Subtexts for Super Bowl XLIX abound, and will be even more prevalent this week when the two teams arrive in Phoenix to be picked at by the thousands of national and international media, all trying to find a different story and an alternative way to predict New England beating Seattle, or vice versa.
Yet there is one howling, overriding theme that is impossible to ignore, and it is one that is likely to have more and more scribes coming back to it as kickoff time approaches. It is basically the Tale of Two Quarterbacks, and the Immovable Object against the Irresistible Force.
Despite their apparent discrepancy in age and experience, Tom Brady and Russell Wilson are cut from similar competitive cloth and both will lead their teams with the benefit of considerable single-minded assurance, i.e., they expect to win.
It is possible to argue the 37-year-old Brady, with 15 seasons and five previous Super Bowl apperances under his belt, has a substantial edge in experience and savvy compared to a player 11 years his junior and in only his third year in the league, but this is not a game in which to lean on such an obvious measurable, because there will be other, more valuable numbers in play at University of Phoenix Stadium on 1 February.
Indeed, the more you examine the playing records of Messrs. Brady and Wilson, the more you realise we are dealing with an almost inhuman balance of indicators, a veritable plethora of game-winning data. Put simply, these are statistical freaks with a mountain of empirical evidence at their beck and call, all of which says — you’re not going to beat me.
Something, therefore, has to give once Broadway star Idina Menzel has finished the national anthem at around 6:30pm ET and the Patriots and Seahawks are left with nothing but each other for company and the potential of a truly epic championship challenge.
A common way to evaluate the two principal players in this instance would be in terms of their experience, especially when there is such an apparent disparity. A player with 237 games under his belt would normally carry much more authority than one with 45, but this is most assuredly not a contest of the young pretender against the established champion, the tyro against the veteran.
After Super Bowl XLVIII, Wilson is totally familiar with this kind of scenario while his 6-1 playoff record is already the equal of Johnny Unitas, Joe Theisman (both 6-2) and Fran Tarkenton (6-5), while it eclipses the likes of fellow Hall of Famers Otto Graham (4-3), Dan Fouts (3-4) and Joe Namath (2-1). A victory on Sunday puts him only one behind Jim Plunkett, Dan Marino and Steve Young and two in arrears of Bart Starr, Kurt Warner and Jim Kelly.
It is already rarefied air for the Wisconsin product but he shows no sign of slowing down his electric tear through the NFL record books, although, as you will hear repeatedly this week, there is only one measurement that actually means anything to him, and that is the almighty W.
Wilson deals purely in wins. One day, he will certainly look back with pride at tying Peyton Manning for most touchdown passes as a rookie (26) and becoming the first quarterback to top 300 yards passing and 100 yards rushing in a game (against St. Louis on 19 October) but he is likely to be far more satisfied by becoming the fastest quarterback to 34 wins (which he did on 14 December against San Francisco), steering the Seahawks into the playoffs in each of his three seasons and in shaking off a truly wretched four-interception performance in the NFC Championship game against Green Bay last Sunday to claw his way to, yes, another win.
However, if you are looking for the most validating statistic with which to champion Wilson’s XLIX cause, the most compelling reason why he is likely to boast a shiny 7-1 postseason record come the end of the game, it lies in the astonishing head-to-head feat he boasts against fellow quarterback members of the Super Bowl Winners’ Club. It is a stat you are going to hear a lot between now and 1 February, and it is an utterly unblemished 10-0. That’s right, he has never lost to Peyton or Eli Manning, or Brees, or Aaron Rodgers. Or Brady.
He has never played against Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger’s or Joe Flacco of Baltimore, the only other active members of the Club, but he has bested both Mannings and Brees twice, Rodgers three times and Brady once. Admittedly, his victory against the Patriots, in 2012, was another squeaker at 24-23, but the Seattle signal-caller was an impressive 16 of 27 for 293 yards and three touchdowns while adding 17 yards rushing on five carries for a dazzling 133.7 quarterback rating. Brady threw for 395 yards that day and two scores, but also two interceptions and only a 79.3 rating.
A one-game sample is obviously not a hefty piece of numerical evidence, but 10 straight victories against the league’s crème de la crème in quarterbacking terms is downright other-worldly, a mercurial run that will either extend further into the realms of implausibility on Sunday — Mr. Brady, meet the Irresistible Force — or be relegated to a statistical footnote in history.
It helps to explain why Las Vegas is having such a difficult time establishing a betting favourite for this heavyweight pas de deux as it’s hard to back against someone who regularly refuses to lose in this kind of situation.
However, on the other side of our even-handed equation, there is plenty of numerical support for the Patriot game to be the Immovable Object, based on the veritable mountain of records Brady has built up in the course of a stellar career.
No one has played in more playoff games (28). No one has thrown more postseason yards (7,017), completions (646) and touchdowns (49) as the sixth-round pick from Michigan. And noone comes close to his total of 20 wins. Wilson would still need to average another two playoff victories each season for the next seven years just to match Brady’s current total, and there is no saying the New Englander won’t pad his figures still further beyond 2015.
But it is the volume of work that is in Tom’s favour going in to Glendale. True, he has lost two Super Bowls, both of them to choking defensive efforts by the New York Giants, but it is perfectly possible to posit that this current Patriots team is far better equipped than any of his five previous AFC championship teams to tackle such an extreme task.
They are running the ball better than ever behind LeGarrette Lynch (or is it Marshawn Blount, some pundits are struggling to tell them apart at this stage in the campaign) and they are increasingly hard to run on. They have unveiled an increasing bag of offensive tricks — under-inflated balls notwithstanding — and Brady is never more adept than when he has this kind of array at his disposal.
In each of their Super Bowl wins, after the 2001, 2003 and 2004 campaigns, New England had a balanced attack for Brady to wield, and this current team looks most like the one that stifled St. Louis in the New Orleans Superdome and that which out-duelled Carolina in Houston’s Reliant Stadium.
For the ultimate validation of Brady’s credentials, though, it is easy to fall back once again on the underlying stats. His 20 personal playoff wins are more than 21 other teams in the league. He has failed to win a playoff game in only two of the 12 seasons in which he has led the Patriots into the postseason. And the telltale indicators of his numbers for completion and quarterback rating are almost as good in the more testing world of the playoffs as they are in the regular season.
He is a statistical monster of the postseason, far in excess of greatest rival Peyton Manning, and noone has seriously challenged his playoff supremacy. Until now.
In past terms, the only quarterbacks with at least 10 postseason starts who can boast a higher play-off winning percentage than Brady’s .714 are Terry Bradshaw at .737 and Troy Aikman, .733, plus the stellar duo of Starr and Plunkett at .900 and .800 respectively. Those five represent the all-time gold standard for postseason success, but there is one notable figure on the horizon who is poised to join the conversation and his name, of course, is Wilson.
At .857, the Seattle passer is charting a unique playoff course. There are fully 70 quarterbacks who have started at least three playoff games, and only one, Starr, surpasses Wilson’s winning percentage. It is an absolutely plausibility-shredding success rate in today’s NFL with its emphasis on parity, and one that underscores the statistical enormity of XLIX and its two primary protagonists.
So, in many ways, Super Bowl’s 49th instalment can be seen, simply, as .857 vs .714, Wilson vs Brady, with the chance to burnish their figures still further. The Seahawks star would boost his percentage to .875 with another victory, poised to challenge Starr for the all-time attainment rate. However, if Brady rules the roost for a record-equalling fourth time, it would make their respective percentages .724 and .750, or as close to parity as makes no difference.
Good luck, Vegas.
