How the Bucs took advantage of the Chiefs’ disarray to win the Super Bowl
Also, is Brady really the GOAT of all GOATs? And the show after the game.
First off, Tom Brady is undeniable. This man, at 43 years old, put a truly gruesome second-half showing in Green Bay behind him to roast the defending champions in an MVP performance. He soundly outplayed Patrick Mahomes to make the Buccaneers the first-ever Super Bowl champions to lift the Lombardi Trophy on their home turf.
That was only after the first half! But Brady could only go as far as the Chiefs would allow. Turns out that was pretty far.
While Kansas City clamped down on top wideout Mike Evans and traced former All-Pro Chris Godwin from the slot, the Chiefs generally failed to track Tampa’s tight ends. This was something the team could overcome when facing Dawson Knox in the AFC title game. It was a completely different story against the Buccaneers and Brady’s huckleberry Rob Gronkowski.
(This GIF was accidentally stripped from the mailed version of this post. That must have been extremely confusing! Sorry about that)
Look at how mad Tyrann Mathieu is. That’s because this happened ALL GAME.
Gronkowski now has more postseason catches from Brady than anyone else in NFL history. He had six receptions (on seven targets) for 106 yards the last time these teams met back in November. None of this was unexpected, yet defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo appeared *baffled* by the strategy. The future Hall of Famer had six receptions on seven targets for 64 yards and two touchdowns Sunday, racking up more yards and targets than anyone else on the team.
Tampa started the game with a series of short passes and play-action sets. This was supposed to set up Brady’s deep ball later on. If that second-quarter touchdown pass to Gronk was any indication, it worked perfectly. Here’s how the Chiefs lined up against that first-and-10 play:
Ten of the Chiefs 11 defenders are stuck within 4.5 yards from the line of scrimmage, even though Tampa’s top two wideouts are on the field. The one safety, Mathieu, gets erased from the play because he has to track Godwin’s inside route, leaving Gronk one-on-one with rookie corner L’Jarius Sneed, who gives up six inches and 76 pounds in this matchup. This was exactly what offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich drew up in his first half dream board. It worked exactly as well as he could have hoped.
(Aside: Leftwich should be a head coach. Chiefs OC Eric Bieniemy, despite calling a touchdown-free Super Bowl, should be a head coach. Bucs DC Todd Bowles should be a head coach once again, because whatever you do with the Jets doesn’t count — plus, he won 10 games there! Hire minority head coaches, especially in a world where Urban Meyer and Nick Sirianni and Brandon Staley and Dan Campbell get jobs.)
Mahomes, on the other hand, dealt with all the pressure we expected he’d face against the Tampa defense. And he put most of those throws on target, including this fourth-and-9 prayer that still, somehow, managed to hit Darrel Williams in the face at the goal line:
Ultimately, Kansas City’s patchwork offensive line was too much for last year’s Super Bowl MVP to overcome. Mahomes’ numbers look awful on paper:
But hot damn, those were some impressive incompletions.
The question was whether or not the Bucs’ young secondary could chase the Chiefs’ neverending supply of speedy wideouts throughout these broken plays. They answered emphatically. No Mahomes completion traveled more than 20 yards through the air. He rarely had the chance to plant his feet and make the downfield throws Brady, nearly two decades older, made with regularity:
That deluge of pressure meant the Chiefs had little time to see set plays through to their terminus. Mahomes was 22 of 34 for 242 yards and an 86.7 passer rating when he was able to throw from the pocket. The Chiefs either sacked him or forced him to scramble outside the tackle box 18 times (34.6 percent of his dropbacks) and limited him to four completions on 15 passes, 28 yards, two interceptions, and a 0.0 rating.
Mahomes completed just two of his 12 attempts (16.7 percent) that traveled 15+ yards downfield, both of which happened in the fourth quarter when the game had been already decided. He’d completed 24 of his 66 passes of 20+ yards (36.7%) during the regular season.
Give credit to a young secondary for swarming to the ball. Give credit to a bulldozing pass rush for creating the distress that blew up Eric Bieniemy’s plays. Give credit to defensive coordinator Todd Bowles for absolutely killing it with his play calling.
