Well, that’s another NFL season in the books. It maybe wasn’t the dramatic ending we were hoping for, but it was an ending nonetheless. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers stifled the Kansas City Chiefs and coasted to their second ever Super Bowl title. Tom Brady got his seventh ring, and Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes fell short of back-to-back championships.
Last week I broke this game down into four crucial areas that I thought would play a major role in deciding the outcome. As it happens, these four areas did turn out to be crucial, as Tampa Bay won all of them decisively. So I figure I might as well structure my recap just as I did my preview, going through what Tampa Bay did to pull this one out.
Smooth Sailing for Brady
Brady was good in this game, but he really didn’t do anything spectacular. He made the plays that were available for him to make, and there were a lot of plays available. The clearest difference between the two teams was the amount of pressure each quarterback faced. While Patrick Mahomes was pressured on more than half his dropbacks, Brady was pressured only four times on thirty pass plays, the least pressure he’s faced in any of his ten Super Bowls.
We knew going in that this Chiefs pass rush didn’t have nearly the depth of the Giants unit that tore Brady apart back in 2008. They have one true edge rusher in Frank Clark, a talented player who was inconsistent in 2020 but seemed to be picking his game up in the playoffs. They also have Chris Jones on the interior, a dominant pass rushing threat who was arguably the best player on the field in the Super Bowl a year ago. They don’t have much outside of that, but there was some reason to believe these two could be enough to disrupt Tampa Bay’s passing game.
Early on it actually seemed like this could work out in Kansas City’s favor. On the first series a blitz forced an inaccurate throw from Brady to produce a three-and-out. On the second series Clark got home with a sack of Brady on third down to force another punt. The Chiefs got pressure early, and Tampa Bay’s offense faltered in the face of it.
So what happened after the first two series? Tampa Bay adjusted. I’ll have more to say on this below, but the offense the Buccaneers ran in this game bore very little resemblance to the one they ran through most of the regular season. Brady got the ball out of his hand extremely quickly, and he attacked the defense underneath and over the middle rather than with the deep shots he relied on for most of the season to this point.
Kansas City tried to counter by playing aggressive, physical coverage on the outside. This is part of their usual MO as well, and they seemed ready to take on this challenge to try to force Brady to hold onto the football long enough for their pass rush to get home. Unfortunately, the officiating crew at this game was calling things very tight on the outside. In the first half Kansas City got called for two defensive holdings and two pass interference penalties. Suddenly their physical style was a liability rather than an advantage, and their secondary was left off balance unsure how they were supposed to play.
In the second half it all came together. The Chiefs couldn’t trust their cornerbacks to hold up on islands on the outside, so they couldn’t send the blitzes that had gotten home early. Brady was able to drop back comfortably in the pocket, and he had plenty of open receivers down the field. He didn’t make any special or memorable plays, but he made the plays that needed to be made. And there was really nothing the Chiefs could do to stop him.
Chiefs Offense DOA
Of course, it all started up front. After a season of steady attrition, the injuries along Kansas City’s offensive line caught up with them at the worst possible time. The straw that broke their back was the injury suffered by starting left tackle Eric Fisher in the AFC Championship game, which forced them to shuffle their offensive line by moving Mike Remmers (already a backup) from right tackle to left tackle, Andrew Wylie (also a backup) from right guard to right tackle, and inserting Stefen Wisniewski (who started the season with the Pittsburgh Steelers) at right guard.
Over the years I’ve developed a hatred for this kind of juggling of offensive linemen. A single injury caused Kansas City to downgrade at three different positions, and all three played like garbage in the Super Bowl. In a longer season, with more time to practice and adjust, maybe the net loss as a unit would be less with this approach than with sliding in an inferior player at left tackle. But with only two weeks to prepare, Kansas City was left with an offensive line that wasn’t up to the challenge of facing Tampa Bay’s pass rush.
Mahomes is capable of spectacular things, but even he can be knocked off his game by pressure. Early in the game he was able to slide around in the pocket and stay close enough to the line to make some plays, but by the fourth quarter the Buccaneers seemed to have locked down their rushing lanes, and he had nowhere to go but backwards as the plays broke down. He ended up scrambling more than 400 yards in the backfield over the course of the night, and even though he made some spectacular throws outside of structure, they rarely turned into anything downfield.
Tampa Bay won along the front with pure talent. They won at the back end with scheme. After struggling using their preferred cover-1 approach over the second half of the season (particularly in their previous matchup with Kansas City), they switched to a cover-2 scheme for their final two playoff games. It worked to keep Aaron Rodgers from killing them downfield two weeks ago, and it worked to basically erase Tyreek Hill from the Super Bowl.
