Super Bowl LI

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Who Are You Rooting For?

  • Atlanta

    Votes: 41 93.2%
  • New England

    Votes: 3 6.8%

  • Total voters
    44
  • Poll closed .

OldSchool

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I think that being up 28-9 with at the beginning of the 4th quarter, the offense has clearly done its part.
Right why would they want to run out clock and keep their defense off the field while adding 3 points and making it a two point lead with less than two minutes to play. Look I'm not saying Atlantas defense was great but your offense has a chance late in the game to put Brady down by two scores with less than two minutes. I guess an 11 point lead that late is losing football.
 

T-REX

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The man sold his soul to the devil in 2001
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j/k...sort of...
 

Prime Time

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Hard to tell what's the bigger meltdown. The team last night or Falcon fans after the game. Go read some Falcons message boards today.

A good idea for a thread. :)

Of course, had the Falcons tried to run clock and the Pats came back to win, they would have been vilified for playing too cautious

Were we watching the same game? That's exactly what the Falcons did.

TOP probably above :40 mins.

40:31 to be exact.
 

dieterbrock

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Were we watching the same game? That's exactly what the Falcons did.
They did not run the clock, they chose to take deep drops and Ryan got sacked, fumbled and worse got sacked and took them out of field goal range. The criticism everywhere is saying they should have run clock.
 

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They did not run the clock, they chose to take deep drops and Ryan got sacked, fumbled and worse got sacked and took them out of field goal range. The criticism everywhere is saying they should have run clock.

At that point of the game, yes.

My main problem was with the defense. The Falcons stopped applying the same pressure and allowed the Patriots to gain short yardage in order to make them go on long drives and eat the clock. That of course allowed them to get back into the game. I absolutely detest "prevent" coaching.

Throw in the refs who began calling just about everything in favor of the Patriots and there you go. Here's another point of view...

https://theringer.com/super-bowl-li...tt-ryan-kyle-shanahan-8d30236f1a2c#.f8o2xn1fa

How the Falcons Threw Away the Super Bowl
With a 25-point lead in the second half, Matt Ryan and Kyle Shanahan stuck to their guns — and it cost them a title
Danny Kelly
Staff Writer, The Ringer


As Lady Gaga took the stage at halftime of Super Bowl LI, the Falcons were well on their way to capping off a near-flawless postseason run. Up 21–3 and set to receive the second-half kickoff, they were on pace to annihilate New England’s no. 1 scoring defense.

With another turnover-less half, they’d become the first Super Bowl–winning team to go an entire postseason without one. And with three blowout wins in three games, they’d be the first team since the 2002 Tampa Bay Buccaneers to lift the Lombardi Trophy without being challenged along the way.

Of course, that perfect first half was followed up with what might be the most disastrous second half in Super Bowl history, and Atlanta lost in overtime 34–28. A well-oiled machine all year, the Falcons offense sputtered in the face of unrelenting pressure from the Patriots.

Matt Ryan and Co.’s ineffectiveness forced Atlanta’s defense to stay on the field for long stretches, and after flying around the NRG Stadium turf in the first half, they tired, and Tom Brady picked them apart.

You don’t blow a lead that big without an impressive performance from the opposing side or without a handful of moments of terrible luck, but you also don’t do it without making plenty of your own mistakes. Thanks to a series of strange strategic decisions, poor clock management, and a lack of execution, the last few pages of Atlanta’s seeming fairy tale turned the story into a nightmare.

Coming into the third quarter, Atlanta was dominating both sides of the ball. The offense had run only 19 plays, but that’s because it was executing with the efficiency that made the Falcons tied for the eighth-highest-scoring team in NFL history. Ryan had completed seven of eight passes for 115 yards and a touchdown for a perfect 158.3 passer rating. Devonta Freeman and Tevin Coleman had combined for 86 yards and a touchdown on nine carries (9.6 yards per tote).

