The New England Patriots’ locker room was eerily calm at the end of Super Bowl XLIX. At the end of a championship game you expect to find the victors in a state of glorious chaos, hugging and hollering as music blares out from some unseen speaker. Twelve months ago, Pete Carroll screamed himself hoarse at the middle of a scrum in MetLife Stadium.
After the Giants beat the Pats in the previous Arizona Super Bowl, Osi Umenyiora tore a picture of Tom Brady in Ugg boots off the inside of his locker and bellowed with unrefined glee.
There were no such scenes at University of Phoenix Stadium on Sunday evening. The stars of New England’s win over Seattle spoke quietly and showered quickly, while staff cleared up used equipment with startling efficiency. The most boisterous moment arrived when Brady walked in and and shouted across a few short words of congratulation to Malcolm Butler, whose interception had sealed the win.
Perhaps the Patriots were still just in shock at their victory stolen from the jaws of defeat. Maybe they simply did not feel like sharing their happiness with journalists after all the criticism their team had received off the back of the ball deflation scandal surrounding the AFC Championship Game.
Such calmness might also be the product of high expectations. The Patriots were not overwhelmed by their own success because they enter into every game with an absolute conviction that they will triumph. They have been right more often than not over the past 14 years. Since Tom Brady officially became the team’s starting quarterback in week three of the 2001 season, New England’s record stands at a combined 191-62 (including playoffs).
This was, of course, their fourth Super Bowl win with Brady under center. He joins Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw as the only quarterbacks ever to reach that number. Already on Sunday night there were many people ready to voice the opinion that Brady had now definitively confirmed his status as the greatest of all time at his position.
In reality we all know that the debate will never truly be ended. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there will never be an objective ‘best’ as long as watching football remains an inherently subjective experience. Brady could win another four Super Bowls and still you would find some fans willing to argue that Joe Cool’s perfect record in title games was more impressive, or that the New England player never threw passes as pretty as Dan Marino’s.
But Brady won a good many people round to his position on Sunday, this writer included. Besides the fact of winning four titles, he now owns three Super Bowl MVP awards – a figure matched only by Montana. His 13 career touchdowns in Super Bowls are two more than his idol mustered. In total he broke, matched or improved upon nine separate championship game records on Sunday night.
More compelling than any of those numbers, though, was the absolute assurance he demonstrated during New England’s final, game-winning drive. To complete eight of eight passes (and in reality nine of nine – since he had one wiped out by an offensive pass interference call) against the best defense of a generation was the stuff that legends are made of. Or in Brady’s case, embellished with. It’s not like he was short of miraculous comebacks in his career before now.
We needed to see this from Brady because it had been so long since he last did it in a Super Bowl. The decade-long wait after his third title was beginning to diminish the notion of him as a clutch performer. He had won the first 10 playoff games of his professional career, but was only 9-8 in the postseason since 2005.
For a team that had won nine divisional titles over the same spell, that was an underwhelming return. It also played into the hands of those who believed that the Patriots’ successes had been built on underhand strategies. Brady, they noted, had won no titles since New England were caught and punished for videotaping the New York Jets’ defensive coaches’ signals during a game in 2007.
There is still potential for this year’s success to be tarnished by the ball deflation scandal. The NFL’s appointed investigator, Ted Wells, advised before Sunday’s game that it would be weeks before he was ready to deliver a verdict. Jerry Rice and Ray Lewis are among the prominent commentators to argue that any New England Super Bowl win this year would need to have an asterisk placed next to it.
A more level-headed take says that we should wait for the results of Wells’s investigation before passing judgement one way or another. If cheating did take place then the Patriots must be punished, regardless of the fact that their offence occurred in a lopsided game.
But equally we should not lose perspective. Deflated balls are not the reason Brady has enjoyed such a phenomenal career. He is an extraordinary player and perhaps an even more extraordinary personality. He did not get here because he was blessed with greater physical tools than most other NFL quarterbacks but because he worked obsessively to make himself better than all of them.
He got lucky, too, by landing with Belichick in New England. Brady’s legacy will forever be intertwined with that of his head coach, whose own status as one of the greatest coaches of all time was consolidated on Sunday night. “I don’t like snapping the ball when I think there is going to be a bad play,” said Brady at his final media session before the game last week. He knows how fortunate he has been to work with a coach who does not put him in that position all that often.
Neither man was interested in talking about legacies on Sunday evening. Those are conversations to be had at the end of a career, and Brady has made it clear that he intends to play on for a while yet. In the sublime silence of the Patriots’ winning locker room, the quarterback was most likely already thinking about what he and his team could do to make sure they stay on top again next year.