Mahomes did his best to hold onto the ball and extend plays even as the pressure closed in on him, but most of the time he was facing only a four man rush, which meant that Tampa Bay’s secondary was able to sit comfortably back with seven defenders to cover the receivers out on the routes. Two defenders bracketed Hill at all times, and none of Kansas City’s secondary wide receivers proved capable of separating or making plays when the ball with in the air.
In the second half the Chiefs countered by switching to a quicker passing attack that exploited opportunities over the middle of the field, and they actually found some success. Four of their five possessions after halftime reached Buccaneers territory, but they produced a total of three points.
Tampa Bay was clever in how they took away the middle part of the field. They don’t have the coverage players to take away Travis Kelce—no one does—but they have athletic linebackers who can create just enough chaos to keep things from being easy. They didn’t bring a lot of blitzes, but they showed a lot of them pre-snap, with Lavonte David and Devin White drifting around the line of scrimmage before dropping back into throwing lanes.
Mahomes is a tremendous talent, but he’s still young and still developing the sort of instantaneous recognition possessed by veterans like Brady who excel at getting the ball out of their hands moments after the ball is snapped. He wasn’t sure what to expect over the middle of the field on each play, and that forced him to hesitate just long enough for the pressure to become a factor. With rushers coming in his face, that only made things more complicated trying to get the ball to his star tight end over the middle of the field.
One of the things that makes Mahomes truly special is his ability to make accurate and powerful throws while moving backwards. Most quarterbacks are taught to move up in the pocket as pressure closes in, but Mahomes’s first move is often away from the line of the scrimmage. He drifts backwards, keeping away from the rush for as long as possible before launching a laser down the field without setting his feet. This strategy has been tremendously successful for him throughout his career, but against Tampa Bay’s fast-moving defense the windows down the field tightened, and each step away from the line of scrimmage was just more time for the Buccaneers to close in and knock the pass away.
Over most of the field this wasn’t an issue, but once the Chiefs reached the red zone the windows became too small for even Mahomes’s guided missile system of an arm to fit balls into. Three times they settled for field goals on drives where they desperately needed touchdowns. Once they turned it over on downs inside the Tampa Bay twenty, and late in the game Mahomes threw an interception on a deflected pass in the endzone. Without a comfortable pocket to stand in, Mahomes simply couldn’t fit the ball into the razor tight windows around the goalline. And when the Chiefs couldn’t get into the endzone, it pretty much didn’t matter what happened on the other side of the ball.
A Coaching Masterpiece
Instead the Buccaneers got the ball back with time to drive down the field, and while they started trying to run the clock out, Kansas City extended the half with their own timeouts to try to sneak in another possession of their own. I didn’t hate the first timeout after they stuffed the first down run, but when Tampa Bay picked up eight yards on second down I think the Chiefs would have been better off letting the clock run. Third and two was an easy conversion, and from there the Buccaneers were able to drive down the field and get a touchdown to push it to a 15 point halftime lead.
The most egregious error was probably the field goal on their first drive of the second half, but I’m not going to harp on these issues. This wasn’t a close game that was decided by a few situational coaching decisions. Maybe these choices would have changed the flow of the game, but on the whole the fact remains that Tampa Bay just thoroughly outplayed and outschemed the Chiefs for a full 60 minutes.
Head coach Bruce Arians and defensive coordinator Todd Bowles have been excellent, if flawed, coaches in the NFL for a very long time. If there’s one consistent criticism I’ve had for both of them it’s their lack of flexibility. Arians is going to run his scheme, dropping his quarterback deep to take shots down the field regardless of whether he can actually trust his offensive line to hold up. Bowles is going to blitz like crazy and leave his cornerbacks isolated on the outside, even if he doesn’t need to send extra rushers to generate pressure.
And, of course, in the biggest game of their lives, these two coaches absolutely proved me wrong. The Buccaneers team that played last night looked nothing like a traditional Arians-Bowles team. They got the ball out of the quarterback’s hands quickly. They trusted a four-man rush (with a few clever twists and overload pressures) to get home, and they left two safeties over the top to contain Kansas City’s speedy wide receivers.
This is probably the most shocking result of the Super Bowl for me, and on the offensive side probably the part that Brady deserves the most credit for. The offense last night looked closer to what Brady ran his last few years in New England than anything Arians has ever been in charge of, and it worked perfectly to attack the vulnerabilities of the Chiefs defense. They leaned on play action and motion in ways they never did during the regular season, and they chewed the defense up with dumpoffs to tight ends and running backs over the middle of the field.
I was as surprised as anyone by the outcome of this game. I thought the Chiefs were the better team. I thought they had better players, better coaches, and more experience from top to bottom. But Tampa Bay proved me wrong in every facet of the game. They outplanned and outplayed the Chiefs, and they ran away with an easy Super Bowl victory.
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