“Trouble now,” Bill Belichick announced to his assistants’ headsets. The head coach’s words came as no surprise, as everyone could see what was happening on the field. The key now was not to allow panic to set in.
The pick six felt like a backbreaker. Falcons fans and Brady haters alike celebrated the images of Tom flailing for Alford’s feet and tumbling to the ground helplessly with a pained look on his face.
How’s your day going, Tom Brady? #SB51, Bleacher Report tweeted with close-up pictures of the quarterback’s distressed face.
Fox Sports reporter Seth Kaplan referred to the creepy, Frankenstein-like courtroom drawing of Tom that became a meme of its own during the Deflategate proceedings, tweeting, This is the worst Brady has looked since that courtroom sketch.
The frustration Patriots fans felt was only exacerbated by the legions cheering Brady’s collapse, mocking him for Deflategate, and reveling in New England’s failures in a game most experts had predicted they would win.
If Brady’s path to redemption was to end with a Super Bowl trophy in Houston, then it had taken a nightmarish turn.
On the Falcons’ sidelines, there was smiling, showboating, and gloating.
“They ain’t ever met nothing like this,” Falcons receiver Mohamed Sanu said, his cockiness backed up by the scoreboard.
But at least one player was wary that no lead was safe with Brady on the other sideline. Third-year receiver Taylor Gabriel had seen this movie before, and sought to temper his teammate’s bravado.
“It’s Tom Brady, though,” Gabriel said, ominously.
“I know. I know. I’m never comfortable,” Sanu conceded. “We about to put up forty-something on they ass. What I’m saying is, they ain’t never seen anything like this.”130
Brady’s first play after the crushing interception is one that could easily have been forgotten in a game that would be filled with memorable moments. But it’s one that, had it gone another way, probably would have destroyed any possibility of what was to come.
On the play, Brady’s arm reared back for a deep throw to his left, but he was hit just as he threw. The ball fluttered uncontrollably over the line of scrimmage. Martellus Bennett was running a crossing route from the right side of the formation and wasn’t the intended target on the play, but luckily wound up in the perfect position to snatch the ball out of the air and prevent another catastrophic turnover. In retrospect, Bennett’s tremendous awareness and hustle on that play was the team’s first step in trying to turn the game around. It was a must-make play in a game that would soon be filled with them.
Bill Belichick had spent his entire tenure in New England preaching the importance of making seemingly innocuous plays. The so-called little things were so clearly critical that none of the memorable plays can happen without them. Bennett’s play was an example of that ethos.
Still, while the catch may have saved the game for the moment, things didn’t immediately get better for the Patriots. On the next down, Edelman extended to Tom’s left and Amendola lined up in the slot right. Brady had good protection, and as the routes crossed twenty yards downfield, Edelman’s defender was perfectly shielded from the route.
The shifty slot receiver popped out on the other side, but the quarterback overthrew him for another incompletion. It was a huge missed opportunity at the time, as it would have likely been a touchdown because the defender was so far behind as the routes crossed. There was nothing but green pasture in front of Edelman. It was a beautiful call by McDaniels but turned into just another gaffe by the struggling Brady.
The next play featured some coaching-clinic pocket movement as Brady delivered a laser beam to James White on the outside, resulting in a big twenty-eight-yard gain. Tom ran through every eligible receiver in his route progression to get back to White, dancing gently in the pocket the whole time, his eyes focused downfield.
A couple plays later, Brady hit White again but unfortunately failed to see a wide-open Hogan downfield.
As the clock ticked away in the first half, Bennett was called for a holding penalty, negating a big screen play to White that had taken the ball down to the Falcons’ 3-yard line. The penalty put New England into playing for a field goal mode on second down and twenty yards to go with just twelve seconds left.
Another screen pass, this time to Bennett, failed, so the Patriots called a quick time-out to try to score some points before the game truly got away. Stephen Gostkowski kicked a forty-one-yarder through the uprights to put New England on the board finally. While the points would ultimately prove to be crucial, at the time, Patriots fans in attendance and across the world groaned in frustration that a field goal was all the great Tom Brady could muster.
The team staggered into the locker room at halftime. Lady Gaga’s bass-heavy music boomed in the cavernous catacombs underneath NRG Stadium. Brady felt like he had been through the meat grinder. But, as he had his entire career—even in the darkest moments of Deflategate—he kept his composure and his focus on the task at hand.
They could still come back. No team before the Patriots in Super Bowl LXIX two years earlier had ever come back from a ten-point deficit. But history wasn’t on their side. A comeback from eighteen points down was extremely rare during the regular season and had never happened in a Super Bowl.
Still, in the stadium, at Super Bowl parties outside of New England, and on social media, millions, predictably, were now dancing on Tom’s grave and writing him off. It was hard not to, as the Patriots were on the wrong side of a 21–3 drubbing and showed few signs of life. Twitter trolls lambasted Brady and his struggling squad, all but declaring the game over.
Author and podcaster Peter Shankman, a New Yorker who attended Boston University, tweeted to his 175,000 followers:
People angry right now:
1) Patriots fans
2) Advertisers who bought ads in the second half. #SuperBowl.
