Buccaneers’ Tom Brady wins his SEVENTH Super Bowl as Tampa Bay beats Kansas City, 31-9

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He’s two decades and 346 games into the most successful career in NFL history, but Tom Brady still isn’t finished winning Super Bowls.

The 43-year-old added to his record with a seventh title on Sunday, guiding the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to their second league crown with a 31-9 win over the defending champion Kansas City Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes in Super Bowl LV.

What was expected to be the 25-year-old quarterback’s coronation as Brady’s logical successor (the Chiefs were slight favorites to repeat) instead turned into one of the biggest statement games the league has ever seen.

Brady not only proved he can win without New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, his boss for his first nine Super Bowl appearances, but the game’s MVP simultaneously gave succinct arguments both for and against retirement. 

On one hand, Brady re-established that he has absolutely nothing left to prove, having won more Super Bowls than every NFL team including the Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers (both six). 

Then again, why would Brady retire now when he’s still capable of tossing three touchdowns in a Super Bowl victory? Besides, he still has one season left on the two-year, $50 million contract he signed with Tampa Bay back in March – his first foray into free agency after 20 NFL seasons. 

‘Yeah,’ Brady told reporters afterwards, ‘we’re coming back.’ 

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The script was a familiar one for Brady, who threw touchdown passes to two former Patriots teammates: tight end Rob Gronkowski (two) and wide receiver Antonio Brown (one).

‘Congratulations to the greatest of all time,’ read a tweet from the Patriots account after the game. ‘And Gronk, be careful with that trophy…’ 

Brady also broke his own mark for oldest player to win a Super Bowl and joins Hall of Famer Peyton Manning as the only quarterbacks to win one with multiple franchises.

The Buccaneers (15-5) won their second NFL title and first in 18 years while becoming the first team to play the big game at home, capping an unusual and challenging season played through the novel coronavirus. They won three road games as a wild-card team to reach the Super Bowl.

‘I’m so proud of all these guys,’ Brady said. ‘We had a rough November but we came together at the right time. We knew this was gonna happen. We played our best game of the year.’ 

Tampa’s victory prevented Mahomes and the Chiefs (16-3) from becoming the first repeat champions since Brady’s Patriots did it in 2003-04.

The NFL completed its 269-game season on time without any cancellations, a remarkable accomplishment that required nearly 1 million COVID-19 tests for players and team personnel. 

Due to the virus, only 25,000 mask-wearing fans were allowed in, including approximately 7,500 vaccinated health care workers who were given free tickets by the NFL. About 30,000 cardboard cutouts made the stadium look full.

A streaker wearing a hot-pink onesie eluded security and slid into the end zone with 5:03 left in the game. Mahomes and Kansas City’s high-powered offense never got that far against Tampa’s ferocious defense.

Bruce Arians became the oldest coach at age 68 to win the Super Bowl. His mom, 95-year-old Kay Arians, witnessed it in person. Brady, Gronk and defensive coordinator Todd Bowles helped Arians get that Vince Lombardi Trophy.

Bowles devised a masterful plan to frustrate Mahomes and shut down the Chiefs, the complete opposite of Kansas City’s 27-24 win in Tampa in Week 12, when the Chiefs jumped to a 17-0 lead in the first quarter. Tyreek Hill had 269 yards receiving and three TDs in that one. He was held to 73 yards on seven catches.

After the Chiefs took a 3-0 early lead, it was all Brady and the Bucs.

Brady accomplished a career-first when he tossed an 8-yard TD pass to Rob Gronkowksi to give the Buccaneers a 7-3 lead with 37 seconds left in the first quarter. Brady’s nine Super Bowl teams in New England produced just three points total in the first quarter. Gronkowski, who came out of retirement to play with his buddy, caught his 13th and 14th postseason TDs from Brady. That broke the record they shared with Jerry Rice and Joe Montana, who combined for 12.

Despite playing at home, the Buccaneers weren’t allowed to fire the cannons from their famed pirate ship after touchdowns and big plays. They did it soon after the clock expired as red, white and black confetti fell onto the field.

Fans still enjoyed the thud of Gronk’s thunderous spike after his first score.

Tampa missed an opportunity to extend the lead when Brady’s 2-yard pass to offensive lineman Joe Haeg was knocked out of his hands by Anthony Hitchens in the end zone. Ronald Jones was stopped short on consecutive carries as Arians stuck to his ‘No risk it, no biscuit’ philosophy and went on fourth down.

But the Chiefs didn’t gain any momentum off the stop. Instead, they made one costly mistake after another.

First, All-Pro tight end Travis Kelce dropped a pass that would’ve been a big gain on third down. Then punter Tommy Townsend shanked a 29-yarder after a penalty forced him to kick again. The Bucs started at Kansas City´s 38 instead of their 27.

A holding call on Chiefs cornerback Charvarius Ward negated an interception by All-Pro safety Tyrann Mathieu. Kansas City’s defense held but an offside penalty during Ryan Succop’s successful field goal gave the Buccaneers a first down. Sarah Thomas, the first woman official in a Super Bowl, threw that flag.

Brady needed one play, firing a strike to Gronkowski for a 17-yard TD and a 14-3 lead. Gronk hesitated before spiking the ball, waiting to make sure the flag on the play was again against the Chiefs.

Mahomes drove the offense for a 34-yard field goal by Harrison Butker that cut it to 14-6, but Kansas City’s defense fell apart in the final minute of the first half – allowing 42 yards on two pass interference penalties. One against Mathieu in the end zone set up Brady’s TD pass to Brown for a 21-6 halftime lead.

It was Brady who convinced his new team to give Brown a chance after the troubled former All-Pro came off suspension. His TD toss to Brown was his 50th of the season, including 10 in the postseason.

