ESPN addressed the elephant in the room Thursday night.
No, it wasn’t Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift watching Nebraska-Cincinnati just days after announcing their engagement. It was Dylan Raiola playing in front of his idol, the man he copies down to every mechanism, every look, every mannerism, in Patrick Mahomes.
The game was at Arrowhead Stadium, which made the whole thing that much more surreal. Here’s Nebraska’s quarterback, who has turned Patrick Mahomes’ imitation into an art form, playing in Mahomes’ house while the actual Patrick Mahomes watched from somewhere in the building.
And with the game being on ESPN, the broadcast couldn’t ignore it. The network had to address what everyone was thinking.
“I think he did a really good job managing the emotions,” analyst Roddy Jones said during the broadcast. “Obviously, this stadium, the excitement coming in, the fact that he’s playing in the stadium that his idol, and the guy he models himself after, Patrick Mahomes, plays in.”
Raiola has been modeling himself after his “idol” Patrick Mahomes for at least four years — maybe longer.
“I humbly say this, but I consider myself sort of like Patrick Mahomes,” he told me in 2021. “I know I can make all the off-platform throws. I’m accurate. Really just a great teammate and a great leader, which comes first, and that just trickles down to everything football-wise. Patrick Mahomes, I look up to him. I watch him every Sunday and just learn from watching him every week.”
Since then, it’s gone way past admiration.
“I can’t get mad at God for making me look like him,” Raiola said recently, defending himself against critics who think the imitation has gone too far.
Thursday was Dylan Raiola’s audition to determine whether his Patrick Mahomes tribute act can actually play football when it matters. And to ESPN’s credit, it treated the spectacle with restraint, mentioning the Mahomes connection without making it the centerpiece of the entire broadcast.
Still, everyone understood that they were watching a college quarterback who built his entire persona around copying an NFL superstar, playing in that superstar’s actual stadium.
You can copy the haircut and the sunglasses. You can wear the same number and practice the same pregame rituals. But when you’re standing in Arrowhead Stadium with ESPN cameras capturing every throw, mimicry only gets you so far.
Raiola completed 33 of 42 passes for 243 yards and two touchdowns in Nebraska’s 20-17 win over Cincinnati.
For one night in Arrowhead, Raiola showed there’s more to this act than a haircut and a jersey number. He may never escape the Mahomes shadow, but at least now there’s something real underneath the cosplay.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.