Defensively, Atlanta forced a LeGarrette Blount fumble and confounded Brady, sacking him twice and forcing three New England punts. When Robert Alford picked Brady off with 2:33 left in the half and returned the interception 82 yards for a touchdown, it looked like the rout was on.

The beginning of the third quarter brought more of the same. When Ryan hit Coleman for a 6-yard catch-and-run touchdown at the 8:31 mark, Atlanta pushed its lead to 28–3, and a few New England fans started heading for the exits.

On paper, it was, essentially, over. Atlanta spent most of the third quarter and the early part of the fourth with a win probability of 95 percent or better. All the Falcons had to do was run the ball, squeeze the clock out, and then pop champagne bottles.

It would be offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan’s deserved send-off: After a year of brilliant play-calling had (reportedly) earned him a head-coaching job with the San Francisco 49ers, he could take it easy and just call those trusty wide zones and toss sweeps until the final seconds ticked off the clock.

Instead, Shanahan kept his foot on the gas. After Brady hit James White for a touchdown to cut the lead to 28–9 (Stephen Gostkowski missed the extra point) with 2:06 left in the third, the Falcons completely abandoned their run game.

From that point on, even with a huge lead, they ran the ball just four more times for 10 yards. Freeman picked up 71 rush yards in the first half … and finished with just 75. And when they did pass, it was rarely to their best receiver; Julio Jones finished the game with four catches … on four targets.

While it took more than two plays to allow New England to erase its 25-point second-half deficit, a pair of play calls in the fourth quarter will replay in Shanahan’s mind all offseason long — and beyond.

The first: Following two Coleman runs to open a drive (the second of which sent him to the bench with an ankle injury), Atlanta faced a third-and-1 from its own 36-yard line with 8:31 left. At this point, the Falcons owned a 99.6 percent win probability. In other words: The Patriots didn’t even have a full percentage-point chance of winning, based on models indexing every play from every game in the recent history of the NFL.

But instead of playing it safe and just sending Freeman up the gut on a dive or pitching it outside to him to make a first down in space, Shanahan dialed up a pass … and Atlanta’s perfect turnover record went up in smoke.


View: https://twitter.com/NFL/status/828433126166712321?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

The Patriots recovered at the Falcons’ 25-yard line. Five plays and a two-point conversion later, they cut the lead to eight. Yet Atlanta’s win probability was 92.1 at this point. Some of the unthinkable had happened, but not close to all of it.

Now for the second play call that Shanahan will never forget: On the next Atlanta drive, two big plays — a 39-yard gain on a quick dump-off to Freeman and a miraculous catch by Jones — set the Falcons up at New England’s 22-yard line with 4:40 remaining, pushing their win percentage to 98.1.

Why? All they had to do here was run into the backs of their linemen two more times, run the clock (or force New England to use its timeouts), then ask Pro Bowler Matt Bryant to kick a field goal to push the lead back to 11.


View: https://twitter.com/NFL/status/828435463765516288?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Instead, Shanahan called up another pass and kept his foot on the pedal. And Ryan did exactly what he couldn’t afford to do in that situation: He took a sack. It pushed Atlanta out of field goal range and set up a third-and-23.

A holding call on the next play negated a 9-yard completion to Mohamed Sanu, and the pass on third-and-33 fell incomplete. Despite finding themselves with a first-and-10 from the Patriots’ 22-yard line, the Falcons came up empty-handed and, worse still, used up very little clock.

Aided by a miraculous Julian Edelman catch, New England pounced on Atlanta’s terrible handling of the end of that drive, scored on the ensuing possession, and got another two-point conversion to tie the game and push the win probability in their favor for the first time since the game was scoreless.

With 57 seconds left, the Falcons’ next drive got them only to their own 27-yard line. The game went to overtime, the Patriots won the coin toss, and you know what happened next. Ryan and his league-best offense didn’t get another chance for redemption.

The Falcons ran into a buzz saw in the form of Tom Brady’s second half, and there’s no taking away from the miracle the Patriots quarterback produced: In the final two quarters and overtime, Brady completed 28 of 37 passes for 287 yards and two touchdowns in leading New England on scoring drives on its final five possessions.

