Bucs set to host Super Bowl
Tampa Bay was unable to win the NFC South this season due to a rough stretch in the middle of the year, so the Bucs were forced to go on the road in their playoff opener. They got past Washington with an eight-point win before beating New Orleans and Green Bay the following weeks. Their offense has been on a tear since the aforementioned rough patch, scoring at least 30 points in six straight games. Legendary QB Tom Brady is appearing in a record-setting 10th Super Bowl. He threw three touchdown passes against the Packers, marking the tenth consecutive game he has thrown at least two touchdowns. The defense recorded an interception and a fumble recovery in the win.
The Bucs face a KC defense that was average for most of the season, but it has turned it on down the stretch. Outside of a loss to the Chargers where multiple starters were resting, the Chiefs have held seven consecutive opponents under 30 points—averaging 18.3 points allowed in the L3. This will be a tough task, though, as Brady has proven time and time again. He has one of the top wide receiver groups in the NFL at his disposal and could be getting wide receiver Antonio Brown back from a knee injury. Brown had caught five touchdowns across a four-game span before getting injured against the Saints. Running back Leonard Fournette has rushed for 211 yards and two touchdowns in the three playoff games. Chris Godwin has been Brady’s top target, catching 14 passes for 223 yards.
Brady Has Done More Than Anyone and This May Ice the Cake
5. “5 TD passes…in a quarter?’’ Oct. 18, 2009
This might have been a meaningless early-season contest between a bad team and a good one had Brady not gone off like a Roman candle on the Tennessee Titans in what became an odd afternoon in Foxboro.
First off, it was unseasonably cold, with snow falling steadily even though it was still two weeks before Halloween. That surely didn’t help the then-lowly Titans. But Brady made their day worse with perhaps his finest passing afternoon.
Two years earlier, during the 2007 nearly undefeated season, Brady had thrown five touchdown passes in the first half of a beat down of the Miami Dolphins. But on this day he only needed a QUARTER to throw five, ripping the Titans’ secondary to shreds in the second quarter as if his arm was a Gatling gun.
Brady connected twice with Randy Moss for scores of 40 and 28 yards, with one coming on a flea flicker; twice to Wes Welker for 30 and five; and once to running back Kevin Faulk for a 38-yard touchdown reception. By the end of three quarters, Brady had passed for 380 yards and six touchdowns in what became a 59-0 rout so lopsided that even backup quarterback Brian Hoyer got in on the action, running for the game’s final score in the fourth quarter after relieving Brady.
Brady completed 85.2 percent of his 34 passes (29 of 34) and posted a quarterback rating of 152.8. Don’t ask me why it wasn’t a perfect rating of 158.3.
4. “On To Cincinnati’’ Oct. 15, 2014
This is memorable because it came a week after not only one of his poorest performances in years but amid whispers that perhaps the 37-year-old Brady had finally hit the wall.
The previous week the Patriots were crushed in Kansas City, 41-14, on a day when Brady threw two interceptions, including a pick-six, and enough off-target passes that some began to question if his GPS system was permanently on the blink.
After the game head coach Bill Belichick was stunningly asked if he was going to “look into evaluating the quarterback position.’’ He had sent young-man-in-waiting Jimmy Garoppolo into the Chiefs’ game as a late substitute and watched him lead the team to a meaningless touchdown. Belichick looked as if he’d just swallowed a spoonful of Castor Oil before snorting a dismissive half laugh for an answer.
Three days later, the media again tried to bombard Belichick with quarterback questions, but no matter what he was asked his reply that Wednesday was the same: “We’re on to Cincinnati.’’
On paper that didn’t look like the best of destinations. The Bengals were 3-0 and coming off a bye week after having pounded the Tennessee Titans, 33-7. They were well rested and had two weeks to prepare for Brady. In short order, it looked like they’d had two minutes.
Brady took his team the length of the field on the opening drive to score, setting the stage for a 43-17 pummeling. He threw for 292 yards and two touchdowns to begin a 10-2 run on the way to a come-from-behind 28-24 victory over the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX.
That day Brady faced down Seattle’s “Legion of Boom’’ defense, which ranked first in fewest points allowed, first in total defense and first in pass defense. All Brady did was pass for 328 yards and four touchdowns, including two in the fourth quarter that erased a 10-point Seattle lead.
The fact that he needed a great defensive play at the end to preserve the win keeps that Super Bowl off the Top 5 list, but it didn’t stop Brady from winning another Super Bowl MVP and then making one final completion when he threw the keys to defensive back Malcolm Butler to acknowledge his last-second, goal-line interception that preserved the victory.
3.
“Hold up there, young man.” AFC Championship Game Jan. 20, 2019
As is often the case with Brady, this was a game when statistically it might seem he was outmatched by young Patrick Mahomes, the quarterback he will face Sunday in Super Bowl LV. Well, as Mark Twain once wrote, “There are three kinds of lies. Lies. Damn lies. And statistics.’’
Mahomes won the stat game. Brady won the football game.
Now 41 years old and, in theory, at least in the twilight of his career, this game was built up as the passing of the torch. Not so fast. While Mahomes threw for 295 yards and three touchdowns and had a 117 QB rating, he ended up getting his fingers burned by Brady, who saved his best for the game’s biggest moments.
On the day Brady struggled some, throwing two interceptions and finishing with an inefficient QB rating of only 77.1. But twice he found his team trailing in the fourth quarter and twice he brought them back, before a last-second Chiefs’ field goal forced overtime.
