The Falcons’ star receiver grabbed the ball tightly with both hands as he fell toward the sidelines. Somehow, he was able to touch both toes to the turf and hold on to the ball in bounds. It was as athletic a catch as you’d ever see and it was a bitter case of déjà vu for Tom, the Patriots, and their fans.
@juliojones_11 you ridiculous bruh, not human, alien…tweeted Saints receiver Mark Ingram.
Brady and most of the Patriots players on the bench watched the replay on the Jumbotron and waved their hands to signal no catch. Then they watched again and again. And reality set in that Jones had come down with the ball. Blount sat with his mouth agape, looking up at the replay.
Tom shook his head in frustration. The entire Patriots team was stunned when the play was confirmed by the referees.
“Hey, you a bad man!” Sanu told Jones back in the Falcons huddle.
“That’s an amazing catch,” Blount told James White on the sidelines, shaking his head. “Every Super Bowl we play in…there’s always that one catch.”
The Falcons were now on the Patriots’ 22-yard line and the clock was down to 4:40. Three run plays and a field goal and Arthur Blank would have his Lombardi Trophy and his parade.
On first down, Freeman took the handoff and was stuck hard by McCourty for a loss of a yard.
“It was a blitz call,” McCourty explained to the authors of this book. “This was one of our more aggressive run blitzes, but it was made for this situation. We hadn’t run it yet in that game.”147
The Falcons may have been trying to run out the clock, but this was a critical negative gain that showed them how difficult it was going to be to move the ball on the ground.
On second down and eleven, Ryan took the shotgun snap and started to get set in the pocket. Trey Flowers busted through the middle of the line and steamrolled center Alex Mack, badly beating him and sacking the league’s MVP.
The Patriots used their first time-out as the sack pushed the Falcons back to the New England 35-yard line and right on the edge of field goal range. From there, it would have been a long fifty-two-yarder to seal the game.
On the next play, third and twenty-three, the Falcons again went back to the air, rather than opt for a short run to keep the clock moving and shorten up a field goal attempt as much as possible. Ryan hit receiver Mohamed Sanu for nine yards, but Chris Long drew a crucial holding call on lineman Jake Matthews. The penalty pushed Atlanta back ten more yards to the New England 45-yard line.
They were now well out of field goal range.
Atlanta was facing third down and thirty-three to go for a first down.
Matt Ryan took the shotgun snap and fired a short pass toward receiver Taylor Gabriel, who was blanketed by Malcolm Butler, and the pass fell incomplete.
“It was obviously a unique situation for us as a defense to be down so many points,” McCourty recalled. “I thought Hightower said it best when Atlanta scored in the third quarter to make it 28–3: ‘We gotta play perfect.’ When he said it, I echoed it to the rest of the guys because it was just true.
“It was cool to see our defense…not really panic or think they had to do something they hadn’t done before,” he continued. “We knew we didn’t have to get interceptions or a bunch of craziness that wasn’t really likely. Guys just had to lock in and do their job perfectly and execute. That was really the difference—no need for a panic mentality, we didn’t have to create a new defense to have a chance.”
McCourty understood the hole the team had put itself in and also knew that the only way to climb back to the surface was to take each play one at a time.
“Bill [Belichick] always talks about ‘If everybody does the right thing, it doesn’t have to be perfect,’” he added. “But because of the situation we couldn’t afford any mistakes. We had to play perfect to just give ourselves a chance to win. So that’s what the second half defensively turned into for us.”
His defense having done its job, on the sidelines Brady was poised and smiling. He even winked at a teammate. This was a position he had been in before. This was TB12 time.
Up in the owner’s box, Robert Kraft checked his son’s pulse once again.
“Well?” the elder Kraft asked. “What do you think?”
Jonathan didn’t blink.
“Probable,” he said.
The Falcons were forced to punt. It was a thirty-six-yard boot to Edelman that pinned the Patriots at their own 9-yard line. They needed to go ninety-one yards in three and a half minutes with two time-outs. And then they would need another two-point conversion—just to force overtime.
“Let’s go score and win this thing, baby,” Edelman told Tom as the two strapped up and headed back onto the field.
“Let’s go win it all,” Tom replied.
“For your mom. For your mom, bro,” Edelman said.
Galynn Brady had found the game almost impossible to watch. When the Patriots fell behind 28–3, she told her husband that she wanted to go home. She was heartbroken for her son. But little did she know that her strength and courage had not only inspired her son but his teammates as well.
Hearing Edelman’s words, Tom nodded sternly as he went back to work.
Chapter Twenty-eight
You Gotta Believe
A determining moment in history is sometimes unrecognizable as it is unfolding. Such was the case as Tom Brady opened the next drive with back-to-back incomplete passes to White and Chris Hogan, the first a result of pressure as number 12 was hit just as he released the ball. The Hogan play was a deep 50–50 fade pass that fell incomplete.
Just like that, the Patriots found themselves in yet another critical situation. It was third and ten and hope was diminishing.
But Brady went back to one of his favorite plays, a sixteen-yard deep out route that Hogan caught for a first down. It was an exceptional clothesline throw that would probably deserve more mention if the world hadn’t seen him do it so many times before. Ryan sat helplessly and nervously on the sidelines, relegated now to spectator.
