Tom Brady was awarded the hardware as the Most Valuable Player in the Super Bowl LV on Sunday night in Tampa.
As always, Brady receives praise and hero worship as a superstar.
But Brady – and anyone else who saw the Buccaneers win by 31-9 over defending champion Chiefs at Raymond James Stadium – knows who the game’s real MVP was.
It was Todd Bowles.
Yes, Jets fans, that Todd Bowles.
Of course, players play the game. And the Buccaneers ‘players were brilliant in defense all night, suppressing the Chiefs’ powerful attack and strangling their otherworldly quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
But it was the positions that Bowles, Tampa Bay’s defensive coordinator and former Jets coach for four seasons, placed his players in that allowed them to do what they did with Mahomes, receiver Tyreek Hill and tight end Jason Kelce.
It was the plan that Bowles implemented that put these players in a position to cause Mahomes the worst defeat of his professional career.
“Todd had a good plan,” said Chiefs coach Andy Reid. “He played in the first and second downs and mixed everything up on the third down and we couldn’t handle it very well. Give Todd credit for the work he did. He got us. ”
Bowles won the Lombardi Trophy for the Buccaneers. And for that, he should have been the one to receive the MVP trophy.
No disrespect to Brady, who turned 21 out of 29 for a modest 201 yards and three TDs, but the quarterback almost always gets the credit, the headlines, the hardware and the supermodel wife, right?
How good was Bowles’ plan?
If you didn’t know him better, you would have assumed that he had attended the Chiefs ‘offensive meetings for the past two weeks, dining at Mahomes’ house and discussing the Kansas City offensive game plan for Sunday.
In the teams’ previous encounter, a 27-24 victory in Kansas City on November 29, the Chiefs’ attack ran through the defense of the Bowles’ Buccaneers. It was an embarrassing day for Tampa Bay. The Chiefs led 17-0 in the first quarter and 27-10 in the fourth quarter, before the Bucs scored some TDs for trash in the fourth quarter.
Mahomes completed 37 of 49 for 462 yards and three TDs that day. Hill, who finished the game with 13 receptions for 269 yards and three TD receptions, had 203 of those receptions in the first quarter.
Mahomes finished Super Bowl LV 26 out of 49 for 270 empty yards, two INTs and a passer rating of 49.9. In the first half, when the game was really decided, Mahomes scored 9 from 19 to 67 yards.
Hill, who ended the game with seven receptions for the quietest and most irrelevant 73 yards you’ve ever seen, had two 13-yard receptions in the first half.
“I can’t give him enough credit, ” Buccaneers coach Bruce Arians said of Bowles. “I think he got tired of hearing how unstoppable they were. I thought he had a fantastic plan – just to keep them in front of us and to cope very well. Patrick was not going to beat us running. We’ll let you run all day. ”
Bowles said that “the most important thing was to try to get the first reading” out of Mahomes.
“You take the first reading, you know [Mahomes] will float and hold [the ball],” he said. “We know this is a dangerous thing, because he can make a lot of things happen to his feet, but we didn’t want him sitting in his pocket just zinging coins at us all day. Then the D-wire put some pressure on him, making him run and be a little uncomfortable. I thought it was the key for us. ”
The Chiefs were unusually inept on the third down, converting just 3 out of 13.
“We mistook some covers, trying to show some disguises and make one thing look like another, and if we could make it hold [the ball] and pause and look a little bit, those guys in front were allowed to hunt and they were getting him out of there, ”said Bowles.
Sunday’s victory was an exclamation point for the Buccaneers’ postseason in the defense that ended Saints’ Drew Brees, Packers’ Aaron Rodgers and Mahomes.
Brees and Rodgers will go to the “rollerblading” Hall of Fame to borrow from the great Bill Parcells. And Mahomes will have to be kidnapped by aliens in order not to end up in Canton after their career ends.
“They accepted the challenge,” said Brady of the defense. “When you go up against Patrick, an incredible player, and Aaron, the [NFL] MVP two weeks ago, and against Drew they played very well. They showed up to the occasion. ”
Bowles was up to the occasion.
MVP.