Get Ready For Lamar Jackson-Josh Allen Week To Be All About Race

It's Josh Allen vs. Lamar Jackson week, playoff-edition. So expect the conversation in sports to be toxic, contentious, and, of course, racial. 

Clay Travis and Bomani Jones don't agree on many topics, but both warned their followers Sunday about the week to come.

"I hate to say it, but if Josh Allen wins and the Bills are playing the Ravens next week @espn is going to turn the game into an awful racial debate and strip away the fun of the game," Clay posted on X. "I know it, you know it. Prepare yourselves in advance, it’s coming."

"ESPN has already turned the entire MVP race into a racial debate between Lamar and Josh Allen," he continued. "The game will be the next extension of that. I’m just telling you what’s coming. Buckle up. Those of us who are fans of both and just want a great game will be mostly ignored."

Bomani jokingly predicted the conversation between the two quarterbacks would remind us of the "Lakers-Celtics in '84," when race was at the forefront of the conversation amid a personal rivalry between Larry Bird and Magic Johnson.

They are right. The NFL media has cast Allen and Jackson as the chief characters in the race wars. 

ESPN pundits portray Allen as the big, bad white quarterback. They have since he entered the draft, during which old tweets of him using the N-word as a teen on social media emerged. Unlike Joe Burrow, the second-best white quarterback in the NFL, Allen is not a woke activist who posts about abortion and rap music online. 

Similarly, Jackson is far from the only great black quarterback in the NFL. Patrick Mahomes, who is bi-racial and identifies as black, is the most accomplished player in the league. But because Mahomes has a white wife and mother, racially obsessed commentators like Jemele Hill don't champion him like they do Jackson.

Here's Hill explaining to Dan Le Batard last year why Jackson means so much to black people:

"Lamar Jackson reminds me so much of Allen Iverson. Iverson had a lot of the same elements as Lamar Jackson. He has the cool, the swag, the tattoos, the cornrows. Culturally, he was the people's champ. That is Lamar Jackson. There are a lot of black people who culturally relate to Lamar Jackson."

Got all that?

Here was Bomani Jones, who started this conversation Sunday, claiming last year that unnamed people favor Allen because he is white:

"When I’m talking about those four guys in the AFC, it’s three black dudes [Mahomes, Jackson, and Stroud] and Josh Allen. So yeah, I do think some people are gonna give Josh Allen too many points, because me and Domonique also talk all the time about the times in our lives that we all gave black dudes too many points."

"I’ve talked about some of this before, I do think the NFL has a little bit of a – I don’t want to call it a crisis, but something’s changing that they never had before which is, the best quarterbacks are black. Part of the success of this league has been built around the fact that they had all these great athletes, and they still had white faces to sell everything."

Heck, ESPN analyst Domonique Foxworth admitted on the network he roots for Allen to "fail" because his fans often have pictures of the American flag in their social media bios.

ESPN has no comment.

One can find coded language in the coverage of Jackson and Allen all throughout sports talk. In aggregate, the vast majority of the coverage is positive toward Jackson and negative toward Allen.

 As Jason Whitlock noted, the threat of the labels "sell out" and "racist" have black and white television pundits, respectively, living in fear.

Will anyone on television have the spine this week to argue in favor of Allen? 

We are skeptical.

Moreover, two scripts are already written for next week, depending on the outcome of the game. If the Ravens win, the narrative will be that Josh Allen failed and Lamar Jackson is the greater quarterback. If the Bills win, the narrative will be that it was just one game and football is a team sport.

Don't you dare blame Lamar Jackson if he comes up short in the playoffs -- again.

As Clay noted at the start, the racialization of the matchup is a disservice to sports fans. Allen and Jackson are both all-time great quarterbacks who frequently leave defenses shaking their heads in disgust. They give off major big kid vs. a bunch of little kids on the playground vibes. We have all been there.

And the game Sunday has "classic" written all over it. 

As of publication, the Bills are favored by just one point over the Ravens, with the winner advancing to the AFC Championship Game, a game with historical ramifications. The winning quarterback on Sunday could have an opportunity to go head-to-head with Patrick Mahomes (if the Chiefs beat the Texans on Saturday) and derail the Chiefs quest for the first-ever three-peat in NFL history.

Imagine what knocking off this Chiefs team would do to either of their legacies. Both have the talent and supporting casts to do it.

Finally, fans don't care about the skin color of their team's quarterback. Fans just want their teams to win. It is the media, and only the media, that will not let the topic of race in sports fade – despite no proof that racial bias still exists. 

Race should have no place in the NFL discussion this week. However, race will almost certainly be the headline up until Allen and Jackson take the field Sunday night.