Oh, and credit Leonard Fournette for being MVP-adjacent in his Spite Bowl against a team that literally could not have been further from playing Sunday night.
Fournette was invaluable in every phase of the offense, gaining 135 yards on 20 total touches. NFL’s Next Gen Stats gave him a 0.9 percent chance of scoring when he took a third-quarter handoff at the Chiefs’ 27-yard line, but he still found a way to burst into the end zone and likely work his way into an unavoidable commercial that will play endlessly throughout 2021’s Sundays.
The problem was Tampa Bay’s well-designed gameplan kept the Chiefs stuck in the mud and left the Super Bowl lacking. After eight straight bangers, Brady’s played in two straight boring title games, winning both.
Everything was mostly uneventful? The game was uncompetitive. The Weeknd’s halftime show was … fine, but he was performing in a spot where being forgettable is the worst possible outcome (either be Prince or have a Left Shark). The finish was familiar, and while it was heartwarming to see Bruce Arians get his Andy Reid moment and finally lift the Lombardi Trophy, this was all a very 2020 finish to the 2020 season.
But hey, the Bucs got their first non-Gruden championship! And Antoine Winfield Jr. gave us this blessed image:
Good season, everyone. All things considered. — CD
On GOATs
Credit where credit is due, Tom Brady played an outstanding game. And seven Super Bowl wins, along with five of the game’s MVP awards, is indeed very impressive, accomplishments worthy of celebration. The downside to this is that we must now suffer through YEARS of professional sports talking people telling us that this makes him the greatest athlete of all time, regardless of the sport.
Brady’s GOAT status is going to be fodder for endless hours of hot sports debate. That’s fine too. Hollering about sports is relatively harmless (or at least it should be, but too often it devolves into harassment, doxxing, and worse). And there’s a pretty good case to be made that he is very much the greatest football player of all time, or at least quarterback. But there are a few things to keep in mind whenever you find yourself confronted with one of these discussions.
First, longevity. How long a player plays the game (or whatever their sport is) matters on the greatness meter. Brady’s missed only enough time in his career to make Matt Cassel look like a viable starting quarterback, tricking the Chiefs, funny enough, into paying him gobs of money to lead their franchise into a previous era of mediocrity. We don’t talk enough about how just doing a sport long enough is maybe the most important element of “greatness.”
Also, there are other sports! How do you measure what Michael Jordan did in his career versus what Tom Brady has done throughout his? I don’t know that you can. It’s not a straight up comparison. That might not be a good example either because both of those guys play in sports where there is one very obvious measure of greatness and that’s highly visible championships.
When there’s an organization to crown an entity as its best for a season, especially one that does so during the most-watched television event of the year, it creates a nice, easily defined version of greatness. Win this thing multiple times and you thus become a GOAT, if not THE GOAT. That leaves out other sports that aren’t worth a billion dollars in advertising money and lack the enormous corporate muscle of a pro sports league.
Is winning seven Super Bowls really more impressive than Nims Purja climbing the world’s 14 highest peaks in six months and six days, beating the former record by about seven and a half years, or summiting K2 in winter? Each of those is one helluva feat that all the TB12 dieting and plyometric exercises in the world won’t really help you accomplish. Yet, those extraordinary feats of athleticism are mostly confined to a niche. More people will know Nims as the guy who photographed the Disney-length line of climbers waiting to get to the top of Everest in 2019.
Football’s also a team sport, in case that point wasn’t driven home by how badly so many of the people around Patrick Mahomes played on Sunday. Your run of the mill game manager QB isn’t going to win seven Super Bowls, but Tom Brady’s not going to do that either without an excellent supporting cast around him, a whip smart coaching staff, and a front office that can balance all the factors it needs to in order to build and sustain a championship team.
I’m not here to be one of those people who craps on everything. One of the gazillion people on Twitter (many of whom might be your friends or at least people you strongly agree with on some stuff) who absolutely live to tell you that a thing you enjoy sucks for a variety of reasons both real and imagined. If you want to celebrate Tom Brady as the greatest athlete of all time, by god, grab yourself some avocado ice cream and holler it out loud for all the world to hear.