But while Atlanta did average 7.5 yards per play against New England’s stout defense, their strange decision-making and sudden inability to execute kept them off the field and paved the way for Brady’s furious play. All in all, the Patriots (93) more than doubled the Falcons (46) in total offensive plays.

The Falcons offense was a model of ingenious play calling and unparalleled execution all season long, but they came up short in both of those categories at the worst possible time. Unfair or not, this group is going to be defined by its one epic failure.
 

dieterbrock

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At that point of the game, yes.

My main problem was with the defense. The Falcons stopped applying the same pressure and allowed the Patriots to gain short yardage in order to make them go on long drives and eat the clock. That of course allowed them to get back into the game. I absolutely detest "prevent" coaching.
I agree on the defense, totally.
 

RedRam

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At that point of the game, yes.

My main problem was with the defense. The Falcons stopped applying the same pressure and allowed the Patriots to gain short yardage in order to make them go on long drives and eat the clock. That of course allowed them to get back into the game. I absolutely detest "prevent" coaching.

Throw in the refs who began calling just about everything in favor of the Patriots and there you go. Here's another point of view...

https://theringer.com/super-bowl-li...tt-ryan-kyle-shanahan-8d30236f1a2c#.f8o2xn1fa

How the Falcons Threw Away the Super Bowl
With a 25-point lead in the second half, Matt Ryan and Kyle Shanahan stuck to their guns — and it cost them a title
Danny Kelly
Staff Writer, The Ringer


As Lady Gaga took the stage at halftime of Super Bowl LI, the Falcons were well on their way to capping off a near-flawless postseason run. Up 21–3 and set to receive the second-half kickoff, they were on pace to annihilate New England’s no. 1 scoring defense.

With another turnover-less half, they’d become the first Super Bowl–winning team to go an entire postseason without one. And with three blowout wins in three games, they’d be the first team since the 2002 Tampa Bay Buccaneers to lift the Lombardi Trophy without being challenged along the way.

Of course, that perfect first half was followed up with what might be the most disastrous second half in Super Bowl history, and Atlanta lost in overtime 34–28. A well-oiled machine all year, the Falcons offense sputtered in the face of unrelenting pressure from the Patriots.

Matt Ryan and Co.’s ineffectiveness forced Atlanta’s defense to stay on the field for long stretches, and after flying around the NRG Stadium turf in the first half, they tired, and Tom Brady picked them apart.

You don’t blow a lead that big without an impressive performance from the opposing side or without a handful of moments of terrible luck, but you also don’t do it without making plenty of your own mistakes. Thanks to a series of strange strategic decisions, poor clock management, and a lack of execution, the last few pages of Atlanta’s seeming fairy tale turned the story into a nightmare.

Coming into the third quarter, Atlanta was dominating both sides of the ball. The offense had run only 19 plays, but that’s because it was executing with the efficiency that made the Falcons tied for the eighth-highest-scoring team in NFL history. Ryan had completed seven of eight passes for 115 yards and a touchdown for a perfect 158.3 passer rating. Devonta Freeman and Tevin Coleman had combined for 86 yards and a touchdown on nine carries (9.6 yards per tote).

Defensively, Atlanta forced a LeGarrette Blount fumble and confounded Brady, sacking him twice and forcing three New England punts. When Robert Alford picked Brady off with 2:33 left in the half and returned the interception 82 yards for a touchdown, it looked like the rout was on.

The beginning of the third quarter brought more of the same. When Ryan hit Coleman for a 6-yard catch-and-run touchdown at the 8:31 mark, Atlanta pushed its lead to 28–3, and a few New England fans started heading for the exits.

On paper, it was, essentially, over. Atlanta spent most of the third quarter and the early part of the fourth with a win probability of 95 percent or better. All the Falcons had to do was run the ball, squeeze the clock out, and then pop champagne bottles.

