New England spent the offseason building a roster shaped by one specific memory: getting run off the field at Super Bowl LX by the Seattle Seahawks. Back in February, the fearsome Dark Side defense held the Patriots scoreless throughout the first three quarters in Santa Clara, while running back Kenneth Walker III stormed his way to 135 yards to help his side secure a lopsided 29-13 Seahawks win that could have been even worse.
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But the upcoming Week 1 rematch at Lumen Field, home of the defending champion Seahawks rather than on neutral ground, could well look much different, potentially yielding immediate revenge for the Patriots. Start with A.J. Brown. New England didn’t have an answer at receiver in February, and now it has one of the best route-runners in football in that room. Then look at what Seattle lost off a defense that dominated that Super Bowl — Boye Mafe, Coby Bryant, Tariq Woolen, three players who mattered, gone. And Seattle is trusting a backfield led by rookie Jadarian Price, who didn’t start a single college game in three years following the departure of Super Bowl MVP Walker to the Kansas City Chiefs.
Online betting sites still make Seattle the favorites, and after their 16-point win in the Big Game, it’s hard to argue. The early odds from Lucky Rebel Sportsbook make the Seahawks a 3.5-point betting favorite to repeat as victors, but New England has been here before. Not in this exact spot, but this exact feeling. Few franchises have made a habit of turning one bad afternoon into the next great chapter quite like the Patriots have, and four of those chapters explain a lot about how this one might go. Here are the Pats’ best “revenge” games of all time.
Super Bowl XXXVI
The 2001 Patriots were 5-5 with an unheard of second year quarterback embarking upon his first season under center. They lost to St. Louis in Week 10, 24-17, in a game that provided plenty of hope. The Rams were known as the “Greatest Show on Turf” and were overwhelming Super Bowl favorites, and the upstart Pats lost by just the one score. Rams head coach Mike Martz called New England a Super Bowl-caliber team, sounding like a coach who’d already circled the date he expected to see them again, in New Orleans, as the team he’d beat for a ring.
New England won six straight to close the year and got their rematch on the biggest stage in American sports. They arrived as 14-point underdogs against an offense that had scored 503 points that season, the best in football by a wide margin, and the entire buildup treated the Patriots as an afterthought in the Rams’ coronation. Belichick’s defense had other ideas, holding Kurt Warner and Marshall Faulk in check for four quarters.
St. Louis tied it at 17 with under two minutes left, and everybody in the building assumed overtime. Brady didn’t. He moved New England into range, and Adam Vinatieri’s 48-yard field goal split the uprights as time expired. First championship in franchise history, and the start of everything that followed.
Super Bowl LI
Brady spent the start of 2016 fighting the league in federal court over a suspension he never stopped believing was wrong, and he served it anyway — four games, no snaps, no say. New England went 3-1 with Jimmy Garoppolo and Jacoby Brissett running the offense, and Brady came back and threw 28 touchdowns against two interceptions the rest of the way.
The Patriots punched their tickets to a third Super Bowl in six seasons, but it looked as though Brady wouldn’t get his revenge on the lead as his side slumped to a 28-3 deficit against the Atlanta Falcons deep into the third quarter. It looked over when Grady Jarrett sacked Brady twice in the red zone, forcing New England to settle for a field goal. Then, with 8:31 left, Dont’a Hightower came free off the edge, hit Matt Ryan as he cocked to throw, and Alan Branch fell on the fumble.
Julian Edelman’s tipped, falling, somehow-completed catch two drives later kept the Patriots alive; Danny Amendola’s two-point conversion tied it at 28. Even then, Atlanta had one more chance — Julio Jones made a sideline catch that should have ended it, but a sack and a holding penalty pushed the Falcons out of field-goal range, and they punted instead. James White scored the winning touchdown in the first overtime period in Super Bowl history. Brady left with a record for passing yards and his fourth Super Bowl MVP, and the whole season stopped being about a suspension.
The “Guarantee” Game
This one wasn’t about a playoff scar. It was about a 23-year-old safety who couldn’t help himself. Anthony Smith stood in front of reporters on a Wednesday and guaranteed a win over a 12-0 Patriots team. “We’re going to win,” he said. “Yeah, I can guarantee a win.” You could hear him start to hedge mid-sentence, but it didn’t matter — Foxborough already had it.
Brady went at Smith from the opening drive, hitting him for a 63-yard touchdown to Randy Moss in the second quarter that turned the game into a formality. Early in the third, New England ran a double pass — Moss lateraled back to Brady, who found Jabar Gaffney over Smith’s head for 56 yards. After his first touchdown, a short toss to Moss, Brady turned and let Smith have it. “I don’t care to repeat what I said, especially if my mother reads it,” Brady admitted afterward.
Belichick, who seldom engages with that kind of noise, couldn’t resist his own shot: “We’ve played against a lot better safeties than him, I’ll tell you.” New England won 34-13 to move to 13-0, the crowd spent the fourth quarter chanting “Guar-an-tee” back at Smith, and when a reporter asked him afterward if he’d make the same guarantee again, he said yes.
Super Bowl XLIX
Seattle came in as defending champions who’d blown out Denver 43-8 the year before, and for most of the fourth quarter, they looked like they’d repeat. Julian Edelman took a hit from Kam Chancellor that would’ve ended most receivers’ nights and kept playing. Brady found him for a three-yard touchdown to make it 28-24 with 2:02 left, and it still didn’t feel like enough — because Jermaine Kearse then made an impossible, bobbling, still-somehow-completed catch to put Seattle at the one-yard line with the ball in Marshawn Lynch’s hands next.
Everyone in that building expected a handoff. Instead, Russell Wilson threw a slant, and Malcolm Butler — an undrafted rookie who wasn’t even a lock to be active — jumped the route and intercepted it. Twenty-four seconds left. Fourth Lombardi Trophy. “It’s not the right matchup for us to run the football,” Pete Carroll explained afterward, and the sentence has been picked apart in Seattle ever since.
That’s quite a few “revenge games” that the Patriots have run, so are we looking forward to another when they face up against the Seahawks once more? Time will tell.
