SUPER BOWL LII
NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS PHILADELPHIA EAGLES
BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — Tom Brady is the comeback king in the playoffs.
From his past two Super Bowl wins to the AFC championship game rally two weeks ago — which put the New England Patriots on the NFL’s biggest stage for the third time in four seasons — no quarterback has engineered more lategame postseason comebacks than Brady.
But he is not alone. Whether it was Marcus Mariota and the Tennessee Titans in the wildcard round against the Kansas City Chiefs earlier this postseason; Russell Wilson and the Seattle Seahawks against the Green Bay Packers in the NFC championship game three years ago; or Andrew Luck and the Indianapolis Colts against the Chiefs in a wild-card matchup four years ago, there have been as many playoff comebacks from at least 10 points down in the fourth quarter the past five seasons as there were the previous 26 seasons.
“What happens is instead of playing the team, they start playing the clock. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you go against a bad boy like Tom Brady and you get burned,” said Reggie Wayne, an NFL analyst and former Colts receiver. “A lot of that falls onto the coaches. The players are going to run what the coaches call.”
Whether it’s the Atlanta Falcons failing to run the ball enough late in last year’s Super Bowl that helped the Patriots
rally from 28-3 down to win in overtime or Seattle’s decision to pass at the goal line late instead of hand it to Marshawn Lynch with the title on the line against New England in 2015, questionable coaching decisions have contributed to some of those comebacks.
But nobody is better at exploiting those mistakes than
Brady and the Patriots (15-3), who take on the Philadelphia Eagles (15-3) tonight at Super Bowl LII in Minneapolis. Kickoff is at 6:30, with NBC televising the game.
Brady has four playoff wins from games in which New England trailed by at least 10 points in the fourth quarter, including the “Tuck Rule” game against Oakland in 2002. No other quarterback has led more than one such comeback in playoff history.
“There’s a great belief no matter what the circumstances that we have enough to overcome it,” Brady said. “I don’t think we want to try to overcome that again this year. That was pretty tough to do. Hopefully we can get a lead, play from ahead, play on our terms.”
The Patriots may not like falling behind in playoff games, but when that happens, they handle the situation better than any other NFL team. They are 6-6 in the playoffs when trailing after three quarters under Brady and coach Bill Belichick, while the rest of the NFL has a 27-140 record in that span. Besides Brady, Wilson and Eli Manning are the only quarterbacks in that span with more than two fourth-quarter comebacks; each has four.
Not that it is by design. “That whole comeback thing is overrated,” said NFL Network analyst Willie McGinest, who won three Super Bowl titles as Brady’s teammate in New England. “Players can’t go in and say, ‘Hey, we want to win this game in dramatic fashion, be down 11 with eight minutes to go and come back and have the crowd go crazy.’ You want to be in control, play a certain way and be in front. Because that changes how you play the game.”
The biggest deficit overcome to win a Super Bowl before last season was just 10 points, and the Patriots were the first team to overcome a deficit that big in the second half when they did it against the Seahawks three years ago. The only other teams to come back from 10 points down to win a Super Bowl faced those deficits early in the second quarter, with the New Orleans Saints rallying past the Colts in 2010 and the Washington Redskins routing the Denver Broncos — thanks to a 35-point second quarter — in 1988.
Brady’s postseason passer rating when trailing in the fourth quarter the past four years is a staggering 121.2, compared to 75.6 for the rest of the NFL.
In last year’s Super Bowl comeback, the Falcons appeared to tire and struggled to generate pressure, sending more than four pass rushers on just two of 24 pass plays in the fourth quarter. In the AFC title game two weeks ago, the Jacksonville Jaguars also only brought more than four rushers on two of 15 fourth-quarter pass plays as New England came back from 20-10 down to win 24-20.
“What teams do wrong is they go zone,” Wayne said. “He’s going to pick zone apart all day, every day. He’s going to spread you out, and they’re the best at creating mismatches.”