It would be offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan’s deserved send-off: After a year of brilliant play-calling had (reportedly) earned him a head-coaching job with the San Francisco 49ers, he could take it easy and just call those trusty wide zones and toss sweeps until the final seconds ticked off the clock.

Instead, Shanahan kept his foot on the gas. After Brady hit James White for a touchdown to cut the lead to 28–9 (Stephen Gostkowski missed the extra point) with 2:06 left in the third, the Falcons completely abandoned their run game.

From that point on, even with a huge lead, they ran the ball just four more times for 10 yards. Freeman picked up 71 rush yards in the first half … and finished with just 75. And when they did pass, it was rarely to their best receiver; Julio Jones finished the game with four catches … on four targets.

While it took more than two plays to allow New England to erase its 25-point second-half deficit, a pair of play calls in the fourth quarter will replay in Shanahan’s mind all offseason long — and beyond.

The first: Following two Coleman runs to open a drive (the second of which sent him to the bench with an ankle injury), Atlanta faced a third-and-1 from its own 36-yard line with 8:31 left. At this point, the Falcons owned a 99.6 percent win probability. In other words: The Patriots didn’t even have a full percentage-point chance of winning, based on models indexing every play from every game in the recent history of the NFL.

But instead of playing it safe and just sending Freeman up the gut on a dive or pitching it outside to him to make a first down in space, Shanahan dialed up a pass … and Atlanta’s perfect turnover record went up in smoke.


View: https://twitter.com/NFL/status/828433126166712321?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

The Patriots recovered at the Falcons’ 25-yard line. Five plays and a two-point conversion later, they cut the lead to eight. Yet Atlanta’s win probability was 92.1 at this point. Some of the unthinkable had happened, but not close to all of it.

Now for the second play call that Shanahan will never forget: On the next Atlanta drive, two big plays — a 39-yard gain on a quick dump-off to Freeman and a miraculous catch by Jones — set the Falcons up at New England’s 22-yard line with 4:40 remaining, pushing their win percentage to 98.1.

Why? All they had to do here was run into the backs of their linemen two more times, run the clock (or force New England to use its timeouts), then ask Pro Bowler Matt Bryant to kick a field goal to push the lead back to 11.


View: https://twitter.com/NFL/status/828435463765516288?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Instead, Shanahan called up another pass and kept his foot on the pedal. And Ryan did exactly what he couldn’t afford to do in that situation: He took a sack. It pushed Atlanta out of field goal range and set up a third-and-23.

A holding call on the next play negated a 9-yard completion to Mohamed Sanu, and the pass on third-and-33 fell incomplete. Despite finding themselves with a first-and-10 from the Patriots’ 22-yard line, the Falcons came up empty-handed and, worse still, used up very little clock.

Aided by a miraculous Julian Edelman catch, New England pounced on Atlanta’s terrible handling of the end of that drive, scored on the ensuing possession, and got another two-point conversion to tie the game and push the win probability in their favor for the first time since the game was scoreless.

With 57 seconds left, the Falcons’ next drive got them only to their own 27-yard line. The game went to overtime, the Patriots won the coin toss, and you know what happened next. Ryan and his league-best offense didn’t get another chance for redemption.

The Falcons ran into a buzz saw in the form of Tom Brady’s second half, and there’s no taking away from the miracle the Patriots quarterback produced: In the final two quarters and overtime, Brady completed 28 of 37 passes for 287 yards and two touchdowns in leading New England on scoring drives on its final five possessions.

But while Atlanta did average 7.5 yards per play against New England’s stout defense, their strange decision-making and sudden inability to execute kept them off the field and paved the way for Brady’s furious play. All in all, the Patriots (93) more than doubled the Falcons (46) in total offensive plays.

The Falcons offense was a model of ingenious play calling and unparalleled execution all season long, but they came up short in both of those categories at the worst possible time. Unfair or not, this group is going to be defined by its one epic failure.

Yep! Couldn't agree more!

