Revisiting Super Bowl LII: What Really Went Wrong For New England

If defense truly wins championships. what did we all watch in Super Bowl 52?

The Philadelphia Eagles surrendered 613 total yards and 33 points to the defending world champion New England Patriots in Super Bowl LII, allowing Patriots' quarterback Tom Brady to throw for a playoff record 505 yards and generate a passer rating of 115.4, not to mention allowing three Patriots to amass over 100 receiving yards each - yet they still won the game.

How is that possible?

Sobering as it is, in the really real world the Philadelphia Eagles are the new world champions, but it didn't have to be that way. Nearly two months later and countless hours in horrific and maddening film study have revealed that while the two defenses between the Eagles and the New England Patriots gave up a record amount of total yardage, that isn't why the Eagles won and the Patriots lost.

So while it is trendy and convenient to look at the defenses and ascertain, without much opposition, that New England's sieve-like defensive performance was the greatest factor in the outcome of the game, in reality the blame for the Super Bowl loss falls squarely on the coaching staff - the reason being that the Eagles' defense was even worse.

Yes, that's right. The Eagles' defense was just as porous, just as susceptible and just as putrid - even more so, in fact - but the Patriots didn't do what they had to do to turn that into an advantage for them.

Oh sure, they racked up an all-time playoff record in yardage and scored the most points ever by a losing team in the Super Bowl, but the offense could also have done a couple of little things - situational football-wise - to help out their own defense, who were getting gashed by a Philadelphia offense that did take advantage of certain situations.

The greatest benefit that the Eagles' offense took advantage of was the fact that New England's defense couldn't set the edge nor cover running backs on station in the flats to save their lives - and it's not as if it takes a football genius to include that little nugget in an offensive game plan, but to rely on it almost exclusively to set up the rest of a game plan took a lot of guts...

...which is what we had come to know of Philadelphia head ball coach Doug Pederson, so it shouldn't have come as any surprise. Pederson was aggressive throughout the game on offense, and his play calling tactic suggested that he had no other choice.

He knew that his defense couldn't stop New England's offense, so it was imperative for him to accomplish two things: He needed to extend drives by any means necessary to keep the ball away from Tom Brady and the Patriots' offense and doing so by exploiting that one weakness on the Patriots' defense.

And "by any means necessary" to extend drives meant going for it on fourth downs at two crucial points of the game - once just before the half and once deep into the fourth quarter after New England had taken it's only lead of the game. As it turned out, those risks worked like a charm, but had either one come up empty, the Philadelphia Eagles would not be world champions today.

That is something that the casual fan does not understand. Pederson pulled out all of the stops on both sides of the ball, yet there was New England with an opportunity to snatch the game from underneath the Eagles late in the game. That is the mystique part of the Patriots' game, and apparently something that Pederson and his staff game planned for.

And in that light, did the Eagles elect to pull an old Bill Belichick gambit to deny the Patriots part of their mystique?

The Patriots under Belichick practice two tenets that give them the advantage over any team they play. First, they almost always defer to the second half if they win the coin toss and, secondly, they adjust their game plan on the fly to make evaporate any momentum their foes may experience - giving them the opportunity to put into practical application their mastery of situational football.

Belichick is notorious for deferring to the second half when he wins the coin toss before the game to give himself an opportunity to "double down" from one half to the next. What this means is that he works to put himself in a situation where his offense has enough time to put points on the board before the half, then piggy back on top of that with a score coming out of the room at halftime, giving him two opportunities to score while keeping the other team's offense on the sidelines.

So to properly take advantage of the Belichick gambit, The Patriots had to score right before the half while leaving little to no time left on the game clock, then come out of the tunnel and score again to start the second half - and a team must check all three boxes to get maximum benefit, and while the Patriots did score before the half and then again coming out in the second half, they left too much time on the clock for the Eagles...

...who scored a touchdown of their own just seconds before the half to destroy the gambit, a turning point in the game that ended up costing the Patriots a sixth Lombardi Trophy.