Next came an incompletion on first down to Edelman, followed by a gutsy, clutch Malcolm Mitchell catch down the sideline to Brady’s left, where Mitchell actually stumbled to a knee and then recovered to make the improbable grab. It was a big-time play from a young player who was quickly earning Tom’s trust.
“What a half he’s had,” Joe Buck exclaimed to the national audience watching on television. Still, Mitchell wished he’d stayed on his feet for that one.
“Well the route sucked,” he later recalled of the play. “But just from practicing and understanding coverages and being in sync [with Tom], I knew from the snap that he’d probably come my way because I was singled up. That’s really what made me hop up off the ground so fast. Because at that point I hadn’t really seen the ball. I just felt like he was going to throw it my way anyhow.”148
The ball was now at the New England 25-yard line with 2:34 left in the game. On first and ten, Tom dropped back and threw an ill-advised pass toward Edelman, who was swarmed by Falcons defenders. What transpired next is forever part of Boston sports lore, and while it doesn’t completely erase the pain of the Tyree helmet catch and later the Mario Manningham miracle catch against the Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI, it makes them a bit easier to swallow for New England fans.
Atlanta’s Robert Alford leaped to intercept the ball but instead volleyed it with two hands into the air. Edelman and Falcons defenders Ricardo Allen and Keanu Neal all leaped simultaneously toward the pigskin as it fell toward the turf. The ball bobbled before it rested on Allen’s arm and then Alford’s shoe. Somehow Edelman managed to grab it with his fingertips just a millimeter before it touched the turf.
“I got it. I caught it. I caught it,” Edelman said as he leaped up from the field with the ball. “I caught it. I swear to god.”
Alford and Edelman watched the replay together on the field.
“Look at it. I caught it,” Edelman said confidently. He was right.
Joe Buck call
ed the catch incredible, while Jonathan Kraft was convinced that the play was the result of skill and focus, not luck. Edelman later told Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon just the opposite. He admitted the catch was about “seventy percent luck.”
Lucky or not, Atlanta challenged the ruling on the field.
The play was agonizingly reviewed, but it was incontrovertible. It was not only a catch, but perhaps the greatest one in franchise history.
“I didn’t run my best route on that play,” Edelman admitted later. “I was always told not to quit on a play especially in the moment that we were in there. A tipped ball over the middle, it’s gonna be one of those things where you gotta fight to the very end.”
The Patriots had a first down at the Atlanta 41-yard line with just 2:03 on the game clock.
On the sidelines, Ernie Adams was already thinking ahead. “We’re still in a go-for-two mode, if we score again, when we score again,” he said.149
On the next play, number 12 made one of his finest throws of the game, launching a heat-seeking missile over the middle that hit Amendola in stride for a twenty-yard pickup to the Falcons 21.
After the two-minute warning, James White’s number was called on three consecutive plays: uncovered out of the backfield for a thirteen-yard completion, a quick seam route catch from the backfield for another seven, and finally a one-yard touchdown plunge through the right side of the Patriots’ offensive line.
Still, all the defensive stops, the circus catches, and the statistics would mean nothing unless the Patriots converted on the two-point conversion. In typical Patriots fashion, Belichick was fully prepared for this moment. Normally, the team will include a pair of two-point conversion plays on its game call sheet. But for some reason, Belichick asked his coaches to have an extra one or two ready to go. They pulled out one of the spares, which was designed for Danny Amendola, known as the best “trash runner and catcher” on the team. The receiver would have to make the catch in traffic and then turn toward daylight.
“And now the biggest two-point attempt in the history of the Patriots franchise,” Buck announced.
Brady lined up under center with five wideouts. Amendola started in motion from Tom’s left toward the center just as the ball was snapped. He got into an open space and Brady hit him with a quick screen. Amendola followed Edelman and Hogan, who were running in front of him as lead blockers. The Falcons defenders were pushed just far enough away to allow Amendola to get the ball over the goal line. He spun and fell backward into the end zone as the refs signaled the successful conversion. There was a flag on the play, but it was against Atlanta. Dwight Freeney had jumped offside before the snap in a bid to get to Brady. The play stood.
“Nice job, ’Dola!” Edelman shouted.
The blocking by Julian and Chris Hogan was also key on that play.
“You may not be getting the ball every play but you still gotta go out and do your job,” Edelman explained. “Blocking is a huge part of the conversation in our receiver room at Gillette Stadium, and we take great pride in it, especially the moment we were in at the time. You gotta do everything you can to execute, and we did that.”
“This is a tie game!” Joe Buck shouted on the national television broadcast.
“I cannot believe what I’m witnessing!” Scott Zolak shrieked on the radio.
“It was all about details,” Mitchell recalled of the comeback. “I think we were at a critical point where everything needed to be executed right—maybe not perfectly—but almost perfect. So it really just came down to doing your assignment, doing your job with one hundred ten percent effort to just help the team any way you could.”
