Patriots quarterback Drake Maye has led his team to the AFC Championship in his second professional season, and at Super Bowl LX he will become the second-youngest quarterback ever to start in the Super Bowl.
Maye will be 23 years, 162 days old on February 8, when he starts for the Patriots at Super Bowl LX.
Dan Marino is the only quarterback younger than that to start a Super Bowl. He was 23 years, 127 days old when he led the Dolphins into Super Bowl XIX. Marino was the best quarterback in the NFL that year and as the youngest quarterback ever to start a Super Bowl, it was widely assumed that Marino would be back multiple times. Instead, the Dolphins’ loss to the 49ers was the only Super Bowl Marino ever played in.
The only other quarterback to start a Super Bowl at age 23 was Ben Roethlisberger, who was 23 years, 340 days old when he started his first Super Bowl with the Steelers, a win over the Seahawks at Super Bowl XL. Seven quarterbacks have started a Super Bowl at age 24: Brock Purdy, David Woodley, Jared Goff, Patrick Mahomes, Tom Brady, Jalen Hurts and Drew Bledsoe.
If the Patriots beat the Seahawks, Maye will surpass Roethlisberger as the youngest quarterback ever to win a Super Bowl.
Three years ago, the cancellation of the Bills-Bengals game following Damar Hamlin’s on-field cardiac arrest prompted the league to handle the multi-layered competitive imbalances by deciding that a Bills-Chiefs AFC Championship would have been played at a neutral site.
If the Bills had beaten the Bengals in the divisional round, Buffalo would have faced Kansas City in Atlanta. Where 50,000 tickets had been sold in only 24 hours, based on the mere possibility of the game happening there.
The Bengals disrupted that plan by upsetting the Bills, but the plan prompted talk within the league office of potentially shifting all conference championship games to neutral sites.
Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt had pushed the idea for years; his partners consistently shot it down. And when the concept emerged three years ago, it quickly fizzled out. (Steelers owner Art Rooney II said, “I hate the idea.” Falcons owner Arthur Blank, whose domed stadium surely would be in the rotation, also opposed it.)
During the fourth quarter of Sunday’s AFC Championship, it suddenly seemed to be not such a bad idea.
That’s the balance. On one hand, the team that earns the higher seed deserves to play at home. On the other hand, the biggest games arguably should be played under conditions that prevent weather from impacting the outcome.
The Super Bowl has always been played at a neutral site. And weather is rarely an issue. (The NFL got lucky in February 2014, with the first — and only — open-air cold-climate Super Bowl in New Jersey. It got unlucky in February 2007, when it rained cats and dogs throughout Colts and Bears in Miami.)
With more teams ditching cold-weather, unroofed venues for domes (as recently noted by Sports Business Journal, the league is on track to have up to 17 teams playing indoors within the next decade, with the Chiefs, Browns, Broncos, and Bears looking to create fully-covered year-round cash cows), the chances of late-January weather impacting conference championships will be reduced. But with the Bills, Jets, Patriots, Steelers, Bengals, Giants, Eagles, Packers, Panthers, and Seahawks playing outdoors in cities that could introduce snow, ice, and/or bitter cold into the wintry mix, the prospect of weather affecting conference title games will remain — especially if/when the regular season expands and the playoffs are nudged deeper into the calendar.
Plenty of fans will huff and puff about neutral-site conference championships. And then they’ll gobble up the tickets and/or hunker down to watch the games by the tens of millions.
After Sunday, here’s the overriding question. Are we OK with staging those games in places where the conditions could make them both unplayable and unwatchable? Do we want the team that was trailing once the skies opened and the snow accumulated to have no realistic chance to come back and win?
Yes, the Broncos had a chance to tie things up late, but a field-goal attempt was tipped at the line of scrimmage. If that kick had been good, however, there’s a good chance the Patriots and Broncos would have lingered through multiple overtimes, until some fluke occurrence allowed one of the teams to score.
