On Sunday night in New Orleans, the Philadelphia Eagles beat the Kansas City Chiefs 40-22, winning Super Bowl LIX and unseating the two-time defending champions in the process.
With that loss, the Chiefs were unable to complete their bid for immortality, as they will not be the first team in league history to three-peat as Super Bowl champions.
This is a fact that has many in the New England region excited heading into their workweek, as a Super Bowl three-peat was just about the only thing the Patriots were unable to accomplish during their double-dynastic run from 2001 to 2018. With the Chiefs losing on Sunday, Patriots fans feel more comfortable with their standing as the team of the century/team of the millennium/team of the 2000s.
Whatever denomination you want to use to describe it, the Patriots are still that.
Another aspect from last night’s loss for the Chiefs that bodes well for Patriots fans is the manner in which they lost, trailing by as many as 34 at two different points in the second half. The final score may have been 40-22, but it may as well have been 100-0. The game never felt close for a single second of action.
This now brings us to the Tom Brady vs. Patrick Mahomes of it all - two resumes that have been continually put up side-by-side in recent years, almost as many times as Michael Jordan and LeBron James (OK, not that many, but it’s getting up there).
And while Brady gave excellent perspective in the fourth quarter on the FOX broadcast of how a star of that caliber deals with a loss of this magnitude, he may have internally been celebrating the fact that Mahomes was putting together - for the second time in his career - the type of night Brady never had on football’s biggest stage:
A blowout loss in the Super Bowl.
Watching the way Mahomes was running for his life, trying to keep plays alive while his opponent thrived on the other side of the football was akin to his only other Super Bowl loss, a 31-9 loss in Super Bowl LV at the hands of Brady’s Buccaneers at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa.
That game, combined with Sunday’s loss to the Eagles, brings his career Super Bowl record to 3-2 - an incredible mark by any measure for a player only eight years into his career. But when those two losses have a combined margin of victory of 40 for the Bucs and Eagles, the record hits different.
While Brady may have more Super Bowl losses than Mahomes with a 7-3 record in the big game, all three of his losses came in one score games:
- Super Bowl XLII (2007): Giants 17, Patriots 14
- Super Bowl XLVI (2011): Giants 21, Patriots 17
- Super Bowl LII (2017): Eagles 41, Patriots 33
The combined margin of victory by the Giants and Eagles in those Super Bowl victories over Brady and the Patriots is only 15 points. And in that 2017 loss to Philadelphia, Brady threw for 505 yards in a game where his team never punted once.
Here are Mahomes’ stat lines from his two Super Bowl losses:
2020:
26 of 49 for 270 yards, 0 touchdowns and 2 interceptions with a QBR of 42.2
2024:
21 of 32 for 257 yards, 3 touchdowns and 2 interceptions with a QBR of 11.4
Chiefs fans and media at-large can try to continue forcing the “baby GOAT” conversation all they want. But at the moment, Mahomes lost his ability to pull the trump card in the debate, as a three-peat opportunity has come and gone.
And even if the Kansas City QB starts to sniff Brady in the “rings” conversation, the Foxborough Faithful will always be able to point to Mahomes’ ugly box scores from 2020 and 2024 and say, “Not quite!”
So for now, Brady still reigns supreme.