Three-time Super Bowl champion Patrick Mahomes may not be done being pitted against the USA men’s flag football team, whose reigning world champion members are bidding to represent the country when the sport debuts at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
During an interview on a new Hard Knocks-styled documentary set to begin streaming Tuesday, USA men’s flag team starting pass rusher Michael Better said he’d “rather rush Patrick Mahomes any day” instead of Darrell Doucette Jr, the quarterback who led the Americans to a world title in Finland in August.
Better, who asserts that Doucette is “the face” of flag football, also said he is “a better rusher than Micah Parsons”, twice an NFL first-team All-Pro. In this case, though, Better said this in the context of his non-contact sport rather than tackle format where the Dallas Cowboys linebacker plies his trade.
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“They’re not used to a quarterback or a ball carrier dipping their hips, twisting their hips, going from one quarterback to a double quarterback,” Better says on Champions Rising: USA Football’s National Team, referring to maneuvers not commonly seen in tackle football but staples in its small-side cousin where tackles are made by pulling flags from a runner’s hips. “You can be the most dominant talent in the NFL and easily be at the bottom tier of the flag football world.”
Better’s remarks on the film could revive a debate over which Doucette and Mahomes sought to diplomatically shelf while making the media rounds in February ahead of Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans.
It began in mid-August when Doucette told the Guardian that it was “disrespectful” for the public to assume that – despite their stated interest in doing so – Mahomes and fellow NFL signal-callers like the Cincinnati Bengals’ Joe Burrow and the Eagles’ Jalen Hurts would oust him and his teammates from their spots on the USA flag football team for the 2028 Olympics.
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TMZ Sports later quoted him as saying, “I feel like I’m better than Patrick Mahomes” at flag football “because of my IQ of the game”.
Despite his attempt at nuance, many commentators mocked Doucette and suggested that he should resign himself to watching the Olympics as a spectator if Mahomes, Hurts and their ilk took setting their sights on his job seriously.
Doucette then shut his detractors up by leading the US men’s flag team to a fifth straight world championship, passing for nearly 1,100 yards while throwing for, running in or catching 28 scores in seven games.
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Ahead of February’s Super Bowl in Doucette’s hometown of New Orleans, both men generally agreed that the approach should be to let the best players available represent the US at the Olympics. USA Football’s chief executive officer Scott Hallenbeck, whose organization is in charge of building the national men’s and women’s flag teams going to the Olympics, said a realistic outcome is for a core of men’s flag players to be reinforced by a few NFL stars who have the attributes to pull off a smooth transition to the five-on-five gold medal competition being planned for 2028.
It is a concept not too dissimilar from Olympic men’s soccer, an under-23 competition where each squad can have three overage players. A memorable example of that was when Brazilian superstar Neymar joined a roster of relatively lesser known players to win their country’s first gold medal in the sport at Rio 2016.
In any event, Champions Rising – which essentially gives the Last Chance U treatment to the unexpectedly emotional process of constructing the US men’s and women’s flag rosters that both won world championships in August – casts Better as a bit of an underdog. He served the US military in the Middle East after playing high school tackle football, then sacrificed his goal of a deferred collegiate career in the sport after starting a family.
After seeking a second act in flag football and trying out for the US national team in 2023, the squad’s coaches cut him. He also fractured the right side of his face after inadvertently clashing heads with an opponent while both jockeyed for position during a pass, requiring a plate and bracket to be inserted over his broken cheek and orbital bone.
“It’s no smiles and no games when you walk on the field,” Better says in the film, which similarly profiles other men’s and women’s players who tried out for spots, successfully or not, on teams that went on to win world championships.
Champions Rising makes clear no US national flag team player is exempt from trying out annually. Still, pardon Better if he doesn’t just roll over and surrendering his spot to someone like Parsons, who has publicly mused about taking 2027 off from the NFL to focus on making the 2028 Olympic flag football team.
Better, in the movie, says: “You ain’t taking my spot.”
