There aren’t many people who can say they beat the Greatest To Ever Do It, Tom Brady, on the NFL’s biggest stage. Especially if you play quarterback. In fact, only two men are in that exclusive club. Eli Manning famously did it twice, in 2007 and 2011. Those games were all-timers, but the third and only other time Brady lost in the Super Bowl, in 2017 to Nick Foles and the Philadelphia Eagles, was perhaps the greatest Super Bowl ever.
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What made the big game even more impressive for Philly, who had never won it all before, was that Foles had only come in for MVP candidate Carson Wentz late in the regular season. Foles was a backup, but he didn’t play like it during that playoff run. And specifically in the Super Bowl, he threw for 373 passing yards and three TDs, plus the cheekiest TD reception in Super Bowl history.
With Brady heading back to the scene of the crime in Minnesota this week, NFL on Fox had the former QB reminisce about his experience leading up to and during Super Bowl 52. Brady called it a “crushing defeat.”
“Any time I see a trick play from the Eagles, I get PTSD. It was very heartbreaking… Yeah that was, in some ways, one of the most memorable losses because I get reminded of it… We had a pretty good game that day on offense… we really never blinked,” Brady said.
“We end up throwing for 500 yards that day… But this guy Nick Foles, we just couldn’t slow him down. They played great. I’m sure a lot of people were rooting for us to lose,” he added.
Brady also noted how unique that Super Bowl was, being played in a dome in cold Minnesota. Experiencing Super Bowl week with temperatures below 10 degrees made it feel a bit different.
“I don’t think I left my hotel except to go to practice. And I would come home from practice and I’d lie on my bed, and let the sun come through the window, because it was the only heat that I felt all week… What’s really distracting is when it’s 10 degrees out and nobody has a place to go. So all we did was sit around the hotel the whole time waiting for the game to happen.”
Despite that, the Pats were actually up 33-32 with about nine minutes left. Foles promptly went on a 14-play, 75-yard drive that ended with their third straight TD on a third- or fourth-down. Talk about drama.
But Philly missed on the two-point conversion, giving the Eagles a 38-33 lead. They had seemingly set Brady up with a classic two-minute drill situation to go win the game. Thankfully for everyone but Pats fans, that didn’t happen.
“My guy, Brandon Graham, fellow Wolverine, has a Wolverine on Wolverine crime. Strip sacks me! In the fourth quarter, we’re going down, we have chance to go ahead and win the game… Dug ourselves out of a hole, and he comes through the line of scrimmage and knocks the ball out of my hand just as I’m getting ready to throw the ball away, and it ends up being a fumble.”
By Wolverine, Brady, of course, is referring to the fact that both he and Graham attended the University of Michigan. But those college ties go out the window in the Big Game. Brady also shared that nearly every time he’s been to an Eagles game as a broadcaster since then, Graham has come up behind him to mimic his infamous strip sack that sealed the 41-33 win for Philly that day.
Foles gets most of the plaudits as the Super Bowl MVP, and rightly so. But as Brady said, Graham and his crucial strip deserve a lot of credit too. Especially because that Eagles defense couldn’t stop a darn thing that day as Brady and company went for a Super Bowl record 613 total yards. Without that strip-sack, it’s very likely Brady would have led the Pats down for the game-winning TD.
But thanks to Graham, I guess we’ll never know.
