It’s like the Bama-Clemson all over again.
Happy dancing in my house. I’ve been a Patriot’'s fan since 1976
Well that was unfortunate.
Holding calls (correctly called) cost them the game. Along with what @droppedit said.
I was pulling for Atlanta. They sure blew it. But they are young and have potential to become great over time.
NE will get well deserved accolades for the greatest comeback ever. Gotta hand it to them, that was some amazing poise and refusal to give up.
James White should have been named MVP. He set a record for the most catches in a super bowl. He scored the game-tying touchdown with under a minute left in regulation and the game-winner in overtime.
White was great but it’s difficult to argue with a Super Bowl record 466 passing yards and leading the team to a record comeback (though the pick six was bad).
Brady should retire after this one. His football career is basically just a hobby since his wife makes all the money in the family! 
oh my gosh
PATRIOTS!!!
For the first 45 years of my life, this team was SO BAD for SO LONG. Tough when you grow up rooting for a laughing stock. In 78 a buddy of mine and I walked up to the ticket window on game day and attended a playoff game!!
I tell me students how spoiled they are, with 5 SB victories and 3 Red Sox WS victories. I grew up with the heartache of 67, 75, and 78 with the Sox.
ryan blew it. they were in position to kick an easy field goal to go up 11 with about 3:00 left. you absolutely cannot take a sack there to put you out of field goal position – and that exactly what he did. come on – 8 year vet and MVP cannot make such a blunder in that spot.
that was painful but 25 point lead with 2:00 left in the 3rd qtr, if you find a way to blow it you deserve to lose
You could say the same thing with NE during the first 3 quarters. After trailing 3-21 in the first half, NE should have scored a touchdown at the beginning of the 3rd quarter. But no, Atlanta scored another touchdown in a few minutes. Wasn’t it frustrating?
What a game. I’m still in shock.
One of the most epic comebacks of all time.
The Patriots’ defense did their job - they held the powerful Atlanta offense to only 21 points, and got them off the field in the 4th quarter.
NE had an almost 20 minute advantage in time of possession. No defense can withstand that without a lot of offensive help, which they didn’t get. They were just gassed by the end, and when the Pats won the toss in overtime they just had nothing left.
The Patriots nearly did themselves in with mistakes, a pick-6 by Brady on a terrible pass and a missed PAT that forced them to make 2 two-point conversions.
The win probability chart had Atlanta with a 99.6% chance of winning with two minutes left in the 3rd quarter:
[Super Bowl LI Win Probability Chart](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C39HZLvWAAEwFNr.jpg:large)
Incredible.
@MADad, you mirror my life. My father was an original Pats season ticket holder (although that was probably $30 for the season).
I have to admit I lost faith tonight. Glad I was proved wrong.
Exactly. When the Boston Patriots got to 9 points I told my family that I see a 30-28 win for them (the momentum shift was obvious at that point). Then, after Freeman got to the 50 yd line on that catch, I went, “whew, now we’ll get a FG to seal it”. Run the freaking ball! But nooooo, they had to pass and get the holding penalty then the sack. The Belichick-Brady machine was in gear at that point and there’s no stopping it once it gets going.
I find it interesting that the two dominant coaches in the NFL (Belichick) and College (Saban) are both Croatian descendants (and Carroll of the Seahawks/USC).
Tremendous battle between two offensive powerhouses. Yet neither team scored any points during the entire first quarter. It took awhile for the coaches to figure out how to pick apart the opponent’s defensive game plan.
So if you are Brady or otherwise associated with the Patriots, do you tell this guy where to shove it? Or is ignoring him the best tactic?
I do not understand why AOL links get filtered out.
Let me try this one:
@nrdsb4:
Claiming it was white supremacy is idiotic, given how many great players the Patriots have who are black, especially on the defense that ended up pretty much stopping atlanta dead in the second half (and gave up 3 touchdowns only).