If that’s what we want, fine. If it’s not, maybe it’s time to revisit Lamar Hunt’s annual suggestion.
In the first 10 games of the 2025 postseason, 15 lead changes happened in the fourth quarter. It’s an all-time record.
There were no fourth-quarter lead changes in either of Sunday’s games. There were no fourth-quarter lead changes because, in both the AFC Championship and NFC Championship, there were zero fourth-quarter points scored.
None. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. The final points scored in Rams-Seahawks happened with 17 minutes remaining. In Patriots-Broncos, 20:29 remained when New England took a 10-7 lead.
That’s 37:29 of total action with no scoring to end the two games.
In Denver, it wasn’t a surprise. The weather took a turn for the treacherous, and neither offense could do anything. In Seattle, the fourth quarter consisted mainly of a long Rams drive that failed on fourth and four from the six, and a clock-churning clincher from the Seahawks that left the Rams without enough time to do much of anything.
Despite the absence of scoring, both games were exciting until the end, or close to it.
Sam Darnold’s redemptive rise began before he joined the Seahawks last year, but the quarterback hit new heights in the last few weeks.
An overtime win over the Rams in Week 16 and a Week 18 wipeout of the 49ers made Seattle the NFC West champs before a rout of the 49ers sent them to the NFC Championship Game against those same Rams. Darnold dealt with an oblique injury all week, but went 25-of-36 for 346 yards and three touchdowns in a 31-27 win that will go down as his finest NFL hour.
It didn’t take long for a reminder of his earlier struggles to surface, however. Darnold began his career as the third overall pick by the Jets in 2018 and the lasting memory of his three years with the team was a four-interception game against the Patriots on a Monday night in 2019. Darnold wore a microphone for that game and was captured telling coaches he was “seeing ghosts” on the field during the 33-0 loss.
During Sunday’s postgame press conference, Darnold was asked about the journey from that point to facing the Patriots again in Super Bowl LX.
“I almost forgot about it, so thanks. No, you’re good,” Darnold said, via a transcript from the team. “I think for me, there was a lot that I didn’t know back then, so I’m just going to continue to learn and grow in this great game. There is a lot of stuff that I can get better from today even. I feel like I missed some throws out there that I shouldn’t miss. There were some things offensively that I feel like we can do better. So we’re always looking to get better. I’m always looking to get better. That’s the great part about this game is you win an NFC Championship and you win games throughout the season, but there is always ways that you can look to get better.”
No one was predicting trips to the Super Bowl for Darnold when he was melting down against New England or when he was struggling with the Panthers, but the door opened for him with the Vikings last year. A late-season swoon marred that comeback, but Darnold kept getting better in Seattle and he could finish his improbable career reinvention at Levi’s Stadium in two weeks.
In the days leading up to the AFC Championship Game, one of the big questions was how Broncos quarterback Jarrett Stidham would fair in his first start since Week 18 of the 2023 season.
Stidham hit a deep shot to Marvin Mims on the second offensive possession of the game to set up a touchdown pass and provide hope that the moment would not prove to be too big for him. That feeling faded in the second quarter when Stidham was pressured by Patriots linebacker Christian Elliss on a third down play. Stidham backpedaled furiously and tried to throw the ball away, but wound up throwing it backward and the Patriots recovered on Denver’s 12-yard line to set up their only touchdown of the afternoon.
The Broncos had shut New England down on defense until that point and Stidham said after the 10-7 loss that he “probably should have just eaten the sack.”
“Obviously, I can’t put our team in a bad position like that,’' Stidham said. “I was trying to throw it away. ... The pressure, he just got up on me real fast and I was just trying to get rid of it. Like I said, I just can’t put the ball in a position like that. That was completely on me.”
The Broncos had a lot of other chances after the Patriots tied the game 7-7, but their offense never clicked before or after the weather turned treacherous in the second half. There’s no way to know if things would have been any different with Bo Nix in the lineup and the Broncos will now have to start all over after falling short at the worst possible time.