That’s when Mahomes made a fatal mistake. He lost the overtime coin flip. Brady got his hands on the football first and made sure Mahomes wouldn’t see it again until the following September, driving his team 75 yards in 13 plays by converting three third-and-10 passes to keep that game-winning drive alive.
Brady was only 4-of-7 on that drive, but when his team most needed a completion he drilled Julian Edelman with third-down throws of 20 and 15 yards and then found Rob Gronkowski for another 15 yards on third-and-10 to put the ball on the Chiefs’ 15-yard line.
With Kansas City now expecting Brady to throw again, he out thought them, handing the ball to Rex Burkhead, who was not often used in such a circumstance. The Chiefs were caught flat-footed as Burkhead rumbled ahead for 10 yards and another first down at the five. Two runs later, with the world still expecting Brady to throw, Burkhead was in the end zone, and the Patriots were headed to their ninth Super Bowl since Brady first became a starter.
They won it. Again.
2. “Where legends are born.” Super Bowl XXXVI Feb. 3, 2002
You can’t win six Super Bowls if you don’t win the first one, and Brady did that in only his second year in the league. A former sixth-round draft pick who was the 199th player taken in the 2000 draft, Brady arrived in the NFL with a chip on his shoulder and a belief in himself shared by few others.
A third-stringer as a rookie, Brady became Drew Bledsoe’s backup the following year ... though not for long. Bledsoe went down with a chest injury that nearly killed him, and Brady stepped in and never left. He conservatively directed the underdog Patriots to the Super Bowl, where they were a 14 ½-point underdog to the fearsome St. Louis Rams, whose high-octane offense was called “The Greatest Show on Turf.’’ High octane is not what was said of the offense Brady led at the time.
On this evening, New England’s defense held that Rams’ offense at bay, while the carefully controlled Brady-led offense had the Patriots leading 17-3 in the second half before St. Louis finally found its rhythm, tying the game, 17-17, with 1:37 left to play.
When New England took the kickoff out only to its own 17, Hall-of-Fame coach and television commentator John Madden said, “The Patriots, with this field position, you have to just run the clock out. Play for overtime.’’
Brady wasn’t listening, immediately dropping back and completing a five-yard throw after first avoiding a potentially fatal sack by defensive end Leonard Little. Little got a hand on Brady, but he shook it off and moved to his left before finding Redmond on a checkdown -- the first of three passes he would complete to the backup running back for 24 yards. It was the kind of calm in the eye of the storm that would later become Brady’s calling card.
After a timeout in which Bledsoe said to him, “Sling it!’’ Brady did just that, completing a 23-yard pass to Troy Brown, who smartly scrambled out of bounds to stop the clock. One more short completion was followed by two incompletions -- the kind of smart throws critical to consistent winning. They're the throws that often go unnoticed because they avoid trouble rather than create it by forcing balls where they should not go.
Content he had given his team a chance to win, Brady walked off leaving kicker Adam Vinatieri to deliver a 48-yard field goal as the clock hit 0:00.
The unlikely Patriots, with their inexperienced kid quarterback, had delivered one of the biggest upsets in Super Bowl history. Brady had thrown for only 145 yards and one touchdown in the last-second 20-17 victory, while league MVP Kurt Warner had thrown for 365 yards. But Warner had been sacked three times, intercepted twice and thrown a momentum-changing pick-six interception.
Brady, meanwhile, had thrown no interceptions, was sacked only once and, when the game was on the line, completed five of his final eight passes on the game-winning drive. That turned out to be not a moment in time but the emergence of a quarterback for all time.
1. “Greatest comeback “evah!’’ Super Bowl LI Feb. 2, 2017
Statistically, this was not Brady’s finest hour, either, but he has never been about statistics, save wins. So in some ways it is his signature game.
Trailing the Atlanta Falcons by 25 points with just over 17 minutes to play, the chances of New England winning were roughly 3 percent, although no one mentioned that to Brady. From that low point, he mounted the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history, putting up 25 unanswered points and a game-tying 91-yard fourth-quarter scoring drive that was his team’s longest of the season.
It took Brady 10 methodical plays to tie the game with only 57 seconds left by completing a two-point conversion throw to Danny Amendola.
New England then won the toss and took the ball to start overtime. Those of us who had seen so many Brady miracles before knew the game was over. So did the Falcons, who never got to touch the ball.
Barely four minutes later, Brady had completed five straight throws to open the drive and then helped draw a pass-interference penalty that put the ball on the two-yard line. Running back James White did the rest.
Brady had a horrendous first half that included a pick-six, but over those final 17 minutes and the four minutes of overtime he was 21 of 28 for 246 yards, one touchdown pass and a two-point conversion throw. For the day he completed just under 70 per cent of his throws (43-of-62) for 466 yards and two touchdowns, plus that one interception.
What those numbers translate into is that over the game’s critical final 21 minutes, Brady completed 75 percent of his passes (21 of 28) for more than half of his total passing yardage and took three sacks without panicking and making a deadly error that would finish his team.
Hemingway would have called it “grace under pressure.’’ People in New England just called it “Tom Brady doing Tom Brady things.’’ Either way, Brady left Houston’s NRG Stadium with his fifth ring, fourth Super Bowl MVP and full GOAT status in the eyes of his peers.
End of the day...we may not all realize what we are witnessing...a generational superstar. So win or lose, just enjoy the greatness!
