The story of Super Bowl LV is, inescapably, Thomas Edward Patrick Brady, Jr. On Sunday night, Brady, the quarterback of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, appeared in his tenth Super Bowl, and won his seventh ring. By himself, Brady now has more Super Bowl titles than either the New England Patriots or the Pittsburgh Steelers, the two teams with the most Super Bowl titles in N.F.L. history. (All six of the Patriots’ titles were won with Brady as quarterback.) Brady is reportedly forty-three, and this Super Bowl was his third since he turned forty.
On Sunday, in dismantling the Kansas City Chiefs, 31–9, Brady was nearly perfect. Well protected by a stellar offensive line—and aided by a tenacious running back, Leonard Fournette, who kept Kansas City’s pass rush honest—Brady was rarely harried, always balanced, always in control. He completed twenty-one of twenty-nine passes, for two hundred and one yards and three touchdowns. Two of the scores were caught by his old teammate in New England, Rob Gronkowski, whom he’d coaxed out of retirement, and the third went to Antonio Brown, a player he’d intensively recruited. It took Brady about half a season to master the Tampa Bay playbook and mold the offense to himself. His arm, improbably, seemed to grow stronger as the weeks passed.
Brady had more than a little help from the Bucs’ defense. The defensive coördinator Todd Bowles used a creative game plan to harass the Chiefs’ quarterback Patrick Mahomes, and the Bucs held the league’s most explosive offense without a touchdown. But no one was surprised when Brady, and not the linebacker Shaquil Barrett, walked away with the M.V.P. trophy. For two weeks, the matchup between Tampa Bay and Kansas City had been hyped as the greatest of all time against the greatest in the game today—the GOAT vs. the Kid—and that was always the way it was going to be seen.
By his own exalted standards and his stat line, Mahomes had a miserable game. He started the game by completing just one of his six first passes, and that one only for three yards. He did not reach a hundred passing yards until there was less than a minute left in the third quarter. He was sacked three times and threw two interceptions, and he completed only about half of his passes. Mahomes might be the most talented player of his generation, maybe ever, but he finished the game grass-stained, glassy-eyed, limping, and defeated.
But the predetermined narrative was the wrong one: the game was not actually decided by the quarterback matchup. Mahomes was playing in front of a patchwork, ineffective offensive line, and facing a defense that looked nothing like the one he’d torched in week twelve of the regular season. What’s more, the game’s truly breathtaking plays belonged to Mahomes. Brady may have added to his already unprecedented resume, but the quarterback who impressed me most was the one who lost.
Again and again, the pocket was breached, and Mahomes was hunted. Again and again, Barrett, Ndamukong Suh, and other Bucs defenders bore down on him. Mahomes was pressured on more than half of his drop-backs—the most of any quarterback in Super Bowl history. (Brady, meanwhile, was pressured only four times.) Mahomes tried to extend plays with his speed and improvisational gifts, and he usually managed to get off the ball before being dragged to the turf. If there was a target downfield, he found it; even as he fell, his whiplike wrists could send the ball thirty yards. But, too many times, the intended receiver was perfectly covered or dropped it.
A few misses were so spectacular that they seemed to suggest alternate histories, in which Mahomes was the hero. With under six minutes remaining in the first quarter, on third and eight, the Bucs sent a wild blitz that included both corners. Mahomes slipped out of a sack, rolled left, and flung the ball toward the end zone. It sailed through the wide receiver Tyreek Hill’s hands and hit him in the helmet. The throw was an astonishing feat of athleticism and wherewithal. Mahomes and Hill are so good, and have performed so many seeming miracles, that it was surprising when the throw didn’t actually result in a touchdown.
Early in the fourth quarter, Mahomes hiked the ball and dropped back, and back some more, searching for an open receiver as he ran toward the left sideline, then spinning as Barrett grabbed hold of him. He spun a second time, and, as he spun, he heaved the ball into the corner of the end zone, an unthinkable throw. The intended receiver nearly pulled it in. On the very next play, on fourth down, Mahomes appeared to be tripped for a loss. As he fell, fully laid out, his body parallel to the ground, he slung a sidearm pass into the end zone. It slipped through the receiver’s hands and hit him in the face.
The tension between the individual and the collective is everywhere in the N.F.L., a league that likes to have it both ways. There was something for everyone in CBS’s broadcast. The national anthem was performed as a duet between a country-music singer and an R. & B. star. The poet Amanda Gorman, the sensation of the Presidential Inauguration, performed. A military flyover included three bombers.
The two teams featured more than one player who has faced legal action for accusations of abuse and sexual misconduct, and one of the Chiefs’ coaches, the son of the head coach Andy Reid, was not at the game, two days after he was involved in a car accident that left a five-year-old in critical condition. There was the usual spectacle of violence on the field, too—watching Suh smash into Mahomes was terrifying. Meanwhile, following years of decline in youth football participation, the league made overt attempts at attracting children: in highlights, Nickelodeon slime cannons were unleashed.
A nurse was on hand for the coin toss, and seventy-five hundred vaccinated health-care workers were given tickets. There were also many other, presumably unvaccinated people in the stands. (The final attendance was reported at just under twenty-five thousand.) All were given masks; only some wore them. Around a hundred million people in the country were expected to watch on television, many of them gathered with friends and strangers; millions of more around the world tuned in. For weeks, health officials have been blaring warnings that the Super Bowl could be a superspreader event. The N.F.L. and CBS tried to walk a fine line, acknowledging the tragedy of the past year while also offering an escape from it. They mostly succeeded; I wasn’t thinking about COVID-19 as I watched Mahomes duck and weave. But it’s too early to say who the real losers of the game were—the Chiefs, or the rest of us.