The best way to handle that is to ignore it, even with Brady and Belichick’s political leanings them speaking out against it wouldn’t do much, the people who believe that kind of drivel will say they were ‘forced’ to say that, those who find it repugnant will likely say “what else could they say, given the composition of the NFL and their team”.
Was I the only one yelling at the TV: “Why are you IN THE SHOTGUN”???
From the opening whistle in the second half, the Falcons played like, “we won this.” The Patriots played like, “we can win this.” For me, that was the difference.
Definitely a game for the books, the first half I admit was a shock, and I suspect that Brady, while not concussed, was pretty woozy, by the end of the first half his passes were amazingly inaccurate and his decision making questionable, like on the pick 6,he generally doesn’t make bad decisions like that, Atlanta’s defense is not predicated on stunts and masked coverage, they play a pretty conventional defense. The big difference in the first half was NE’s offensive line, which was porous, for a second I thought Brady was playing on Indianapolis.
The games came down to what I thought it would, NE’s defense, and it did. Atlanta’s offense moved the ball well in the first half, but it was all big plays, they couldn’t play ball control, which is one of the ways you beat any great quarterback, you keep them off the field. In the second half I felt the playcalling was suspect, they weren’t doing enough to try and fool the NE defense to allow them to run the ball, they could have gone to a short pass out of the backfield/screen pass, plus run, they kept throwing downfield. Might even have been better to run the ball and use maximum clock, even on a three and out that could get several minutes off the clock.
Still, it takes a pretty amazing team to be down 25 points against a really good team like Atlanta and not throw in the towel, if this was the Jets with their coaches they would have thrown in the towel 5 minutes into the second quarter. I would love to know what went on in the locker room, because something happened.
I do feel for the Atlanta fans, this was one of those so close yet so far, NE knows what this is like from the two SB’s against the giants that went down to the wire, as Seattle did against NE. The thing the fans should be happy about is this is not a team full of near ready to retire players trying to win it all, their defense is incredibly young and already shows signs of being world class, their offense is relatively young with one of the better qb’s in the league (I do question Ryan’s ability to lead, the second half showed questionable decision making, but would take him in a NY second if I could get him). I don’t know if Quinn is calling the defense, but they might need a new DC, their defense is just too vanilla, they could use disguised blitzing capability, and other defensive schemes, to mix it up, by the second half it was clear Brady knew exactly what they were doing. I feel for the Atlanta defense, in the first half they were playing in many ways above their heads (not talent, but experience wise), and you can’t sustain that with the amount of time they were on the field, they would have every right to be mad at Shanahan and Ryan, they more than did their part, by the end of the third quarter they were as gassed a defense as I have seen (other than the Jets defense every snap this year).
In terms of hating NE, as an avowed (shamefaced) Jets fan since the paleolithic era when QB’s called their own game plan and the coaching staff wasn’t the size of a major league baseball roster. I saw the (Boston) then New England Patriots and much of their time, it was like the Jets, inept coaches and players, 40 year old QB’s when that was dirt old (Steve Grogan), and teams where players who were so so there went elsewhere and became hot property (Jim Plunkett as one example), they mirrored the Jets in many ways, bad ownership (Victor Kiam, your team stunk as much as the crappy electric razor you produced)…and fans there suffered through it. I have heard how it is all cheating, how that is how they win, but that is sour grapes, NE has been winning because they have a unified team, Kraft lets Bellichick run things, they found gold in a QB no one wanted, they also have a head coach and under coaches who don’t tolerate any bs and have players who want to be there, and they have coaches who not only are great teachers, but also learn, too (though they often have the problem that they think when they become head coaches that they can imitate Belichick, rather than be themselves, he hasn’t necessarily been a great developer of head coaches). They got where they are by having a brilliant coach, a sharp owner who stays out of the way, and by picking players who will do what they want, when they want them to, and the proof is in their record. Obviously, it didn’t hurt that NE also plays in a historically weak division against the Moe, Larry, and Curley of NFL teams, but their record in getting to championship games and superbowls, let alone winning them, makes that a pretty lame argument.