The Sunday Night NFL official Twitter account tweeted out a picture of Tom on the bench, his head bowed in dejection, with the words Not great, Tom. #SB51
Breaking Bad actor Bryan Cranston kept the cyber-trolling going, tweeting to his two million followers, Lady Gaga covered more ground on the field than the Patriots. #SuperBowl.
Chapter Twenty-four
They Will Fight
Their Asses Off!
Halftime
During the extended halftime of Super Bowl LI, Bill Belichick was concerned about the lopsided score, but he didn’t think it was indicative of the play on the field. He noted that his team had actually held the ball for more than eighteen minutes of the first half, as compared to Atlanta’s eleven.
“I felt like we had control of the game. We didn’t have control of the score,” Belichick said later.131
He even told his offensive coordinator as much. “We’ll be okay. Our guys believe. They will fight their ass off,” Belichick said to McDaniels.132
He then turned to his players.
“Let’s just play one play at a time,” Belichick told his men. “We can’t worry about things we can’t control. Let’s worry about what we can control.”
At that moment an unlikely leader emerged with a rallying cry.
“This is going to be the best comeback of all time,” free safety Duron Harmon shouted across the locker room.
Harmon was another classic Belichick guy. Picked up in the third round of the 2013 draft, he was one of two Rutgers University defensive backs selected by the Patriots that year, joining Logan Ryan. The pair had up-and-down moments throughout their first few seasons, and Belichick’s affinity for Rutgers players became a kind of running joke on sports talk radio in Boston.
Harmon was having the last laugh, however, as he emerged as a solid role player and, more importantly, a quiet leader on the defense in 2016. In the divisional round against the Texans, he picked off Brock Osweiler and took it back thirty-one yards. His versatility at safety and cornerback also allowed more freedom for safety Devin McCourty to roam.
No one laughed. No one blinked an eye, especially Brady. His mother was sick and his legacy and reputation were on the line. Although he was considered a future first ballot Hall of Famer, some critics still called him a cheater. Journalists across the country had placed an asterisk next to his name in spite of his many accomplishments.
Those closest to him knew just how much it hurt him to be portrayed as a cheater and a liar. It flew in the face of everything he was and strived to be. But the quarterback had to block it all out now.
“It was all out of my mind. I wasn’t thinking like way down the road or all these different things. I was just thinking about how can we get back in the game?” Brady would later recall. “It’s one play at a time. It sounds so cliché but that’s the way you are. That’s the reality. You can’t score twenty-five points in one drive. We did a great job in all three phases coming together as a team and that’s what Super Bowls are all about. You’re playing the best teams on the biggest stage and you know you gotta get the job done.”133
While the players in that locker room were aware a comeback of this magnitude would be nothing short of a sports miracle, in Belichick’s world, there was only one path to victory: do your job.
“We have to keep doing what we’re doing, play like we know how to play and don’t think about what happened,” he reinforced firmly. “They have to score a lot more points to keep us down.”134
Edelman understood Belichick’s words.
“A lot of the things that were happening in the first half, that was just us beating ourselves,” he would recall. “We were in the red area twice and we had a fumble and we threw an interception, but it wasn’t like we weren’t moving the ball. We just had to really soak in what we said we had to do and we couldn’t make any more mistakes. Our coaches did a really good job of keeping us in the moment and keeping us focused on each play instead of thinking about the big picture. Instead we focused on doing our job on each play.”135
Chris Long, son of Raiders Hall of Famer and longtime Patriots tormentor Howie Long, was one of those Belichick players who needed a shot on a new team to prove he still had worth. A blue-chip recruit out of Santa Monica, California, with football in his blood, he played at the University of Virginia and had a stellar college career, coming in tenth in the 2007 Heisman Trophy voting, even earning one first-place vote, but losing to Tim Tebow.
Long was drafted second overall in the 2008 draft by the St. Louis Rams right after the Dolphins took University of Michigan offensive tackle Jake Long (no relation). The player selected with the third pick right after Chris Long? Matt Ryan out of Boston College, the quarterback who was now toying with him and his Patriots teammates.
Chris Long put up solid numbers with the Rams, leading the team in sacks and quarterback pressures for several seasons. In 2014, his time in St. Louis came to an end after he suffered a serious ankle injury that required surgery.
Belichick picked him up as a free agent in March 2016, signing him to a classic Patriots one-year deal for $2 million. There were questions about whether the then-thirty-one-year-old had anything left in the tank. The short-term deal not only gave Long a chance to play with a contender, but it was also a chance to prove he wasn’t finished. A great year with New England would mean a long playoff run, a shot at a title, and a chance at one final lucrative contract.
He came into training camp and made the most of his stay. Belichick praised his work ethic and effort throughout the season, and Long became an important role player on the defense that had helped propel the Patriots to this moment.
In the locker room at halftime, Long’s ears perked up at Harmon’s declaration. He would later say that Harmon’s words shook the team out of its funk at the exact right moment.
