The Tightest of Margins

Well that was some game last night. I am going to assume that all of you watched the game (if you didn’t then I think you lose your American citizenship), but just in case some of you were given amnesia by the sheer insanity of the end, I’ll recap what happened. The Patriots beat the Seahawks to win what was probably the best Super Bowl I have ever witnessed from beginning to end. It was competitive throughout, with multiple swings of fortune for each teams, culminating in what will no doubt become one of the iconic plays in football history.

Of course, everyone is going to be talking about the ending. It was certainly something, and I will address it at length below. But everything that came before was fantastic as well. These two teams showed yesterday that they both deserve being called the best in the league, and both played well enough that no one would have had any complaints if they brought home the Super Bowl trophy. The Patriots won because a few breaks went their way, and because they managed to eke out minor edges in tightly contested matchups across the field.

The Other Secondary

Much has been made of Seattle’s “Legion of Boom” secondary. Over the past three years Richard Sherman, Kam Chancellor, and Earl Thomas have combined to form possibly the best pass defense in NFL history, shutting down opposing attacks in a way that isn’t supposed to be possible under the new rules. On most days they are without question the best secondary in the league, but during yesterday’s game they were not the best secondary on the field.

Seattle’s offense can be very good, but they can also go through severe and perplexing droughts. The first half of last night’s game was witness to one particularly brutal drought. The Patriots struggled against Marshawn Lynch as the game progressed, but early on they managed to hold him somewhat in check, slowing him enough that Seattle couldn’t simply ride him down the field. They forced Seattle into passing situations, and then they turned their secondary loose on the mediocre Seahawks receiving corps.

In my preview of the game I highlighted the matchup of Seattle’s pass protection against New England’s pass rush, a fairly even matchup that I expected would go a long way to deciding this game. For the most part Seattle won this battle. The Patriots sacked Wilson three times, but these came more as a result of coverage than pass rush. At times Wilson had all day to throw, but he could not find anywhere downfield to go with the ball. During the first half he ended up eating a lot of plays, either scrambling ahead, going down for a sack, or throwing the ball away.

The failure of Seattle’s wide receivers to get open was not surprising, though I expected them to have more success creating space once the play broke down. But New England’s defensive backs shadowed them perfectly, giving Wilson no room to throw the ball. Darrelle Revis followed Doug Baldwin for most of the night, and Seattle’s best receiver was limited to a single catch he only managed because Revis ran into an official. With Baldwin shut down the Patriots were free to leave a safety over the top of Jermaine Kearse at all times, neutralizing Seattle’s deep threat.

The only success Seattle found in the passing game was by attacking downfield. Wilson averaged more than twenty yards a completion thanks to several fantastic catches from Chris Matthews, who with four catches for 109 yards and a touchdown increased his career totals to four catches for 109 yards and a touchdown. He did an excellent job of high pointing the ball, and Wilson still throws one of the most beautiful deep balls in the league. Late in the first half and moving on to the third quarter the Seahawks were able to stretch the field, forcing the Patriots to back off and giving Lynch the room he needed to move on the ground.

What ended up stopping the Seahawks offense was as much luck as New England. After the Patriots scored a touchdown to pull within three points, Seattle received the ball with 7:55 remaining in the game. Everyone stresses defense when it comes to preventing a comeback, but often offense is the more effective means of closing a game. If they had been able to stay on the field and move the ball, running four or five minutes off the clock and adding a field goal or a touchdown, they would likely be Super Bowl Champions.

They had opportunities to move the ball, but they were not able to capitalize. New England was not going to allow them to move down the field by running the ball, so Seattle did the smart thing and dropped back to pass. Ricardo Lockette ended up running wide open across the field with an easy first down, and the throw was perfect enough that it still hit him even after he tripped and fell down. Had he caught that pass, he had enough open space to move into New England territory, getting Seattle that much closer to sealing the game. Instead they ran two more plays and were forced to punt, with only a minute run off the clock.

