Mahomes Might Face Non-NFL Competition for 2028 Olympic Roster

Not so fast, my friends. Darrell Doucette may as well have been Lee Corso last week when the NFL announced that all 32 teams voted in favor of allowing their players to compete for flag-football gold at the 2028 Summer Olympics.

The current quarterback for Team USA, Doucette, wants a fair shot at making the historic team. Worried that more popular tackle-football counterparts like Patrick Mahomes will dominate the 2028 roster, Doucette has already said he’s a better flag quarterback than Mahomes. ESPN analyst Bill Barnwell on Monday proposed an idea that could work.

“I would pay a large sum of money out of my own pocket to watch the non-NFL flag football team vs. the NFL flag football team in a qualifier to see who represents the US,” Barnwell wrote on Bluesky.

“Any outcome is good! NFL team blowout: Great, Pros vs. Joes was a lot of fun … NFL team narrow win: Classic, the underdogs pushed them to their limit … Non-NFL narrow win: Do you believe in miracles 2.0 … Non-NFL blowout: This ends with the NFL players fighting each other on the field.”

Whether that last outcome is positive or negative is, as Peyton Manning says, debatable. But no one would argue with the potential television ratings and revenue goldmine. And, Barnwell might have not only solved the brewing Olympics issue; Barnwell’s colleague Mina Kimes said his proposal could reverse waning interest in the Pro Bowl Games.

Photoshopped images of Mahomes in a Team USA jersey have already appeared on social media. The Chiefs’ quarterback, hands down, would win a national popularity vote over Doucette. Just settle the debate on the field, Doucette told Adam Kilgore of the Washington Post.

“If those guys come in and ball out,” Doucette said, “and they're better than us, hats off to them. Go win that gold medal for our country. The flag guys deserve their opportunity. That's all we want. We felt like we worked hard to get the sport to where it's at.”

Back in 1992, the dream was the same for the U.S. basketball Dream Team: Compete against the best in the world for something professionals could never win in organized leagues, Olympic Gold.

But the NBA and USA Basketball had no issues stacking their roster with Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Charles Barkley back in 1992. Their lineup didn’t have to compete against the nation’s best from a much different sport.

And flag football is different. Mahomes, for instance, is likely the only candidate from the Chiefs’ current roster because the sport emphasizes a certain type of athlete. Kansas City has a locker room filled with players who’ve produced the NFL’s best record since 2018 but they're football athletes, not flag-football athletes.

And according to Olympics.com, each flag team fields only five players and carries just 10 on a roster. Each game consists of two 20-minute halves, and the field is 70 yards long and 25 yards wide (a 100-yard NFL field is 160 feet wide, or 53.3 yards). Play begins on a team’s own 5-yard line and the offense has four downs to cross midfield (first-and-30), then has four downs to cross the goal line (first-and-35).

Perhaps the key difference is that flag-football athletes have nuanced skills, the ability to shift hips, joints and ligaments to avoid defensive flag-pullers trying to “tackle” by removing the thin flags on the ball-carrier’s waist. Also, offensive players are prohibited from “flag-guarding,” swatting away the opponent’s hands. Derrick Henry's stiff-arms are outlawed.

NFL players like Justin Jefferson, Jahmyr Gibbs and Travis Hunter could adapt to flag football, just as Pro Bowlers do every winter at the Pro Bowl Games. But whether the non-NFL players could win such a competition is a wildly interesting idea.

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