For their entire NFL careers, Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen have posed fascinating choices for sports media. And as they clash over the 2024 MVP trophy, ESPN host Domonique Foxworth believes all the perceptions around both QBs’ careers are coming to the surface for awards voters.

Discussing the race on The Domonique Foxworth Show after Jackson’s dominant win in Houston on Christmas Day, Foxworth highlighted what NFL media gets right and wrong about both players.

With Allen, analysts are putting stock in the unexpected. After Buffalo traded Stefon Diggs and lost Gabe Davis, Allen, and the Bills somehow put together one of their better recent seasons.

Whereas with Jackson, a two-time NFL MVP with multiple high-profile postseason failures on his resume, analysts seem less convinced by his career-best season.

“Now it feels like even within the quarterbacks, there’s two different arguments of like, who played the best and who had the most team success?” Foxworth said. “And then there’s like another column over there like, who did we not expect much from and had success?”

At the same time, Foxworth highlighted how both players have sharply changed the conversation around themselves since entering the NFL. Allen went from a questionable prospect to a revolutionary athletic force, while Jackson helped lead a change in how NFL minds see Black, run-first quarterbacks in the pros.

Foxworth admitted to allowing his pro-Jackson bias to turn him into an Allen hater early on. Still, he encouraged other NFL analysts to be more willing to change their views on players and “root for the awesome.”

“In sports media, a lot of us have a tendency to cling to our priors and want them to be right, which I think I do also. But as soon as I can get off a dumb opinion, I get off of it,” Foxworth explained.

“We all have some biases. But I try my best to recognize when I find myself rooting against awesome because I want to be right; I realize that you know what I can do. I can change my opinion and I can root for the awesome and also be right. That’s how opinions work; you get more information. And … I was very pro-Lamar and anti-Josh. It took a few years, but then I saw Josh doing Josh things, and I was like, ooh, that’s my guy. I love him.”

As both Jackson and Allen have turned in Hall of Fame-caliber starts in the NFL, Foxworth believes both have also forced football media and fans to reconsider their perceptions of the people who play the position.

“It’s funny that we’ve gotten this deep into the Lamar-Josh Allen conversation without pointing out one of the most obvious reasons why it has become such a hot-button conversation piece and why people are so deeply ingrained in their positions,” Foxworth said.

While Jackson’s unapologetic embrace of southern Black culture is unique in the stuffy, old-school NFL, Foxworth pointed out that Allen plays QB in an even more “futuristic” way than the supposedly new-school Jackson.

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“Lamar is Black. And he’s not a traditional quarterback. I don’t remember the last NFL quarterback who would play with diamond grills in and speak with an accent. It represented something else. So I think a lot of the people who are very strongly pro-Lamar, juxtaposing them against each other, Lamar was a Heisman trophy winner at a major college. Josh Allen was not a very good football player at a major college. And it came to represent some things to people that it probably never should have. And I think that speaks to a lot of these football nerds … who are like, (Jackson is) our guy, and (Allen is) your guy, old football media who just wants the biggest, whitest guy to play quarterback. And ironically, Josh Allen plays in a way that is more futuristic than even Lamar Jackson sometimes.”

Football nerds are just one group that has embraced Jackson and pushed back on traditional Troy Aikman or Terry Bradshaw-type quarterbacks. Many Black football fans and former NFL players see Jackson as an avatar for their cultural and football values.

As a former NFL defensive back who played for the Ravens and still loves near Baltimore, Foxworth is one. But to reinforce his point about being open to information and pushback, the host reminded himself and the audience that Jackson is also more conservative than him and not some kind of progressive icon against the regressive NFL.

“Any time I get comfortable using Lamar as a virtue signal, I get to my Google box and I’m reminded that I may not agree with everybody who I root for, and it’s fine,” Foxworth noted. “I can still root for them even if I do not agree with some of the decisions they’ve made.”

At the end of the long segment on his podcast, Foxworth summed up the conversation by saying that while Jackson vs. Allen is full of incongruities and misperceptions, it’s also super fun to debate. So maybe there is nothing wrong with continuing to yammer about it, even if we get some things wrong along the way.

“It may not need to be fixed if it’s this much fun to talk about it,” Foxworth said.

[The Domonique Foxworth Show on YouTube]