SANTA CLARA, Calif. – For all the playmaking, schematics and analytics that make up the modern National Football League, it’s still a game that gets decided more often than not at the line of scrimmage.
That was exactly the case in the 60th Super Bowl game, won Sunday evening by the Seattle Seahawks in a matchup that was mostly a grind through three quarters.
The Seahawks’ top-ranked defence delivered from start to finish, completely shutting down the second-highest scoring team from the regular season and capturing their second Super Bowl title in franchise history by a 29-13 score.
In the process, Seattle diminished a New England team that had snuck up on the rest of the NFL a week at a time, turning a 1-2 start into a 16-1 finish heading into the Super Bowl.
The Patriots had given up just 26 points during three playoff wins, a historic pace that came under scrutiny because each of their postseason opponents was missing key pieces on offence.
The question all week was how the New England defence would stand up against the highest scoring team in the playoffs and the third-highest-scoring team from the regular season?
Pretty well, it turns out. Seattle managed just three field goals during the first half to take a 9-0 lead to the locker room, adding a fourth field goal on their opening possession of the second half.
Seattle got consistent production from running back Kenneth Walker III but their other playmakers were held largely in check, including standout receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba, who had just four catches for 27 yards. Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold ended up completing just 50 per cent (19 of 38) of his passes on the evening.
New England was the NFL’s No. 2 scoring offence during the regular season at 28.8 points per game, demonstrating a consistency during the season where the Pats never scored fewer than 23 points in a game from Week 3 onward.
That success put quarterback Drake Maye into the MVP conversation and allowed the Patriots to capture their first division title since the Brady-Belichick era.
It also happened that New England played the softest regular-season schedule this century, which didn’t include a single top-10 defence.
Much was made of the fact that New England had faced three of those during their playoff path to Santa Clara, but the 54 points they put up in those games was the lowest output for any Super Bowl participant that has ever played in the wild-card round.
So the Patriots didn’t exactly put to rest any concerns about their offence headed into the Super Bowl. And those concerns were well-founded.
New England struggled to move the ball on offence all night, failing to match Seattle’s run game with their duo of Rhamondre Stevenson and TreVeyon Henderson, and finding themselves consistently in third-and-long situations where Maye struggled to find open targets.
Maye’s tendency to take sacks reared its head throughout the game, as the second-year pivot ended up taking six in all. When the Seahawks didn’t get home on D they managed to hurry Maye enough that he was mostly ineffective until the fourth quarter when the game was out of reach.
By the time Seattle forced the game’s first turnover with a strip-sack fumble of Maye late in the third quarter, New England’s futility on offence was becoming too much to overcome.
When Darnold hit tight end AJ Barner with the game’s first touchdown score, giving Seattle a 19-0 lead with 13:24 to play, it felt like things were out of reach.
Time after time, Maye would escape from the pocket, usually either throwing the ball away or trying to make something out of nothing with his legs.
Back-to-back deep throws by Maye to Mack Hollins quickly made it 19-7 with 12:27 to play.
Those were two desperate, low-percentage throws that briefly gave New England life before another low-percentage deep throw on New England’s next possession produced the game’s first interception.
If Maye needs any reminder that the path from the draft stage to the Vince Lombardi Trophy is rarely a straight one, he need only look at Darnold, who was taken with the same pick (third overall) six years earlier.
Darnold had signed with his fourth team, Minnesota, for the 2024 season to be the backup to first-round pick J.J. McCarthy but wound up as the starter on a 14-win team after the rookie suffered a season-ending injury before the season started.
When the Vikings recommitted to McCarthy after last season, the Seahawks jumped at the chance to upgrade to Darnold from Geno Smith. And got the payoff performance they wanted.
The Patriots won’t have to upgrade at quarterback for a long time, with Maye being just 23 years old and the second-youngest QB to ever start a Super Bowl.
But they’ll need to study the playmakers around him after four playoff games against top-10 defences that produced just 67 points — a sobering ending for a team that entered the playoffs on such a roll offensively.
The Pats couldn’t sustain things when the completion stiffened and couldn’t get out from under Seattle’s blanketing defence until it was far too late.