Wilson’s final stats give an accurate impression of how this game went down. He completed only 12 of his 21 pass attempts, but he still managed nearly 12 yards per attempt thanks to his success completing passes down the field. But there was nothing there for him on short or intermediate routes, and without these sort of completions an NFL offense is going to struggle to consistently move the football.

Crucial Injuries

It seems fitting then that these same short throws were the primary way New England’s offense moved the football. During this game Brady’s average depth of target (how far the average wide receiver was from the line of scrimmage when he threw the ball) was 6.6 yards, a number that would have ranked the second lowest in the NFL this season to only Alex Smith. Of Brady's passing yards yesterday 57 percent came after the catch, which also would have been second to only Smith.

A series of injuries across Seattle’s defense paved the way for this short passing attack. Prior to the game there were concerns about how injuries would affect Seattle’s secondary. Richard Sherman was playing with a torn ligament in his elbow and will require surgery now that the season is over. This injury did not appear to affect his performance however, and the Patriots spent most of the game avoiding his side of the field. The only passes thrown his way were screens and slants designed to rub him off using another receiver as a blocker, plays that rarely went anywhere.

The other preexisting injury turned out to be a bigger deal. Earl Thomas suffered a dislocated shoulder in the victory over Green Bay, and even two weeks later he had not fully recovered. Thomas is usually at his best in deep coverage, and they decided to hide his limitations by keeping him in the deep middle for most of the game. He was asked to do very little in run support, putting minimal stress on his injured shoulder. But the Patriots never had any interest in throwing the ball deep, and under normal circumstances Seattle likely would have brought Thomas closer to the line to cut off the inside routes being run by many of New England’s receivers. Doing so would have put him into more congested areas, a risk his shoulder simply could not take.

Other injuries during the game opened the door even further. A first quarter interception by Jeremy Lane ended a Patriots drive in the red zone, but it came at the cost of a gruesome arm injury (seriously, do not look up the picture of what happened to him). Lane isn’t one of Seattle’s starting cornerbacks, but he sees major time as a nickel defender responsible for covering slot receivers. Because of his injury Seattle was forced to shuffle around their secondary, moving normal starter Byron Maxwell into the slot and bringing in Tharold Simon on the outside.

The Patriots immediately began attacking Simon. They drove down the field by attacking Simon’s side, eventually completing a touchdown pass to Brandon LaFell on a post route with Simon in coverage. This is where Seattle might normally have given extra help from Thomas, but because of his injury they had to leave Simon on an island on the outside. In the other part of my preview I discussed whether the physicality of Seattle’s defenders or the quickness of New England’s receivers would have the advantage. Had the Seahawks secondary remained healthy it might have been another story, but Simon simply was not capable of keeping up with players like Julian Edelman and Danny Amendola.

Even with this weakness on the outside, Seattle managed to slow the Patriots down in the third quarter thanks to their pass rush. Michael Bennett was incredible yesterday. He spent the early part of the game playing defensive tackle on most snaps, using his quickness to blow past interior linemen and get after the quarterback. We saw some truly awful throws from Brady when under pressure, and Seattle managed to build a ten point lead in the third quarter by forcing an inaccurate throw leading to another interception.

But, like the first Brady pick, this one came at a cost for the Seahawks. Defensive end Cliff Avril went down on the return, leaving the game with a concussion. He wasn’t nearly as productive as Bennett during this game, but his loss weakened Seattle’s pass rush and forced them to move Bennett back to the outside. Suddenly Brady was a lot more comfortable in the pocket, with the time and space to make plays to get them back in the game. On the touchdown drive that pulled them within four points he converted a third and fourteen by stepping up in the pocket and finding Edelman downfield, a play that wasn’t possible when Seattle’s pass rush was getting after him earlier in the game.

All of this culminated in New England’s final touchdown drive. The Patriots ran nine plays, eight passes and a run to Shane Vereen. Every single pass is described in the box score as a “short pass”, and every single one turned into a completion. It culminated with a touchdown to Edelman on a slick whip route that Simon had no chance to keep up with, the touchdown that proved to be the game winner.

