HAND IT TO ’EM
AFC CHAMPIONS: Shaking off injury, indomitable Brady rallies Pats in 4th
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — Playing with a cut on his throwing hand that spilled blood on the practice field at midweek? No problem. Facing the fearsome defense of the Jacksonville Jaguars? No matter. Trailing by 10 points in the fourth quarter, without Rob Gronkowski and needing to overcome the big-game curse of Tom Coughlin? No big deal.
Tom Brady and the New England Patriots put all of that aside Sunday and added to the lore of the NFL’s greatest recent dynasty. Brady threw two fourth-quarter touchdown passes as the Patriots came back to beat the Jaguars 24-20 in the AFC Championship Game at Gillette Stadium and advanced to their eighth Super Bowl with Brady as their quarterback and Bill Belichick as their coach.
“We’ve got a lot of great players,” Belichick said during the on-field postgame trophy presentation. “We’ve got a lot of guys
that fight, that never give up.”
They will seek a sixth Super Bowl triumph orchestrated by Brady and Belichick in two weeks in Minneapolis, facing the NFC champion Philadelphia Eagles.
The Patriots trailed 14-3 in the second quarter Sunday after a touchdown pass by Jaguars quarterback Blake Bortles and a touchdown run by powerful rookie running back Leonard Fournette. Brady seemed less bothered by his hand injury than by the Jaguars, who ranked second in the league this season in total defense. New England pulled within 14-10 by halftime but by then had lost Gronkowski, the tight end who is a matchup nightmare for most defenses, because of a concussion suffered on an illegal hit.
The Patriots faced a 20-10 deficit in the fourth quarter. But Brady threw a 9-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Danny Amendola with just under nine minutes remaining, then teamed with Amendola for a 4-yard score with 2:48 left. The Patriots held on from there, getting a breakup by cornerback Stephon Gilmore of a fourth-down pass by Bortles and then running out the clock.
Third-and-18 conversion
Amendola, a product of The Woodlands and Texas Tech, totaled seven catches for 84 yards. Perhaps as important as his touchdown grabs was his 21-yard catch on third-and-18 with 10:49 remaining in the game.
Amendola’s sliding catch in front of safety Tashaun Gipson kept the Pats’ hopes alive. If he doesn’t make that grab, they’re punting the ball, trailing 20-10 in the fourth quarter.
“I had an option route in the middle of the field,” Amendola said. “I had pointed out the line before the play snap, so I knew where to get to. And then Tom had a laser, and it was perfect.”
It was the second time this season Amendola converted a thirdand-18. He also did it in Week 3 against the Texans, sparking another late Patriots comeback.
“You just wait for it,” Patriots left tackle Nate Solder said of Amendola. “Come the end of the season, he’s going to make some unbelievable catch on a thirddown conversion. It’s going to be a touchdown, it’s going to be something big, and there he was.”
The Jaguars were kicking themselves after the game for allowing Amendola to convert such a low-percentage play.
“Obviously, I would like that play back,” Gipson said. “I am a better player than to give up thirdand-18.”
Brady, who completed 26 of 38 passes for 290 yards, played without a glove on his injured throwing hand but did have it wrapped and bandaged with black tape. He’d been listed as questionable after his hand was hurt during Wednesday’s practice, reportedly in a collision with running back Rex Burkhead.
Brady told Westwood One before the game that it was “a very fluke injury.” ESPN reported Sunday that more than 10 stitches were required to close a cut on the inside of Brady’s right hand near his thumb. Previous reports had indicated that Brady received four stitches.
“I said, ‘We’ll see,’ ” Brady said, in reference to the injury, during the postgame celebration. “I think (it went) pretty well. It went pretty good. Coach Belichick doesn’t like us talking much about injuries. It was just a pretty good cut. I dealt with it the best I could.”
Said Belichick: “Tom’s a tough guy, but we’re not talking about open-heart surgery.”
Even the presence of Coughlin was not enough to derail the Patriots. Coughlin beat the Patriots in two Super Bowls as coach of the New York Giants. He rebuilt this Jaguars team as the franchise’s front-office football czar and spent Sunday in the press box, muttering under his breath and occasionally pounding a fist on the table in front of him. The Jaguars lost for the third time in three appearances in the AFC Championship Game, the previous two defeats coming when Coughlin was their coach in the late 1990s.
Happy anniversary for Kraft
The Patriots are off to another Super Bowl amid recent reports of internal strife and speculation that this is the final go-round with Brady, Belichick and owner Robert Kraft together. The winning nevertheless continues, and Sunday’s victory came on the 24th anniversary of Kraft’s purchase of the team.
“I have never heard Gillette Stadium as loud as it was tonight. This is what I dreamt about as a fan in the stands, just like all of you,” Kraft said during the postgame ceremony. “And now we have to go to Minnesota and finish the job!”
The Patriots were making their seventh straight appearance in the AFC Championship Game, and it began smoothly. Brady completed all six of his passes for 57 yards on the game’s opening drive. The Patriots made good on a fourth-and-1 gamble from the Jacksonville 30-yard line but ended up having to settle for a Stephen Gostkowski field goal.
Bortles’ 4-yard TD pass to tight end Marcedes Lewis in the opening minute of the second quarter gave the Jaguars the lead, which was padded on Fournette’s scoring run from 4 yards out.
The Patriots pulled within 1410 soon after Gronkowski exited following a helmet-to-helmet hit by Jaguars safety Barry Church. The hit drew a penalty, and Church risked an unsportsmanlike-conduct call for stepping over Gronkowski and then reacting angrily to the flag, but he was not penalized a second time. A subsequent pass-interference call on Jacksonville set up James White’s 1-yard touchdown run.
A 54-yard field goal by Josh Lambo put the Jags up 17-10 in the third quarter, and his 43-yarder in the opening seconds of the fourth quarter pushed the lead to 10.
But it wasn’t big enough to save them from Brady.