Sunday night's Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta provided quite the contrast from last year's Super Bowl LII loss in Minneapolis, when Tom Brady set a Super Bowl record with 505 in a futile effort, coming up on the losing end to the Philadelphia Eagles.
Brady only had half his passing yards (262) from a year ago, and didn't throw any touchdown passes, though his two big strikes to Rob Gronkowski on the fourth-quarter touchdown drive set up Sony Michel's goal-line plunge to make it 10-3.
Had it not been for Stephon Gilmore's fourth-quarter interception to thwart the Rams' best scoring opportunity of the night, or Dont'a Hightower's critical third-quarter sack that forced the Rams into settling for a field goal, their only points of the game, this could be an entirely different narrative. And thusly, Brady made sure to defer plenty of credit to his defense.
"Yeah, it was tough," Brady said of the Patriots' measly 3-0 halftime lead, per NBC's Pro Football Talk. "We just couldn't make the big play, we just couldn't stay on the field on third down. We just knew we had a whole half to go, defense set the tone. They held them, we got some good field position for them. They held them and finally we kind of broke through in the fourth quarter, we kind of needed that."
Critcized throughout the season for its perceived lack of punch up front, deficiencies that were illuminated in road beatdowns from teams like the Detroit Lions and Tennessee Titans during the regular season, the Patriots' defense was without peer in January and February. Sunday night, that resulted in record offensive futility; in addition to this being the lowest-scoring Super Bowl of all-time, it's the first time in the history of the game that no touchdowns were scored before the fourth quarter.
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