committed to it.
Before the season, Jones claimed the media held Jackson to a higher standard than Allen, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.
Further, the Lamar Bros. — Jones, Ryan Clark and Cam Newton among them — actually force us to diminish Jackson when they insist on comparing him to Allen. At this stage of their careers, the two quarterbacks aren’t particularly close.
Allen is considerably better.
Don’t take our word for it. Ask the people paid to evaluate NFL quarterbacks.
In August, The Athletic asked 50 NFL executives and coaches to rank the league’s quarterbacks entering the season. They placed Allen No. 2 in Tier 1, behind Patrick Mahomes and ahead of Matthew Stafford and Joe Burrow. Jackson ranked No. 5 — in Tier 2.
A month earlier, ESPN surveyed league executives, coaches and scouts for a similar ranking. That group ranked Allen the best quarterback in football. Jackson again finished fifth, a tier below.
So, whom should we trust: NFL coaches, executives and scouts, or Bomani Jones, Cam Newton and Ryan Clark?
One group studies film, personnel and performance for a living. The other increasingly filters the discussion through racial narratives and the social-media reaction those narratives generate.
The postseason gap is even more explicit. Take a look:
Josh Allen: 38 total touchdowns, 4,682 total yards, six interceptions, a 101.4 passer rating and an 8-7 playoff record.
Lamar Jackson: 13 total touchdowns, 2,394 total yards, seven interceptions, an 84.6 passer rating and a 3-5 playoff record.
Just stop.
Calling Allen a “moron” while treating Jackson’s mistake as an invitation for contextual nuance might score culture-war points, but it doesn’t create a real rivalry between the two.
It’s the quarterback version of Caitlin Clark vs. Angel Reese: a media rivalry sustained largely by people who desperately want the comparison to be closer than the evidence suggests.
If pundits like Bomani Jones insist on pitting a White athlete against a Black athlete, they could at least wait until they find two performing at roughly the same level.
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Side note: Jones also tried to make Kyler Murray vs. Sam Darnold a thing this summer, after Darnold won the Super Bowl. To no one’s surprise, Jones sided with Murray, the black quarterback.
That one hasn’t aged particularly well, either.
That’s the problem with racial idolatry as a substitute for analysis: eventually, the games are played.
Finally, a reasonable conclusion exists here, one requiring no racial sociology whatsoever: Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson both made errant throws that cost their teams during the first month of the regular season.
Not every moment needs to advance the race war. Sometimes a bad interception is just a bad interception.