But, the whole conversation is moot had Shanahan not brain-locked. They were averaging what, four yards a pop running the ball? Run the ball three times and kick the game winning field goal. Who knows, maybe they pick up a first down running it? Heck, they could've gone to the victory formation, kneel down three times, then kicked the field goal. Even if they miss the kick they've burned off a lot of the clock.

Why these guys, that are paid a HUGE amount of money, have to try to outthink the Hoodie when the game is theirs to take?

The Seahawks did the same a couple of years ago.

Yeah, it's a lot easier coaching from the couch and second guess. But even the potatoes can get some calls right! Shanahan and Quinn lost this game for Atlanta. Shanahan made the dumb calls and Quinn didn't step in and veto those calls. At least call a timeout and say, "Is this what we really want to be doing?" Mind boggling stuff...
 

kurtfaulk

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I have a very simple way of dealing with this. I have not watched any nfl related show since the game or read any articles either. I will not watch anything nfl related until the start of free agency.

.
 

Mikey Ram

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They used recycled paper from their Dewey beats Truman issue...Oh, it should have been true !!!
 

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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/about-those-falcons-play-calls/?ex_cid=story-twitter

About Those Falcons Play Calls …
By Ty Schalter

gettyimages-633954942-1.jpg

KEVIN C. COX / GETTY IMAGES

Every Super Bowl loser wants a do-over, but no team has had as disastrous an ending as Atlanta had in the final nine minutes of Super Bowl LI. If the Falcons were given 1,000 do-overs, they would have been expected, according to ESPN’s win probability model, to win the game 996 times.

All the Falcons needed was one more point, one defensive stop or perhaps even just one more minute of burnt clock to zero out the New England Patriots’ 0.4 percent chance to surmount a nigh-insurmountable lead.

Why didn’t they?

“I think we ran out of gas,” Falcons head coach Dan Quinn said at his post-game press conference. Even so, Quinn’s offensive machine should have been able to coast to the finish line after being up 28-12 with possession of the ball and less than 10 minutes to play. Instead, bad decision-making turned domination into capitulation.

The Falcons, as I wrote one FiveThirtyEight’s Super Bowl live blog, had been stunningly effective on the ground all game. The Patriots’ rush defense ranked fourth in Football Outsiders’ Defense-adjusted Value Over Average (DVOA) this season, yet the Falcons had piled up 94 yards and a touchdown on just 14 carries.

Starting at the 9:40 mark, Falcons running back Tevin Coleman ran on first and second down, getting injured on the latter play but setting up 3rd-and-1 from the team’s own 36-yard line. Rather than dial up another clock-eating run, offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan called a pass play. Coleman’s backfield partner, Devonta Freeman, whiffed on his blocking assignment, and Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan was strip-sacked.

After the Patriots capitalized on the turnover with a touchdown, the Falcons ran 11 offensive plays — and only two of them were runs. Despite needing more than anything to wind the clock down to zero, Shanahan gave only two more carries to Freeman, who’d been averaging 8.2 yards per carry until that point.

This is where football coaches, who spend numerous hours micro-analyzing schemes and matchups as they build out their game plans, can lose the forest for the trees. It may well be that Shanahan had a perfect play called up for that situation, or a matchup he knew Ryan could exploit.

Ryan, after all, had completed 13 of 16 passes to that point; another short completion seemed like an easy ask. But the Falcons needed to maximize their chance of finishing the game with more points, not their offensive efficiency.

Even if the Patriots had stopped Freeman short of the sticks on 3rd-and-1, it would have run 30 more seconds off the clock, and an average Matt Bosher punt would have placed the Patriots inside their own 20-yard line with less than eight minutes to play. Instead, the Falcons’ only turnover of the game gave the Patriots the ball 5 yards from the red zone with 8:24 left on the clock.

Even an unsuccessful run and decent punt at this juncture might have been enough to win the game, considering that the Patriots would go on to score the game-tying touchdown with just 57 seconds left. (Then again, having one fewer minute may have just meant that the Patriots would have scored even faster.)

