The Super Bowl Story, According to Tom Brady

It’s understandable when a stunning event overwhelms a career-defining event, the way it did in Super Bowl XLIX eight days ago. We spent three or four days piling on Pete Carroll for a call that seemed (and still seems) foolhardy, a decision that cost Seattle a second straight Super Bowl victory and a decision vital to the fourth Super Bowl title of the Belichick/Brady Era. Heck, Matt Lauer of the “Today Show” flew to Seattle and sat down with Carroll for 20 empathetic minutes. That aired Friday. So that was day five of Seattle regurgitation.

Now it’s day eight, and it’s time for New England quarterback Tom Brady to get his due. Offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels too. And important contributors Shane Vereen, Julian Edelman, Rob Gronkowski, Danny Amendola and the five-man line that kept Brady clean for the most important 18 plays of their lives, and the most important two touchdown drives.

I am going to isolate on Brady and McDaniels here, but that does not mean the others shouldn’t get a figurative Gatorade bath too. What New England did over the last 11-and-a-half minutes of the Super Bowl—against the defense that led the NFL in 2012, 2013 and 2014—is historic. It should not be forgotten or in any way overshadowed by the Malcolm Butler interception—gigantic, obviously, in its own right—because when the career of Tom Brady is put in a time capsule, this is the day, this is the quarter, these are the two drives, that should be best remembered. They show perfectly what made Brady a quarterback for the ages. All ages.

I spoke to Brady for an hour the other day, to get his play-by-play on the last two drives. And I spoke to McDaniels alone at length in the crazy post-game scrum. This is their story. It has a Spielberg twist on the final play that just makes it better. Perfect, in fact.

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McDaniels: “I didn’t get to see tape on Seattle until about 4 in the afternoon the day after our championship game. The way we do it is, we take care of all our Super Bowl logistical work first, so we can concentrate on game preparation after that without a lot of distractions. I watched a lot of them, obviously. And when you saw people have success against them, you saw teams stringing eight or 10 normal successful football plays together. Not explosive plays. But the word that kept coming to my mind, and I must have said it to our offensive players 25 times in two weeks of prep, was ‘patience.’ I told them, ‘Maybe we can come out of the game with one or two big plays. Maybe. But just trust the process. Be patient.’ The keys, to me, were being patient and never running horizontally after the catch. Just go upfield. You’re not going to create yards by trying to get around one guy, because two guys will be waiting for you. We did so many catch-and-run drills during the week of practice. Vertical, vertical, vertical. For Tom, the key was: Do not hold the ball for four seconds, or bad things are gonna happen.”

Brady: “I watched a lot of tape. A lot.”

He watched the Seahawks’ NFC Championship Game three times.

Brady: “They’d allowed the fewest big plays of any team all season, and you saw pretty early why you don’t want to go into the Super Bowl throwing up a bunch of posts, a bunch of ‘nine’ routes. [‘Go’ routes.] Richard Sherman picks off the go route every time you throw it. The plan was to exploit other parts of the field—but short parts of the field. Michael Bennett rushes from everywhere. Cliff Avril kills people. They believe in what they do. We countered that by saying, ‘Okay, here’s what we’re pretty good at: Space the field, find the soft spots, be satisfied with the four-yard gain, be happy with the four-yard gain. We were gonna be happy with a two-yard gain.”

Ball Security.

McDaniels: “The thing nobody talks about with Seattle is their ability to create disruptive plays. We worked on that literally every day, and in our six or seven practices before the game. Ball security. How to run after the catch. We told the scout team guys to punch, strip, whack at the ball, all the time. I knew every time we would have the ball in space, they’d be chopping at it. And that’s exactly what happened in the game. In fact, I have this thing I do during the first half of our games. I write down on my play sheet what I want to talk about to the team at halftime. And after seeing this five, six, seven times in the first half, I wrote down: ‘Constantly stripping at the ball.’ And we talked to them about it again at halftime.”

In 72 offensive plays in Super Bowl XLIX, New England did not fumble.