Mathieu took an unsportsmanlike penalty after the TD pass for getting into it with Brady as he ran to the sideline. 

The mere fact that there is a Super Bowl this season is no small feat given everything the league and country has been through with the ongoing pandemic. 

It took nearly 1 million COVID tests, thousands of Zoom meetings, a dozen or so rescheduled games and an untold amount of flexibility for the NFL to not miss a single of its 269 regular-season and postseason games in the midst of a worldwide pandemic.

Game No. 269, the Super Bowl, is fascinating for the quarterback matchup of young (Mahomes) vs. old (Brady);  but also for the 22,000 socially distanced fans in attendance as the NFL becomes the last of the country’s four major professional sports leagues to declare a champion amid the pandemic. 

The NFL and society, in general, are hoping America’s biggest sports celebration won’t turn into the mother of superspreader events, either at the stadium or at the inevitable thousands of high-fiving, chip-dipping, hug-it-out Super Bowl parties planned across the land.

With the reality that the most important results of the Super Bowl — the spike, or lack of spike, in COVID numbers — wouldn’t be known until well after the final score was posted and most of the $4.3 billion in expected wagers are settled, the NFL still scored points by merely making it to the finish line without any major disruptions.

‘The fact that every team played the correct number of games. and that most people did not get sick, is a real testament to their perseverance in making it happen,’ said Dennis Deninger, who teaches a Super Bowl and Society class for Syracuse’s sports management department.

The resiliency of the players and the league stood out as a bright note this winter, as the coronavirus ravaged the United States and the world. The NFL’s ability to keep the show moving — albeit imperfectly — reinforced the sport’s strong footing in American culture. It also generated debate about whether the country and the league have their priorities straight, given that resources devoted to playing football could have conceivably been expended elsewhere.  

‘In some ways, you say, it doesn’t feel right to be talking about sports and thinking about sports in the middle of a pandemic,’ said Ketra Armstrong, the director at University of Michigan’s Center for Race and Ethnicity in Sport. ‘But when you think the role sports can play for the psyche of the country, and you understand the level people are going to to deliver sports, you can appreciate’ the effort the NFL made to make the season happen. 

And, in fact, the NFL’s efforts benefitted more than simply the league’s own interests. Using as a backbone of its research the approximately 957,000 tests it conducted on more than 7,500 players and employees, the NFL collaborated with the Centers for Disease Control to publish a paper describing testing protocols, mitigation strategies and contact-tracing measures that could also be useful in ‘high-density environments’ such as schools and long-term care facilities.

A key conclusion from the paper was that ‘although the protocols implemented by the NFL were resource-intensive’ — i.e., the league had plenty of money and manpower to implement a testing program few other organizations would dream of — many of the lessons learned were valuable.

‘The idea was to test frequently, to identify when you had a positive, and to isolate and trace closely if you did,’ commissioner Roger Goodell said, while taking a victory lap of sorts earlier in the week at his annual Super Bowl news conference. ‘We don’t think there was a safer place to be than at an NFL facility that year. We never doubted that for a second.’ 

The season was far from perfect. Because of rescheduling, there were games played on every day of the week, including Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The Titans, Ravens, Browns and Steelers were among those that endured high-profile outbreaks that threatened not only their rosters but the league’s entire operation. In the season’s biggest debacle, the Broncos were forced to play a game with a wide receiver playing quarterback after everyone in the QB group got put under quarantine on late notice.

Goodell said all decisions were made in service of prioritizing safety over everything, including the NFL’s longstanding calling-card — competitive balance.

And yet, as Goodell pointed out, offense came at a record pace, and 70 percent of this season’s games were decided by eight points or less — reinforcing that, even in a pandemic, anyone can beat anyone on any given Sunday in the NFL.

As the playoffs wore on, some developments started feeling more normal, even if they didn’t always reflect well on the league.

There was the weeklong wait to see if Mahomes would play in the AFC championship game following his placement in the league’s much-debated ‘concussion protocol’ after his head slammed to the turf in the previous week’s win. Mahomes returned a week after the scary incident and led the Chiefs to the Super Bowl.

The two biggest off-field news items centered on a high-stakes quarterback carousel, with marquee signal-callers Jared Goff and Matthew Stafford swapping teams (Goff to the Lions and Stafford to the Rams) and DeShaun Watson of the Texans demanding a trade.

More troubling was the annual reminder of the NFL’s generally lackluster record in hiring minorities for coaching and front-office positions.

‘We had two minority coaches hired and it was not what we expected,’ the commissioner said of the seven head-coaching vacancies in the league this year. ‘And not what we expect going forward.’

It undermined progress made earlier in the season when Goodell, taking the temperature of a country agitated by increasing calls for social justice, conceded that the league should have paid more heed to Colin Kaepernick when he started his own form of protest by kneeling on the sidelines four seasons ago.

‘We know the NFL has failed miserably in many regards in being socially responsible, culturally responsible and showing it has a racial conscience,’ Armstrong said. ‘What you hope is that they can take advantage of this unique moment to maximize the power of sport. There’s a lot they can do. A lot more they should do.’

Clearly, though, the focus of this season was not on the NFL’s imperfections, but rather on the games themselves. With a few months to see what other sports did right and wrong, the NFL came up with a plan, revised it, revised it again, and got all its games in, albeit in front of mostly empty stadiums. Goodell said a total of 1.2 million people attended games that, in a normal season, would have been seen live by up to 17 million.

The capper to it all was a marquee matchup, to be played before a crowd of 22,000, featuring the two biggest names in football: Brady vs. Mahomes.

‘The NFL, and a lot of sports, served as examples for organizations in corporate America about how, if you put your mind to it, you can find ways to contain the virus, and continue doing what you do,’ Deninger said.