There were just fifty-two seconds left on the game clock, and Matt Ryan and the Atlanta Falcons had one final shot to end the fourth-quarter nightmare for their fans while the Patriots defense would be called upon once more to shut them down.
The league MVP looked shell-shocked during the Falcons’ final possession. If Tom Brady was dialed in, Matt Ryan was tuned out. He had no mental control over the game and was relying solely on muscle memory now.
Flustered, he mustered a mere sixteen yards on four plays before the Falcons punted away as time ran out in regulation.
The Super Bowl was headed to overtime for the first time in history.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Redemption
Overtime
New England Patriots captains Matthew Slater, Dont’a Hightower, and Devin McCourty walked together toward the middle of the field for a coin toss that would determine who would get the ball first in the overtime period. Ryan walked out by himself. It was, again, a symbolic visual. The Falcons quarterback looked alone, abandoned as Atlanta’s ship continued to take on water.
A win for either team might have been only just a coin toss away, but the result almost seemed predetermined.
Matthew Slater made the call.
“Heads,” he said.
The referee flipped the coin. Heads it was.
Slater signaled that the Patriots wanted to receive the kickoff. Ryan didn’t look surprised. He looked like someone who was accepting his fate.
Jonathan Kraft saw that his team had won the coin toss. He had come full circle and knew, like everyone watching, what was about to come when Tom Brady took the field in overtime.
“Game over,” he said to his father.
“Let’s go score and win this thing, baby,” Edelman said to his quarterback.
“Let’s go!” Brady shouted.
The Patriots started overtime with the ball on their own 25-yard line. The drive began with five straight completions as Brady spread the ball around to four different receivers.
Six yards to White. Fourteen to Amendola. Hogan for eighteen.
“We have a lot of targets and we have the best distributor of the football in the history of the game,” Edelman said. “It’s tough on a defense when we’re all doing our job.”150
For Brady, it was no longer a game. It was art, and he was painting the field with the brushstrokes reserved only for a master of the craft.
When asked by the authors of this book which throw stood out most, it was impossible for Brady to pick just one.
“There were so many plays in that game, when you look back on it, it was a game of inches,” he recalled. “Julian’s catch, Hogan’s catch. Malcolm Mitchell’s slipping on a route and getting up and catching it on a second and long. They all make a difference.”
He then added, “I threw the ball to Danny on our sideline. I just kinda dropped it on over his shoulder. It was a twelve-, fourteen-yard gain. Danny and I have worked on that together so many times. I threw another to Jules [Julian Edelman] on this crossing route in overtime and really kind of threaded the needle. I threw one to Hoags [Hogan] on the left sideline where the DB tried to get his hand in. Those were all important. The [offense] was pretty incredible, blocking, throwing, run after the catch. It’s a lot of hard work and it pays off.”
The silent, vacant stares and dour faces that were on the Patriots sideline after Julio Jones’s miracle catch had shifted across the field to the Falcons players.
There was now intensity and restrained excitement on the Patriots’ sideline.
Brady completed another short pass to White but it resulted in a three-yard loss. Unfazed, the quarterback went to the air again, hitting Edelman fifteen yards downfield. It was surgical. White then chewed up ten more yards on an end sweep. No Patriots fan had expected him to have such a big game, but there he was competing for the game’s most valuable player honors.
Number 2 for Atlanta nervously stalked the sidelines wearing a baseball cap, arms folded, waiting for more bad news while New England’s number 12 marched his team down to the Falcons’ 15-yard line. Brady fired a pass to Bennett that was nearly caught, but defensive pass interference was called on linebacker De’Vondre Campbell.
The Patriots were awarded a first down and goal to go at the Falcons’ 2-yard line.
NFL security had summone
d the Krafts to come down to the field to prepare for the postgame ceremonies. But the father and son were staying put. Like the rest of New England, they were superstitious about these things. They weren’t changing a thing until the game was officially over. They had never gone down onto the field early for any of the other six Super Bowls, win or lose, and they weren’t starting now.
After an incomplete pass to Bennett, the call was made to give the ball to White on a toss play to the right side of the offense. He had already scored twice, in addition to the crucial two-point conversion, and racked up 110 yards receiving on a Super Bowl record fourteen catches. For this play, Belichick’s decision to have extra two-point conversion plays available was prescient as the Patriots used another, just two yards from the goal line.
Dion Lewis had been the one practicing the play all week, but he was hurt in the third quarter and wasn’t available, so the offense substituted White, who was having a career night.
“This is what you dream about,” he would say. “You want to go out there and give it your best shot. You don’t want to have any regrets.”151
On the final play, White was ready for his moment of glory.
Brady took the snap with White five yards behind him in the backfield. Tom pitched the ball to the young back and he plowed forward until he was face-to-face with three Falcons defenders. “It was a toss play to me,” he remembers. “We ran through it in practice a bunch of times. The offensive line did a good job, the receivers did a good job and opened up a lane. There was just one guy there. I just had to put my pads down and find a way to get the ball in the end zone.”
He lowered his shoulders and bulled his way through Atlanta’s wall, stretching the ball forward and across the goal line just before his knees hit the turf.
“A touchdown and a title for the Patriots!” cried Joe Buck.
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