Pre-Knee Jerk Reaction to Super Bowl LI
Everything that needs to be said about Tom Brady pic.twitter.com/kXY994CLzL
— Jerry Thornton (@jerrythornton1) February 6, 2017
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I can’t even process what we’ve just seen. I can’t even begin to.
I swear to you on the souls of my sons, when the Pats were down 28-3, I had a blog all written in my head where I was going to rip the Patriots for a terrible game and praise the Falcons for earning a championship. It was going to include Tom Brady’s unforgivable pick-6. About his bad throws that missed open receivers. About his accurate throws that receivers dropped, while Atlanta made clutch catch after clutch catch. About the Pats O-line being inexcusably unable to stop a smallish Falcons defense’s 4-man rush or push them around in the run game. And I planned on eviscerating the game plans on both sides of the ball. I promise you.
And I was going to lean into the hatred and backlash that all Pats fans have to endure any time the team loses and the world bathes in their blood.
But something happened: Greatness. By Brady, the greatest winner in team sports history. By the coaches, who made adjustments. And by virtually the entire roster, who stepped up and out-clutched a young Atlanta team who seemed poised for greatness.
There’s a metric fuck ton of plays, strategies and analysis to get through before I can make any sense of this game. And I have every intention of doing it by morning. But for now, I’m half drunk. And to get personal for a second, I just got off the phone with the son who watched the Pats win three Super Bowls sitting next to me but missed the fourth because he was sitting in a foxhole in the middle of nowhere. At halftime, he called me from a barracks surrounded by Falcons fans, and we were both suicidal. At the end of the game, he called me and we were both in tears. And neither one of us can still fully grasp how we got from there to there.
All I do know is that there is no story in my lifetime I would rather be writing about, no job I would rather have and no group of people I would rather be working with than the ones I am right now. What an amazing ride. I just hope I can make sense of it. And that it really happened.