Barth

Who get's the worst end of this? Falcon fans since they thought they had their first superbowl or the 49ers hiring Shanahan? That was some crazy play calling the second half. Run when should pass, pass when should run. Dude didn't know what to do.

outcastja

Seriously,

3-1 GSW
3-1 Indians
21-0 Falcons

What a crazy year in sports.

Bill Needle

And it's not like they weren't running the ball effectively. Why they kept throwing once they got to the Patriots 22 under 4 minutes defies explanation. They were a 40-yard FG at worst from forcing the Pats to score twice (and recover an onside kick in between) with just over 3 minutes and 1 TO left.

brainee

Not a Falcons fan but I live in Falcons country (in Georgia). Tomorrow should be fun! I teach at a University and am giving an Anatomy and Physiology exam tomorrow. What do you think of this for a question?

Any answer selected will get credit for being a correct answer

EinCB

Barth

Yep. That's why most people that actually know football and watched the game call it a choke job more than a comeback.

I'm not a fan of either team but I was happy for Atlanta when they seemed to have it in the bag since the media said they had no chance in the first place.

asianxcore

What's funny is that Dan Quinn was Defensive Coordinator for the Seahawks during that Super Bowl. Yikes.

Coral

Not applicable. Curry and the GSW won a championship.

Barth

That's great! Make sure to get the all of the above option in there!

Barth

Ahh but it kinda is. GSW having that 3-1 lead and losing it is about the same as this Atlanta team losing the Super Bowl.

EinCB

Noted, but it's a comparison to last year's NBA Finals choke.

Coral

Yes, but still more applicable to a player on the Cleveland Indians I think. Chokes happen often, but the worst kinds are for players/teams that never win.

davidh777

Right, the Warriors blowing the game is more like the Seahawks.

Decker

Of course 3-1 series leads are coughed up, if not all the time, at least occasionally. I think about 1 in 10 times in the NBA. It's bad, but it happens.
No Super Bowl team had ever come back from an 11 point deficit-- this was 25 points with under 19 minutes left. Hard to even wrap your head around.

EinCB

See your point, Coral. I despise the Warriors and thought it was funny.

Lt Ripley

The Bugler's Dream now has lyrics:

Tom Tom
TaTom Tom Tom Tom
etc....

fujishig

While it's not sports I think you can include the Presidential election in terms of ridiculous upsets.

wmansir

Speaking of the election, I got a bit of election night deja vu looking over fivethirtyeight's live blog of the SB. They had the Pats chances of winning at 0.4% at one point.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog...ts-vs-falcons/

Josh-da-man

Yeah, that was a fucking catastrophe. They're in FG range, then lost 12 yards on the sack, and then another ten on the holding penalty. They fucked themselves so hard there. This is the big goddamned game, you want to win it, not dick around trying for a TD you don't need and probably won't get.

mcnabb

If I were a Falcons fan, I think I would be done with watching sports after that lost. You wait all of these years to finally get back to a Superbowl, and you blow the game similar to the Oilers/Bills playoff game in 1993.

The book on beating Brady by the Giants in the previous Superbowls was get pressure on him, and the Falcons did that all first half. Then I assume they went to a Prevent Defense and probably stopped blitzing more, and Brady was just sitting back there and picking them apart.

As much as I hate the Patriots, it was great to see Goodell have to give Brady/Kraft the Lombardi Trophy just to show one more time how incompetent he is and how much I hate what he has done to the NFL since he took over.

And Kraft did interview on FoxNews earlier in the day and talked about how they have to figure out how to limit the commercials. I'll be honest, that is the #1 problem with the NFL right now as the constant commercials on national games have almost ruined the sport (especially in the first half when every change of position, kickoff, injury, etc) there is a break.


This is the one benefit of the Salary Cap era in sports is that you just don't have elite-elite teams anymore (except the NBA), so anything can happen in these big games. If you think back to the Superbowls in the 80's/early 90's, they were mostly blowouts, because teams like 49ers were so stacked, they were too great to blow a lead when they were up. Now you have great teams making the Championships in these sports, but the Salary Cap has stripped them down from being as great as teams 20-25 years ago, so you get these crazy outcomes.

Honestly, the Patriots team has to be one of the worst Superbowl winners of the 51 year history, but they have the great Tom Brady that hides all of their flaws. That's how great he is to take that crap team to the Superbowl and win it.

EddieMoney

Guess the Falcons couldn't read Tom's pokerface.

covenant

Patriots fans walking into work this morning

Perkinsun Dzees

Bad news for Matty Ice: QBs who lose their first Superbowl appearance usually never end up winning one and most never even get back to the big game. I think in the last 40 years only John Elway has been able to lose his first appearance and then end up winning it all.

Meanwhile, the list of one and done losers is pretty daunting: Kenny Anderson, Dan Marino, Boomer Esiason, Steve McNair, Donovan McNabb, Jake Delhomme.

Not sure why that is, exactly. Possibly losing the Superbowl takes a huge mental toll that is tough to overcome. Or maybe the losing teams needed a lot of things to go their way to get the big game (ie. soft schedule, no key injuries, other teams underestimating them, etc) that it is difficult for them to repeat their success.

Goat3001

As a Jets fan, there aren't many teams I hate more than the Patriots but man, I just can't justify any argument against them anymore. Trust me, I tried my best for a long time. For awhile during that game I was thinking that the Patriots weren't playing with enough urgency and was starting to wonder if Belichick just doesn't know how to come back from big deficits since he never has to do it. Alas, I couldn't have been more wrong. Him and Brady kept the team perfectly poised and they made the comeback seem easy.

Me007gold

Ryan has been in the NFL for 9 years already, hes 31. Is that really that young?

Aside from the last 5 minutes of the game, this was one of the most boring Super Bowls ever. 1st half, Pats didn't show up, 2nd half Falcons didn't show up