“We were down,” he recalled. “I think most of us believed, but some of us had some doubts. It’s natural to have some doubts. We’re only human.”136
With Harmon’s words in their heads, Brady and the Patriots made the walk back to the tunnel to head back out onto the field.
“Halftime on the sideline, us being together as a team knowing we’re not quitting. We just gotta play better. It’s not really the plays, it’s more the feeling and how proud I am that our team never gave in to any adversity,” Brady would remember vividly.137
“The vets did a great job of leading by example. No one panicked,” first-year receiver Malcolm Mitchell told the authors of this book. “They didn’t have to say anything to me. You could see from how they handled themselves, their posture, how confident they were in the team’s ability to respond.”138
On the sidelines, the coaches tried to keep the players focused, reminding them that they were well prepared and that there was still plenty of time to mount a comeback.
“Trust the system,” the team was told. “Do your job.”
It was gut-check time and the moment they had been working toward since the summer.
The Patriots had famously trained all season by running up a steep hill behind Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. It was a brutal practice drill but one designed specifically for this time and place. The players were well conditioned in part because of the uphill practice running.
“Do you believe we’re going to win?” McDaniels said to Lewis, White, and Blount.
“Yes,” they collectively responded, nodding their heads.
“I do, too,” McDaniels said. “Let’s just play our best half. I don’t want anyone to do anything they can’t do. Don’t try and make it all up in one play. Just play each play by itself.”139
Third Quarter
Because the Falcons had deferred after winning the coin toss at the opening of the game, Matt Ryan and company got the ball first after a Gostkowski kickoff. New England’s defense had a tall order to keep the red-hot Atlanta quarterback from marching down and putting the nail in their collective coffin once and for all. A comeback from 21–3 was a big enough task. Allowing the Falcons to extend their lead to 28–3 would be a disaster.
Unsettled Patriots fans settled in for the second half. If this was indeed Brady’s final stand, they would continue to watch to the bitter end, as they were committed to their quarterback.
The defense was stout, though, and forced the Falcons into a rare three-and-out.
It was now Brady’s turn. Number 12 jogged onto the field, hoping to get something going. But despite the locker room confidence and his determined focus, the offense was still out of sync.
On first down, Tom looked off the middle-of-the-field safety by keeping his eyes and shoulders to the right side, and then whipped back left and threw a perfect ball into tight solo coverage to Chris Hogan on the outside. Hogan had begun aligned to Brady’s left in the slot, but Tom motioned White out of the backfield beyond Hogan’s alignment. The down safety adjusted with the motion, giving Brady the information he wanted: man-to-man coverage across the board with a deep middle-of-the-field safety.
The coverage was tight—too tight it turned out—and although Tom threw a perfect ball, it was punched out from Hogan’s hands. It was the perfect throw in a competitive situation that showed Brady was back on his mark and still trusted his receivers to fight on.
The throw wasn’t rewarded with a completion, but it foreshadowed a litany of high-level passes to come. And as Belichick had so often said, you have to make catches in competitive situations to win the big games. You can’t just catch the wide-open ones. One glance at the Super Bowls they lost to the Giants would prove as much. Those victories were sealed for the Giants on two huge catches on jump balls. The Patriots needed some huge catches of their own. Despite the incompletion, it was clear that one thing was certain: Brady was unafraid and was going to put the ball in competitive spaces to help his team crawl back to life.
Second down was a negative gain, a two-yard loss on a screen to Amendola. As a mild solace, Tom delivered a dart to give the play a chance, but it was poorly blocked. On third down, Edelman dropped a perfectly placed crossing route with catch-and-run potentia
l that would’ve likely earned a first down. All in all, Brady had just thrown three perfect balls and the offense had nothing more than another three-and-out and a loss of two yards on the possession to show for it.
“Guys, at some point we all gotta just start making the plays,” Tom shouted to his struggling teammates as he walked back to the sidelines. He gathered with his receiving corps on the bench.
“We just needed to execute one drive, and after that drive we’ll come to the sidelines and we’ll talk about the next drive,” he later said.
The discouraging series at this point amounted to a significant emotional weight for the players in the game. Nothing had gone the Patriots’ way in the first half. When New England did finally get their way to start the second half—a quick defensive stop, a nice special teams return to midfield—only to do nothing with the opportunity, it triggered a collective groan from Patriots fans throughout the stadium that was sensed by the players down on the field.
While the Patriots continued to chip away, their fans saw their Super Bowl dreams slipping away. The game was all but over. And it was about to get even worse.
Matt Ryan and his squad got the ball back and promptly marched eight plays for eighty-five yards and a touchdown that chewed up nearly four and a half minutes of the third quarter.
The score was 28–3. The rout was on.
Chapter Twenty-five
No Room for Error
The biggest deficit Brady had ever erased in his career was a twenty-four-point hole in a 2013 home game against the Broncos. No Patriots team in history had ever come back from twenty-five.
Yet the Patriots sideline remained eerily calm. There was no throwing of helmets or pointing of fingers. They still knew that if there was one player in the world who could lead them back, it was number 12.
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