Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, and Joe Burrow have been grouped together so often that the “AFC Big Four” has become part of the NFL vocabulary. Even in 2026, with a new generation of quarterbacks pushing into the conversation, those four names remain a familiar shorthand for the conference’s star power. 

Put football aside for a minute, though, and their wrists tell a much less predictable story. Mahomes has grown into the kind of collector who talks watches with Tom Brady and Travis Kelce. Allen connects some of his most important pieces to marriage and fatherhood. Jackson’s watches live inside a bigger world of custom jewelry, gifts and personal style. Burrow keeps turning to Cartier when the dress code gets serious. Same position. Same conference. Four very different ideas of what makes a watch worth wearing.

That’s what makes their off-field collections worth a closer look. The price tags are inevitably big, but the interesting part is why these particular watches make sense for the people wearing them, from a diamond-covered Royal Oak and a GMT-Master II to a sentimental Patek Philippe and one of Cartier’s most mechanically playful dress watches. Once you get past the celebrity factor, there’s quite a bit here that any collector can recognize.

Patrick Mahomes: The Collector Who Kept Going

Mahomes has probably given us the clearest picture of how an NFL star can gradually become a watch collector. In a 2025 GQ interview, he explained that he initially bought one watch for every year he made it in the league. Then the math stopped working. “I got a little too greedy,” he joked, because eventually there were more watches than NFL seasons. He credited former Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith with helping introduce him to high-end watches and said he now talks collecting with Travis Kelce and even asks Tom Brady for advice. That sounds less like celebrity accessorizing and more like someone who has caught the bug. 

His watches back that up. In 2024, Mahomes appeared courtside wearing an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Chronograph ref. 26322OR, an 18K pink-gold factory-set piece carrying 966 brilliant-cut diamonds across the case, bezel, bracelet and dial. Underneath all that is still a 41mm Royal Oak chronograph powered by the automatic caliber 2385, but subtle it is not. GQ also documented Rolex Daytonas, GMT-Master IIs, Yacht-Masters and a solid-gold Omega in his wider rotation. 

More recently, Hublot has become a major part of the story. Mahomes joined the brand as an ambassador in 2025 and has spoken openly about liking its more expressive designs. In 2026, GQ documented him discussing the colorful Big Bang Summer Ceramic, while another appearance put a white ceramic Spirit of Big Bang on his wrist. The latter is a 42mm skeletonized chronograph with a white ceramic case, automatic HUB4700 movement, 50-hour power reserve and 100 meters of water resistance.

There’s a pattern here. Mahomes didn’t find one trophy watch and stopped. He learned from other collectors, built relationships, moved between brands and gradually became interested in watches as a category. Plenty of famous athletes own expensive watches. Mahomes actually talks like someone who enjoys collecting them.



Photo: Hublot © Hublot

Josh Allen: Watches With Somewhere to Go

Josh Allen’s collection gets interesting for almost the opposite reason. When GQ asked him about his essentials in 2026, Allen brought out a Rolex GMT-Master II “Bruce Wayne” and explained that watches had become a way for him to express himself without dressing particularly loudly. He also liked the simple ritual of checking a mechanical watch rather than reaching for yet another screen. 

The “Bruce Wayne” is Rolex’s black-and-gray GMT-Master II, ref. 126710GRNR. In its Jubilee-bracelet configuration, it combines a 40mm Oystersteel case with a two-color ceramic 24-hour bezel and caliber 3285, which provides roughly 70 hours of power reserve and an independently adjustable local-hour hand. Allen also confirmed that he owns a “Pepsi” GMT-Master II, although he didn’t give enough information to responsibly pin down its exact reference or bracelet. 

Then the conversation took a turn that says far more about Allen as a collector than another Rolex nickname ever could. He said his wife has bought him several watches, including one for their wedding, and that he owns a couple of Patek Philippes that are especially meaningful to him. His favorite is a rose-gold Patek Philippe Pilot Alarm that he bought when his daughter was born. Allen said he plans to engrave her birthdate on the removable caseback and hopes the watch will eventually become hers.

His description is consistent with Patek Philippe’s Alarm Travel Time family, whose rose-gold 5520 pairs a second-time-zone system with a genuine mechanical alarm: a hammer physically strikes a gong inside the watch. That makes Allen’s casual comment that “any chime is a pretty big deal” wonderfully understated. Patek confirms the mechanism uses a self-winding caliber and a 24-hour alarm, although we would stop short of assigning Allen’s watch a precise reference without clearer visual confirmation. 