Incredibly, Shanahan and the Falcons later doubled down on their mistake.

On the ensuing Falcons possession, Ryan gripped it and ripped it. The Falcons moved from their own 10-yard line to the Patriots’ 22 with a 2-yard run sandwiched between two deep passes. They then ran once, for a loss of a yard, shaving 44 seconds off the clock. Then, Shanahan dialed up another pass — and Ryan took his fifth sack.

“You don’t think, just run the ball and make your guy kick a 50-yard field goal,” Shanahan told reporters after the game. But wait — why wouldn’t you think that?

Running two more times, even for no gain, would have forced the Patriots to burn two timeouts. The Falcons were on the Patriots’ 23-yard line; a field-goal attempt from there would have been 40 yards, not 50.

Falcons kicker Matt Bryant has made 78.2 percent of his career kicks from between 40 and 49 yards. With the score 28-20, going up by 11 with less than four minutes to play would likely have been as effective a dagger as going up by 15.

In the end, Shanahan, Ryan and the Falcons offense can point to just about any metric and say they put together a masterful offensive game. They averaged a whopping 7.5 yards per play over the course of the game, far more than the Patriots’ 5.9, or even the Falcons’ league-leading regular-season average of 6.7.

But sometimes the best performance in a vacuum isn’t the optimal performance in a game situation. That’s something Shanahan, the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, is going to have to learn.
 

thirteen28

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The hold by Matthews, on Chris Long, to me, was the critical moment of the game...

Matthews obviously didn't get the memo that you are only allowed to use that hold on Robert Quinn, or on the Rams in general. No blue font needed.
 

LACHAMP46

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Matthews obviously didn't get the memo that you are only allowed to use that hold on Robert Quinn
Funny thing was, the first thing I thought was, the boys & gals at ROD would see that hold and say, Quinn never gets that call. Maybe in the super bowl....52 or 53 my friend.
 

OldSchool

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IN the 2016 season including playoffs there were 108 times a team had the ball 1st and 10 at the opponents 22 yard line. One time in those 108 resulted in a punt but I keep hearing Atlanta made the right play calls leading to that one and only punt.
 

thirteen28

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Funny thing was, the first thing I thought was, the boys & gals at ROD would see that hold and say, Quinn never gets that call. Maybe in the super bowl....52 or 53 my friend.

Well, it WAS the first thing I thought. We've seen it so GD many times here on Quinn and never get called. After all those years on the Rams, Long must've been at least a little surprised that the flag was thrown.
 

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https://theringer.com/nfl-playoffs-...-new-england-patriots-51d67392c5e6#.rs2360qrj

Lessons From a Legendary Loss
The Falcons blew the Super Bowl in spectacular fashion, but their shame provides three valuable lessons for future Patriots foes
Kevin Clark
Staff Writer, The Ringer


The Atlanta Falcons could not pinpoint exactly what went wrong in Super Bowl LI, when they blew a 25-point lead, failed to secure the first title in franchise history, and made Dikembe Mutombo miserable. They made plenty of mistakes, committing costly holding penalties, allowing a debilitating sack on Matt Ryan in the fourth quarter, and losing a late fumble that set up a crucial Patriots score, but none of those were the problem.

They were the symptoms of the problem, the byproduct of the one thing the Falcons could not control: They had to play the New England Patriots.

Other than the henchmen in Bond movies, who fall down at the most inopportune moments, no one makes more mistakes than teams playing New England in Super Bowls. The Seattle Seahawks threw from the 1-yard line against the Patriots with a championship on the line despite employing Marshawn Lynch at the time, and Malcolm Butler promptly picked off the pass.

The Philadelphia Eagles ran the slowest hurry-up offense in history against them in the Super Bowl, playing with no urgency and all but ensuring they’d never get close late. The Panthers kicked off out of bounds before the final possession of their Super Bowl, giving the Patriots amazing field position and setting up a game-winning field goal.

