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In today’s SI:AM:
🏈 Breer’s Super Bowl takeaways
🏈 Patriots’ weaknesses exposed
🏈 Kenneth Walker III’s career night
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Defense won this championship
The most impressive thing an NFL team can do is make a Super Bowl boring. Every fan wants to see a back-and-forth thriller, but strangling your opponent and turning the game into a completely one-sided affair is the best way to assert yourself as a dominant champion.
That’s exactly what the Seahawks did last night against the Patriots.
New England’s defense deserves some credit for helping to make the game a total slog (neither team scored a touchdown in the first three quarters) but Seattle at least moved the ball enough to muster four field goals before it finally reached the end zone in the fourth quarter. Darnold also struggled against pressure from the New England defense, but avoided making the same mistakes Drake Maye made that had the Patriots spinning their wheels. New England punted on its first eight possessions of the game, excluding the kneeldown at the end of the first half.
The Seahawks’ defensive pressure was simply too much for Maye and the Patriots offense to withstand. Maye was sacked six times, one shy of the Super Bowl record. (Seattle appeared to tie the record, but Uchenna Nwosu’s defensive touchdown in the fourth quarter was later changed from a sack and fumble recovery to an interception.) Maye and the Patriots had no answer for Mike Macdonald’s defensive game plan. New England’s offensive line, which featured two rookies, couldn’t create enough holes to effectively run the ball or impede pass rushers long enough for Maye to throw it.
“That group up front, they knew they had to play the most unselfish game they’ve ever played,” Seahawks defensive coordinator Aden Durde said. “Someone was going to get a sack, and it didn't matter who.”
In retrospect, perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Seahawks won so handily. Of course, the Patriots had a great season. No one reaches the Super Bowl by accident. But the Seahawks were far superior by a variety of metrics.
Most impressively, Seattle ranks third all time among Super Bowl winners in Defense-adjusted Value Over Average (DVOA), the advanced metric developed by ESPN’s Aaron Schatz that measures overall team strength. The Seahawks’ DVOA of 46.4% is behind only the 1985 Bears (52.3%) and ’91 Washington team (53.9%) on the list of greatest Super Bowl champions ever. (The 2007 Patriots rank third all-time in DVOA but did not win the championship.)
New England, meanwhile, was not as strong as its 14–3 regular season record would indicate. The Patriots had by far the lowest strength of schedule in the NFL this season by Pro Football Reference’s measure, while the Seahawks played the seventh toughest. The Patriots didn’t exactly look like a juggernaut in any of their first three playoff games. They had less-than-dominant wins over flawed Chargers and Texans teams, then held on to beat the Broncos after a snow squall effectively ended the game after three quarters.
There are reasons for the Patriots to be excited about their future. Maye made an enormous leap from his rookie season to finish second in MVP voting, and coach Mike Vrabel helped construct a top-notch defense that will keep his team in most games. It’ll be interesting to see how New England fares next season when it’s playing the schedule of a 14–3 team instead of a 4–13 team, but Vrabel has undoubtedly accelerated the Patriots’ rebuild.
Seattle, on the other hand, seems poised to continue an impressive run of success. The Seahawks’ 7–10 finish in 2021 is the only time they’ve posted a losing record since 2012. Much of that success came from the partnership of Pete Carroll and Russell Wilson, and now it’s continuing with Macdonald and Darnold.
The best of Sports Illustrated
- After a season that went further than anyone imagined, the Patriots will immediately turn their attention to what’s ahead. Alber Breer also has much more in his Super Bowl takeaways.
- The Seahawks ripped apart the Patriots’ weaknesses with ease to cruise to a title in their Super Bowl LX win, writes Conor Orr.
- Greg Bishop details how the Seahawks busted ghost after ghost on the way to lifting the Lombardi Trophy.
- Matt Verderame breaks down the good, bad and ugly of Sunday’s matchup.
- Verderame also explains why Seattle running back Kenneth Walker III’s Super Bowl MVP performance reflects a changing sport that suddenly favors his position again.
- Gilberto Manzano reports scenes from the Patriots’ locker room and recounts the struggles of New England’s offensive line on the biggest stage.
- American figure skater Ilia Malinin put Team USA on his back so the team could earn a gold medal, writes Michael Rosenberg.
- Even though Lindsey Vonn’s devastating crash in the women’s downhill sent shockwaves through the Milan Cortina Olympics, Pat Forde contends that the tragic end to her comeback wasn’t all for nothing.
- Forde says there is a new star for Team USA as downhiller Breezy Johnson took gold on the same slopes where Vonn crashed out.
The top five…
… plays from Super Bowl LX:
5. Rhamondre Stevenson’s fingertip catch for a Patriots touchdown.
4. A beautiful throw and catch from Drake Maye to Mack Hollins for the Patriots’ first touchdown of the night.
3. Two long runs by Super Bowl MVP Kenneth Walker III.
2. Two unreal punts by Seattle’s Michael Dickson that both went out of bounds inside the 10. (It wouldn’t have been absurd for Dickson to be named MVP, in my opinion.)
1. Uchenna Nwosu’s interception return for a touchdown that extinguished all hope for the Patriots.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | Dominant Seahawks Smother Patriots to Complete a Dream Season.