But remember, he also might not be. There are very many other athletes in a variety of other fields worthy of praise for also impressive accomplishments, and like all potential GOATs, there are a lot of people behind that person deserving of credit as well. —RVB
The post-Super Bowl show had more action than the Super Bowl
Last week, a viral tweet about The Wonder Years series premiere made the rounds, reminding us all of our mortality:
What that tweet fails to mention — besides that PEN15, which takes place in 2000, fits that timeline — is that The Wonder Years debuted after the Super Bowl. It wasn’t the first time a pilot episode had earned TV’s most coveted timeslot, but it was the first time a new series with actual substance aired in this spot and went on to have a long, successful run. The show, which won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series in its first season, arrived fully realized as a beautiful, achingly poignant slice of Americana.
Other networks tried to follow suit in subsequent years, but the only Homicide: Life on the Street, which premiered after the Super Bowl five years later, ever came close to capturing the magic of The Wonder Years’ first episode.
NBC tried a different concept three years later when it once again owned the TV rights to the Super Bowl. Rather than highlight a new show, the network decided to reward an established hit, using the biggest ratings winner of the year to add to an already-healthy audience. Friends, in its second season, secured the post-Super Bowl bid and determined that a normal episode wouldn’t do. Instead, “The One After the Superbowl” was a supersized episode with superstar guests, including Julia Roberts and Jean-Claude Van Damme. (I recommend reading this oral history about the episode.)
Since then, the networks have switched up their approaches to the Super Bowl lead-out slot. Sometimes they opt for a TV phenomenon that has tapped into the zeitgeist (like The Office), and sometimes they decide to introduce viewers to a new program (e.g. Undercover Boss). Other times, they want to grow the audience for a low-rated show they believe in (such as Alias, which produced a banger of a Super Bowl episode the last time the Bucs had won a championship before this year).
Ever since that Friends episode aired 25 years ago, I’ve taken a keen interest in which program is picked to run after the Super Bowl, even when it’s something I’m not necessarily a fan of. Several times, I’ve watched shows that I knew were decidedly not for me (Grey’s Anatomy, Criminal Minds), just so I could experience what I felt like was a collective pop culture moment. However, I’ve always drawn the line at any of the reality shows selected (Survivor, The Voice, etc), because that’s not a genre of TV that has ever appealed to me.
I had gotten out of the habit of watching the lead-out program after working the Super Bowl for eight years. When the game ended, my brain was fried on SEO overload and I was still facing probably seven more hours of work that night. But this year, I was free and had both the time and the mental capacity to check out the postgame show. Although how and what we consume on TV has changed a lot in the last eight years, I was looking forward to returning to one of my favorite Super Bowl traditions.
CBS went back to the pilot well and chose to give the slot to the debut of Queen Latifah’s The Equalizer, which is also a reboot of an 80s show and a Denzel Washington film series.
There’s usually only one time I ever watch CBS procedurals: when I’ve left the TV on TNT after an NBA game, it’s 3 a.m., and I’m too lazy to change the channel. Nevertheless, I was committed to watching The Equalizer, despite it being a show I wouldn’t normally seek out.
The pilot did a decent job of setting up the premise: Queen Latifah plays Robyn McCall, a former CIA operative whose last mission still troubles her, hinted about during her scenes with her one-time handler. Robyn, who lives with her aunt and teenage daughter, is trying to figure out her next move when she stumbles on a woman who needs help and can’t go to the police. With some assistance from her two hacker friends, Robyn finds her calling: "Got a problem? Odds against you? I can help."
The episode itself wasn’t particularly good or bad; in fact, it was pretty standard for a CBS procedural, almost like they have an algorithm designed to pump these shows out. The case of the week wasn’t that engrossing and required a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. And I regret to inform you that even after 24 and Homeland, the staff of an action show still cannot write properly for a character who is a teenage girl.
Still, Queen Latifah kicks butt in the role and has, as she’s always had, a strong screen presence.
At least in that way, it was probably more entertaining than the Super Bowl itself, especially with an unnecessary explosion in the middle of the episode. I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch The Equalizer again because it’s not the kind of show that I’d put in my normal rotation, but if it’s randomly on one night after NBA on TNT, then sure, I’d leave it on to see Queen Latifah mess up some bad guys. — SH
is he taunting at the chiefs ha chifes deserve that