It isn’t fair to say that Seattle would have won this game if their players had stayed healthy, but these injuries certainly played a factor in the outcome. New England’s offense took advantage of the sudden holes in Seattle’s defense, scoring twice in the fourth quarter to come back from a ten point deficit. This game was decided by the slimmest of margins, and there were any number of plays throughout that we can point to as crucial for the outcome of the game. But there is one obvious play that stands out from the rest.

The Interception

This is the most talked about play of the game, and rightfully so. From the moment the Patriots elected not to use a timeout to preserve time for their offense, I was almost completely confident that the Seahawks would win this game. I did not see the Patriots making a stop on the goalline, not against an offensive line that had been pushing them around for most of the game and a running back who specializes in fighting through contact. I certainly did not see them electing to throw the ball, and I never expected a game ending turnover.

To understand this play we need to take it step by step. The decision to pass the ball is being ridiculed by fans and writers across the nation, and there is some justification for that. Since joining the Seahawks, Lynch has converted on 48 percent of goal to go carries from the one yardline. The Seahawks were sitting on second down and needed a touchdown, and using these odds running the ball three times would leave them with only a 14 percent chance of failure. The Patriots have also been one of the worst teams in the league in short yardage situations over the past few years, and the odds were likely even better than that.

But there is an added factor that needs considered, and that is the clock. A touchdown would have only put them up by three points, and the Patriots still would have had an opportunity to move into field goal range to tie the game. Their first priority had to be scoring a touchdown, but they also couldn’t leave too much time for the Patriots. Because of this, they made the decision to run the clock down below 30 seconds before snapping the ball. With only a single timeout remaining, if they ran the ball on second and third down and failed to get in they might not have had time to run a play on fourth down.

In order to get three plays in they needed to throw the ball. You can quibble about their decision making and say that they should have thrown it on third down instead, but they had a good matchup with three receivers on the field against goalline personnel. And if you look at the play itself, it was very well set up. Lockette was clear on the slant, the defender was playing off the line, and there was no one in the passing lane. In almost every other circumstance, this becomes a touchdown.

So what happened this time that was different? A pair of Patriots defensive backs made phenomenal plays. Malcolm Butler attacked the slant like few defenders can and made an incredible interception on a contested ball, the sort of pass that normally falls harmlessly to the ground. He was able to make this play because of the effort from Brandon Browner, who stonewalled Jermaine Kearse and prevented him from running a pick. Normally teams run this play with receivers moving on different levels, the back receiver providing enough of an impediment to open the underneath slant. But Browner’s size and strength was enough to cut off the rub route, giving Butler the lane he needed to make the play.

If you want to get mad at Seattle’s coaches, get mad at them for the play they called. Throwing the ball was an acceptable decision there, but they needed to be smarter about how they did it. The play made by the Patriots is a rare occurrence, but it is still a possibility that needs to be taken into consideration. Throws across the middle carry an inherent risk. The area is heavily congested, and footballs have a habit of bouncing in ridiculous ways (see the catch two plays earlier by Kearse). They should have run a safer route, something to the sidelines or the back of the endzone where the worst that can happen is an incompletion out of bounds. Instead they chose to run a play with a relatively high probability of disaster, and they ended up losing the Super Bowl because of it.

People will focus on this one play, and it was absolutely the biggest of the game. But the thing about close games is that there are dozens of plays throughout that could have swung the game. Lynch was stuffed on a third and short earlier in the game, forcing Seattle to kick a field goal. Kearse dropped an easy pass in the first half, and Lockette fell down while wide open on his route while the Seahawks were trying to run down the clock. And if things had gone the other way, there would be plenty of Patriots coaches and players kicking themselves for the plays they did or didn’t make. This game was as close as they come, and in the end the Patriots made more of these tight plays than the Seahawks.