Josh Allen: 'I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous' for The Match vs. Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers

Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen isn’t immune to pressure and he’s not a Teflon man when it comes to feeling nervous before a big game. If he wasn’t nervous, he wouldn’t be human.  

But taking the field for an NFL playoff game as opposed to playing 12 holes of golf on national TV? Yeah, Allen said there’s absolutely no doubt which endeavor is more nerve-wracking.

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous,” Allen said Tuesday regarding his upcoming participation in The Match, the made-for-television golf competition where he and fellow young gun Patrick Mahomes of the Chiefs will be playing head-to-head against gray beards Tom Brady of the Buccaneers and Aaron Rodgers of the Packers.

“It’s a whole different racket,” Allen continued, comparing playing football on the big stage to an individual, all-eyes-on-you sport like golf. “Like when you’re on the first tee — and I’ve played in a couple of these tournaments now where there’s people around — and you get up and you’re shaking uncontrollably, you’ve got to figure it out. 

“And usually you start swinging a little faster when there’s people involved and that’s when the slices come, but hopefully my experience playing in some of those can help. But again, I haven’t played in something where it’s going to be nationally televised with an earpiece in my ear and hearing those guys talk and understand that there’s gonna be a lot of people watching so it’ll be a learning adjustment.”

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The match play event will take place Wednesday, June 1, at 6:30 p.m. ET from the Wynn Las Vegas resort course and can be seen on TNT. Since its inception in 2019, when Tigers Woods met old rival Phil Mickelson on Thanksgiving weekend, the event has raised more than $33 million for charity. 

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This will be the first time The Match will not feature a PGA Tour star, but the presence of four of the best quarterbacks in the NFL should produce impressive TV ratings.

Brady and Allen have already been going back and forth on Twitter, getting digs in on each other, and while Allen has been playing plenty of golf with Bills backup quarterbacks Case Keenum and Matt Barkley to get ready, he’s also sharpening his verbal daggers.

“I don’t know if I’ll be the best golfer there, I hope to be, but I’ll be the best trash talker when we’re on the course,” he said with a smile. “There’s some things I’ll have to tone down and try not to cross the line because they’re two of the greatest quarterbacks of all time and guys that I’ve grown up watching, but I gotta get in their heads somehow. We’ll see what we can do.”

The other night, Brady and Rodgers were guests on TNT before the network’s NBA playoff coverage, and Rodgers, speaking to Charles Barkley, a notoriously terrible golfer who played in The Match along with Stephen Curry in 2020, said, “Charles, I’ve done my scouting report. I heard that Josh was terrible at Pebble. And Pat has played the last couple of years in Tahoe and hasn’t broken 80 yet. So I think he was closer to being in a group with you. No offense.”

Allen revealed that Nike has hooked him up with apparel and specially designed cleats, and the golf bag he’ll be throwing on the cart is one, he said, that #BillsMafia will greatly appreciate.

Allen has played the past two years in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, a PGA Tour event where amateurs play with tour professionals, and he hopes to draw on the way he quelled his nerves while playing in that event.

Of course, Allen and Mahomes are fierce rivals on the field, especially since Mahomes’ Chiefs have ended the Bills’ season each of the past two years in the playoffs. 

“I talked to him quite a bit actually and I don’t think it’s gonna be weird at all,” Allen said of playing on the same team as Mahomes for once. “We get along extremely well outside of football; we’ve got a lot of respect for each other inside of football and on the field.”

Allen then lobbed a grenade at Brady and Rodgers, saying: “I think that me and Pat will have a better rapport than those other two guys that have been fighting and clawing against each other for the last 18 years where me and Pat are just starting to go at it. 

“I think the relationship is in a better spot than theirs is. We’ll be happy to see each other’s putts go in where I don’t think the other guys are going to be happy when the other guy makes a putt because they’re going to be the one that wants to make it. 

Those guys are older and they’ve been in a couple of these so they’ve got the experience, but me and Pat, we’ve got the youth on our side. ”

Game on.

Sal Maiorana can be reached at maiorana@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @salmaiorana.