

Before it even started, their cornerbacks coach, Kevin Ross, wrote on a board all the quarterbacks they would be facing - Matt Ryan, Drew Brees, Aaron Rodgers and Mahomes, who torched them in Week 12 for 462 yards and three touchdowns.

The Buccaneers loaded up on playmaking receivers, linebackers who excelled in coverage and aggressive defensive backs who matured as the season progressed. “They were an organization ready to win,” Gronkowski said of the Buccaneers.
#Who won super bowl last year 2021 movie#
Their quest was nicknamed Operation Shoeless Joe Jackson, a wink to the prophesy from the movie “Field of Dreams”: “If you build it, he will come.” Brady valued how General Manager Jason Licht had assembled a team that solved problems around him instead of asking him to solve them himself. “I think we knew this was going to happen now, didn’t we?”īrady’s arrival in Tampa reflected a certain harmonic convergence, a confluence of foresight, audacity and serendipity largely alien to the Buccaneers, who hadn’t won a playoff game since steamrollering the Raiders for their only title after the 2002 season. “We came together at the right time,” Brady, who went 21 of 29 for 201 passing yards and was selected as the Super Bowl’s most valuable player for the fifth time, said on the field afterward. Brady joined Peyton Manning as the only starting quarterbacks to win Super Bowls with multiple franchises. franchise, more than John Elway and his boyhood idol, Joe Montana, combined, more than Michael Jordan in the N.B.A. In delivering Tampa Bay’s second to win his seventh - more than any N.F.L. The last two Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks had never faced each other, and in some circles the game had been distilled in rather crude, and imprecise, terms as a referendum on each of their legacies - as if Brady’s would be tarnished with a defeat, or if, four seasons into a glorious career, Mahomes’s was somehow linked to the outcome.
#Who won super bowl last year 2021 full#
struck a cosmic bargain: In exchange for plowing through a full 256-game slate without creating a closed environment in which to play, it would be granted the most tantalizing quarterback matchup in the Super Bowl era, Brady versus Patrick Mahomes, the best of all time against the best of this time.

Capitol, Patriots Coach Bill Belichick declined to accept a Presidential Medal of Freedom from him, citing his conversations with the team “about social justice, equality and human rights.”įor this untidy heap of a season even to reach Sunday’s capstone, it was as if the N.F.L. Trump became “ uncomfortable.” As Trump’s term came to a close, with some of his supporters leading an armed attack on the U.S. and Galynn.Ĭivil unrest over racial injustice roiled the country, emboldening players, coaches and owners to protest systemic inequality, with some players gathering to challenge the commissioner, Roger Goodell, to proclaim that Black Lives Matter.īrady left New England behind and did not comment this season on the red Make America Great Again hat seen in his locker there in 2015, but he did say his relationship with President Donald J. plowed ahead, establishing health protocols and reinforcing them as the virus upended schedules, postponed games and infected more than 700 players, coaches and staff members - as well as Brady’s parents, Tom Sr. calendar, but never before had so many events surrounding the field of play threatened to pause the nation’s most popular sport.Īfter the pandemic gripped the country last spring, the decision to play the regular season on time, as scheduled, was met with pushback and confusion. The final game is always an exhausting, exhilarating conclusion to the N.F.L. This Super Bowl win was, for Brady, almost certainly his hardest, his sweetest and his strangest, too, captured at the end of the most improbable season in N.F.L.
