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How Josh McDaniels and a daring trick play helped the Patriots pull off their 28-3 comeback
David Andrews relived the Patriots' epic Super Bowl comeback against the Falcons on "The Quick Snap."
When you’re losing 21-3 in the Super Bowl going into halftime, it’s understandable if doubt or fear starts to creep in that maybe it’s just not your day. Not if you’re the Patriots, though.
Even in the face of an eventual 28-3 deficit in the second half, New England refused to concede Super Bowl LI to the Atlanta Falcons, eventually roaring back to pull off the biggest turnaround in championship history.
According to David Andrews, it all started with then-offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels coming into the locker room and hitting them with a silver lining.
“I’ll never forget: Josh came in on the whiteboard and wrote “45” — it was either 44 or 45 plays, certain time of possession [in the first half],” Andrews told “The Quick Snap” podcast this week.
According to ESPN’s play-by-play synopsis for the game, the Patriots ran 43 plays on offense compared with Atlanta’s 19 in the Super Bowl’s first half. In other words, New England was playing far better (aside from a LeGarrette Blount fumble and Tom Brady’s pick-six) than the scoreboard indicated.
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“We were in control of that game. It just wasn’t on the scoreboard,” said Andrews, who was then a second-year player in his first of two Super Bowls with the Patriots. “There was no panic. You never felt any panic from Tom or other leaders on our football team. We knew this is more about us than it is about them. Everyone was calm. There was no big rah-rah speech at halftime.
” … You can’t score 25 points in one play. So let’s just start chipping away. We scored. All right, we scored again. And you’re looking up there and you’re like, this thing’s winding down, and we’re chipping away at this.”
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Of course, Andrews acknowledged his heart rate wasn’t always perfectly steady in the game’s most crucial moments. One play that had him stressed was the first of New England’s crucial two-point conversions with 5:56 left in the fourth quarter: a direct snap to James White that the center had issues with in practice that week.
“We ran that play on Friday in practice, and I launched that ball. I sent that ball to frickin Jupiter,” he said. ” … I’m not gonna lie. That was in the back of my head a little bit. I was like, for the love of God, don’t send this to Mars.”
But McDaniels reportedly didn’t panic when Andrews struggled with the play in practice and had no hesitation calling it when New England needed it most. It worked.
Then, the Pats veteran admitted feeling some dismay when a hobbled Julio Jones pulled off an unbelievable sideline catch even the Patriots didn’t believe was possible to put the Falcons in scoring position later in the game.
“Julio Jones had a foot injury that week, and they were like, look, [he] can’t run an out route to the right because it’s his left foot,” Andrews recounted, “and this joker ran an out route, planted on that foot, goes and made one of the best catches I’ve ever seen on the sideline in front of our bench. That was the one time where I got a little life sucked out of me.”
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But the Pats kept the Falcons off the scoreboard, tied the game with under a minute left in regulation and immediately marched the ball down the field for the winning points on the first possession of overtime.
That’s how you pull off the most cold-blooded comeback in the history of sports.
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