With 5:01 left in the first half and following a Duron Harmon interception, the Patriots' offense embarked on what was supposed to be the final drive of the first half - one that, if successful, would cut the Eagles' lead to two points going into halftime - Brady fed the football to Dion Lewis in between throwing four straight incompletions, eating up two minutes before connecting with Chris Hogan on a 43 yard gain to get the ball to the Philadelphia twenty-six...


...then after running off another 40 seconds handed the ball to James White, who could have walked into the end zone through the enormous hole created by the offensive line as three different defenders bounced off of him like so many dodge balls, scoring with just over two minutes remaining in the half.

Curiously, White doesn't make his bones breaking tackles, he makes them with an insane drag-step that, in the open field, makes would-be tacklers look like soccer players taking a dive - which brings up the question, did the Eagles allow White to score from 26 yards out in order to get the ball back with enough time to counter Belichick's gambit?

There is plenty of evidence to support such a theory, and even some precedence in the Patriots' Super Bowl past to consider.

In Super Bowl XLVI against the New York Giants, Belichick called for the same tactic with just over a minute left in the game and leading by two points - replays clearly showing that the Patriots' defense allowed Giants' running back Ahmad Bradshaw to score a touchdown from six yards out to prevent New York's offense from running the clock down to nothing before kicking the winning field goal...


...which would have happened since the Patriots had just one time out left and would have had to drive the length of the field with about twenty seconds left.

The Eagles defense doing so wasn't quite as obvious as they actually made contact with White, while the Patriots' defense in the earlier Super Bowl made no effort at all to get to Bradshaw, but the hole opened by the Patriots' offensive line to spring White against the third-ranked rush defense in the league does raise some eyebrows.

The ploy, purposeful or not, paranoid delusion or not, robbed Belichick of his opportunity to double down on the Eagles and take the lead early in the third quarter and effectively kept the momentum with Philadelphia and was, as it turned out, the turning point in the contest - especially considering that the Eagles were forced into that second fourth down conversion attempt late in the game.

Truth being, had either one of those fourth down conversion attempts failed, the New England Patriots would be two-time defending champions today.

On that first attempt with a little over two minutes on the clock for the Eagles, they marched right down the field. lining up in a wildcat formation on fourth-and-goal from the one, with quarterback Nick Foles lined up as an off-the-line tight end - illegally, as it turns out - who acted as if he was blocking, but suddenly released into the end zone for a one yard scoring strike from his tight end.

So instead of playing down just three, the Patriots were down by ten and needed a touchdown catch by tight end Rob Gronkowski to get the lead back down to three, the two teams trading blows until New England actually took a brief lead mid way through the fourth quarter on another Gronkowski grab.

So down by one, the Eagles got the ball with nine-and-a-half minutes left in the game and proceeded to put together one of the more epic clock-draining drives in Super Bowl history, going 75 yards in 14 plays for a touchdown - not only taking back the lead on the scoreboard, but also milking seven minutes off the game clock...

...the now-desperate Eagles aided greatly by the second fourth-down conversion attempt from their own 45, barely converting when safety Duron Harmon couldn't bring tight end Zach Ertz down on a short slant.

After Ertz converted that fourth down, Philadelphia went to their four-minute offense, methodically moving the ball down the field and eventually Eagles' quarterback Nick Foles found Ertz for an 11 yard scoring strike late in the fourth quarter to regain a lead they had just lost, eating a full seven minutes off the clock in doing so - but still leaving Brady over two minutes and three time outs to work with...

...and there probably wasn't a football mind on the planet that didn't think he would somehow rally his team down the field for the winning numbers.

But on second and two from his own 33 yard line, Brady encountered blitzing linebacker Brandon Graham, who was credited with a sack though all he really did was take a swipe at the football over right guard Shaq Mason and knocked it loose, the ball rolling right into the line of sight of rookie defensive end Derek Barnett, who easily recovered the ball.

The Eagles held the ball for only a little more than a minute, but forced New England to burn their last time out and extended their lead to eight points on a Jake Elliott field goal - making the task of generating a comeback significantly more difficult - more difficult because they were forced to go ninety-one yards in 58 seconds with no time outs.

The final irony is that the Eagles defense that was statistically worse than New England's, ended up making the game-saving play, but it was the aggressiveness of Eagles' coach Doug Pederson that made the ultimate difference.