HOUSTON—“What a game,” said Bill Belichick, exhaling.
He had more to say, rumbling songs to sing, but that needed to be said first. What a game. There had never been anything like that played in NFL history, never. A 25-point comeback? In the second half? Overtime? None of that had ever been seen on this stage. Everything was rewritten. It could have been different.
“From questioning everything to being on top of the world,” said New England Patriots defensive lineman Chris Long. “It’s the biggest emotional roller coaster I’ve ever been on.”
“I’m kind of numb,” said Atlanta Falcons safety Ricardo Allen. “Like, I don’t really know what to feel. I’m broken inside, because this is not us.”
It wasn’t, until it was. Atlanta was up 21-3 at halftime of Super Bowl LI, and was up 28-3 with with 8:31 left in the third quarter, and the New England Patriots still believed. At halftime backup safety Duron Harmon came in and said, man, one play at a time and we can literally make the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history. He kept saying it.
“No one laughed, no one blinked an eye,” said cornerback Logan Ryan. “Everyone said, let’s go.”
A football game is never one man, one play, one thing. Any single football play is so many distinct acts of technique and will, and one mistake can blow the thing to smithereens, and it all needs to work. No football game can be about one guy.
But the greatest football game? That requires so much. It requires lifetimes colliding in one place. Atlanta was a team full of youth and skill and speed, and they flew after the ball. They ate up New England’s running game, and you went, uh-oh. They made Tom Brady throw wobblers, hit him hard, sacked him five times. His receivers weren’t open. New England had the ball for nearly 20 minutes in the first half, but Brady had been intercepted for a pick-six, on a play Atlanta had been working on jumping all week … well, almost everything had gone wrong. Atlanta owner Arthur Blank came down from his luxury box in the third quarter.
But the Patriots don’t break. The organization is so tight, so controlled, so Belichick. He didn’t call timeout two years ago when Seattle was driving inside the 10, inside the five; he just had a feeling, he said. This past two weeks he and offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels put in extra work on two-point converts. Again, a feeling.
“I don’t know; just Josh and I had a sense that we may need a couple of them,” said Belichick. “They were well executed. I’m glad we did.”
It could have been different, but it wasn’t. New England adjusted some: the cornerbacks not blanketing Julio Jones were left on islands, sink or swim. The pass rushers had to go get Matt Ryan, and make him uncomfortable. Dont’a Hightower, who made the tackle that kept Marshawn Lynch out of the end zone at the end of that Seattle Super Bowl, took the ball from Ryan with 8:24 left, with Atlanta passing on a third-and-1, and that was necessary. Everything was necessary.
“The thing that makes a champion, it’s not about shutting everybody out, making everything easy,” said Logan Ryan, his voice rising. “It’s about how you get knocked down, and how you get back up and how you respond. And not one person in that locker room lost faith in the play calling, and how we were playing. “We’ve got a bunch of believers, man. Bunch of guys with chips on their shoulders. Bunch of guys who were unheralded at one point, or not wanted by different teams. Bill tells us, you were brought here for a reason, for games like these.”
It could have been different. They needed Atlanta, after Brady had dragged New England within 28-20, to get to the Patriots 22 on a Julio Jones catch that deserved immortality, and then absolutely lose their minds: A one-yard run loss, a pass play that turned into a sack, a holding penalty. It all pulled them from a 39-yard field goal to a 52-yarder to a 62-yarder, and it stayed a one-score game. Atlanta offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan calls plays by instinct, they say. His instinct failed.
They needed all that time of possession in the first half, and again in the second half, to make cement of Atlanta’s legs. After it was 28-3, New England outscored Atlanta 31-0, and outgained them 338-68. It was rope-a-dope, executed with 11 players at a time.
“That’s how Atlanta plays, man,” said Logan Ryan. “They get up on you, they take advantage of turnovers, they have very explosive players. Devonta Freeman, first play of the game. Julio Jones, every catch he made. And we just had to wear them out. And it’s wasn’t a bunch of knockout hooks. It was body shots, and body shots, and we wore ’em out.”
“We weren’t afraid to lose this game. Atlanta might have been afraid to lose it at the end. They might have been holding on. We had nothing to lose.”
And they needed Brady. In his final five drives, he completed 26 of 34 passes for 284 yards and two TDs, and produced four touchdowns and a field goal. Every play was the result of years of making his muscles pliable, controlling his diet, studying formations, experience. Habit. Nobody had ever done this. He is 39 years old, and the greatest.
“I’m trying to tell you, man, that overtime, I was sitting on the sidelines, like, I ain’t going in,” said Harmon, the prognosticator. “He’s the GOAT, man. He’s going to get it done. This is the (Michael Jordan) of football, the greatest player ever, he’s going to get it done for us. He continues to do it. Think about it. The last Super Bowl we played, Super Bowl 49, we’re down multiple scores in the fourth quarter, come back and get the win. What does he do today? Come back and get the win, man. It’s easy to say, man: The greatest football player of all time is Tom Brady.”
“Tonight we earned the championship,” said Belichick. “These guys played like champions when it counted the most in the fourth quarter and overtime. It is about this team and what this team accomplished. It isn’t about anything else. They deserve it. They earned it, and they got it.”
“I think it’s one of those feelings that feels amazing right now, but it’s going to feel better as a memory, all time,” said Long. “I mean, that memory’s never going to leave me. You feel like you’re immortal, man. I mean, you can’t kill that memory. It’s the biggest comeback in Super Bowl history.”
This past year gave us the NBA Finals, with LeBron James ascending so high to pull Cleveland back from 3-1 down against a 73-win monster, and that Game 7. It gave us the World Series, and the Cubs coming back from 3-1 down to beat Cleveland, and that Game 7. It gave us the Grey Cup, and 40-year-old Henry Burris playing the game of his life to beat one of the greatest CFL teams in history.
And it gave us this. It gave us Atlanta’s failure, and New England’s comeback, and every piece of the mosaic that created it. What a game.
“You saw Julio Jones tiptoe on the sideline,” said Patriots tight end Martellus Bennett. “You saw Julian Edelman catch a ball between seven guys’ legs. There was a lot of awesome stuff happening on the football field. There were just a bunch of guys that really wanted to win.”
“It was a great football game,” said Belichick. “A lot of great players on the field.”
In the end, the Patriots were the David Tyree catch and the Mario Manningham catch and a Wes Welker drop from winning seven Super Bowls; they were a Seattle running play, and a couple Falcons running plays, and maybe a play here or there against Carolina or St. Louis, from losing six. They were Edelman’s acrobat catch, or Brady’s genius, or Atlanta’s foolishness from losing this one.
But these games are only played once. They are irrevocable. That’s what makes them great.
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