The engraving plan is the detail that sticks. Watches often get sold as future heirlooms; Allen is already deciding whose wrist his will end up on.



Photo: FOX Sports

Lamar Jackson: Watches Inside a Bigger Jewelry Story

Lamar Jackson gave GQ a look at his jewelry collection in 2024, and his watches make more sense when viewed as part of that whole. Chains, pendants, gifts and custom work all occupy the same stylistic world. Among the pieces he showed were a custom gold Patek Philippe and an Audemars Piguet with a blue band, both gifts from rapper Kodak Black. Jackson specifically called out the blue on the AP as his favorite color. 

Here, resisting the urge to play watch detective matters. GQ identifies the brands, and Jackson himself discusses the watches, but the available evidence doesn’t establish exact factory models or references. His Patek is heavily customized, while the AP isn’t shown clearly enough to turn a model guess into fact. The original Perplexity research correctly flagged that limitation. 

Jackson also said something revealing: he’d like to add a “plain Jane” Rolex. In jewelry terminology, that means an unmodified watch without an aftermarket diamond setting. So the funny twist in Jackson’s collection is that the understated Rolex may actually be the aspirational piece. After customized gold and high-visibility jewelry, restraint becomes its own kind of flex. 

His watches therefore tell a different collecting story from Mahomes or Allen. The emotional center isn’t reference hunting or complications. It’s personal relationships, gifts and the way a watch interacts with the rest of what he wears. In Jackson’s world, the wrist is part of the outfit.



Photo: Gary McCullough/AP

Joe Burrow: Cartier Makes Perfect Sense

Joe Burrow has spent enough time around fashion that seeing a conventional oversized sports watch on his wrist might actually be the surprise. His strongest verified watch appearances point toward Cartier, and they fit his public style almost suspiciously well.

At the 2025 Met Gala, Burrow wore a yellow-gold Cartier Santos-Dumont Skeleton Micro-Rotor, ref. WHSA0031. This is where the watch gets much more interesting up close. Cartier skeletonized the automatic caliber 9629 MC and shaped its micro-rotor like the Demoiselle, an aircraft designed by pioneering aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont. The watch therefore sneaks an airplane into the movement of a model named after an aviator. Cartier says the caliber took almost two years to develop and contains 212 components. 

The yellow-gold watch measures 43.5 by 31.4mm and only 8mm thick, with roughly 44 hours of power reserve. That combination is worth noticing because skeleton watches can easily become technical theater. Here, the mechanism is doing aesthetic work too: the architecture of the movement effectively becomes the dial. 

Burrow returned to Cartier at the 2026 Met Gala, this time with a large yellow-gold Tank Américaine. Vanity Fair photographed his stylist fastening the Cartier watch before the event, while subsequent coverage identified the model and metal. The current large yellow-gold Tank Américaine uses an elongated, curved case measuring 44.4 by 24.4mm with an automatic movement and leather strap.

There is one distinction worth making. These appearances verify that Burrow wore the watches. They don’t establish that he purchased or owns them, especially in a red-carpet environment where brands routinely dress high-profile guests. That doesn’t make the watches less interesting. If anything, wearing Cartier at consecutive Met Galas makes the styling direction unusually clear: Burrow’s public watch choices favor shape, design history and formal proportions over the giant sports-watch formula that has dominated athlete wrists for years.

Four Quarterbacks, Four Very Different Ideas of a Watch

Put the four wrists next to each other and the fun part is how little they resemble one another. Mahomes approaches watches like an increasingly experienced collector, learning from people around him and moving deeper into the hobby. Allen has already attached watches to marriage, fatherhood and the idea of inheritance. Jackson folds them into a personal jewelry culture built around gifts and custom expression. Burrow keeps gravitating toward Cartier pieces that work as design objects as much as timekeepers.

That variety is probably the most useful takeaway for anyone building a collection without an NFL contract. There is no correct trajectory from “first nice watch” to “serious collector.” Technical complications can matter. So can design. A watch can mark an occasion, remind you of a person, finish an outfit or simply be the weird mechanical object you can’t stop reading about.

The price tags here may belong to professional-quarterback territory. The reasons for choosing a watch feel a lot more familiar.

Which AFC quarterback’s approach to watches feels closest to how you’d build your own collection?