The Rams famously wouldn’t move away from Marshall Faulk even though the Patriots were roughing him up on every play and Rams players were begging head coach Mike Martz to change the game plan.

In essence, the Patriots turn every opponent into a Gus Bradley team. That isn’t luck; it’s strategy. As I wrote after New England sealed its 34–28 victory on Sunday, consistency is the key: Bill Belichick’s team does the correct thing over and over until the opponent does the wrong thing.

Think about how Rafael Nadal plays tennis, or how the Fast & Furious franchise remains essential: It’s about constant quality; it’s about always returning serve.

Here’s the problem for the NFL’s other 31 teams: For the bulk of the Super Bowl, the Falcons put up an Oscar contender and fired ace after ace, and it still wasn’t enough. They played nearly flawless football, building a 25-point lead behind an MVP-winning quarterback and overachieving defense, and then the Patriots still did what the Patriots so often do.

Hell, New England is so good that Belichick capped his fifth championship by complaining about wasting five weeks of 2017 prep time.

How can anyone hope to compete with that absent a Giants-esque playoff miracle? Here are the three keys to one day toppling Belichick’s seemingly unstoppable force.

1. Don’t Overthink It
From now on, when young coaches come up through the NFL ranks, the vets will show them the Falcons’ fourth quarter as a prime example of how not to close out a game. Past Patriots wins have reinforced some basic football know-how — seriously, people, don’t ever throw the ball from the damn 1-yard line! — and this game reminded us all that running the ball to drain clock is generally pretty wise.

Sure, NFL coaches have theoretically known this for 100 years, but that didn’t affect offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan, who called just five run plays after Atlanta went up 28–3 in the second half.

Running backs Devonta Freeman and Tevin Coleman had proved to be perfect complements to Ryan’s passing all season, but instead of handing off late, the Falcons kept passing, and worse, they also routinely snapped the ball with more than 10 seconds on the play clock in the fourth quarter. The Patriots finished regulation with two timeouts left, while the Falcons had blown theirs before crunch time.

The Falcons wasted a 25-point lead in part because they put almost no pressure on the Patriots from a time perspective. Knocking off Belichick and Tom Brady requires smartly managing the clock.

2. Get in Shape
After the loss, Atlanta head coach Dan Quinn admitted that his team ran “out of gas” in the fourth quarter. A few feet away from where Quinn was speaking, the Patriots were widely discussing their outstanding conditioning. Fitness was a talking point for both sides because it truly mattered late.

The Patriots ran almost double the plays the Falcons ran, so it’s no surprise the defense was tired, but that doesn’t account for the Atlanta offense losing so much steam. Also, uh, the Patriots were on the field for all of those offensive plays as well, and they managed to maintain plenty of zip on offense.

Belichick spoke after the game about how important conditioning was in the contest, echoing something he’s long preached. He noted specifically that superior conditioning is the main attribute that former lacrosse star Chris Hogan brought with him from his prior sport.

Wide receiver Julian Edelman, who notably got significantly better in the fourth quarter and made a will-be-shown-in-every–New England–bar-forever catch on a pass everyone who lives in Atlanta bobbled, talked after the game about the New England hills that coaches make the players run.

“We’ve got these stupid hills in Foxborough that we have to run, and we all bitch and complain about it, but we do it,” Edelman said. The next team that faces the Patriots in a big game better find some hills, because that training clearly mattered on Sunday.

3. Make Adjustments — Because the Pats Rarely Will
No Patriots opponent will have a better coach or quarterback, since the Pats have the best ever in both categories. But there are other edges to gain if the opponent is willing to make more adjustments to combat the Patriots’ typically rigid defensive game plan.

The Pats force offensive stars like Julio Jones and Faulk out of the game, and if an opponent switches to an offense that accounts for that reality, it stands a far better chance of scoring, even if the points don’t come from the offense’s usual bread and butter.

Quarterback Matt Ryan detailed on Sunday night how the Patriots brought slightly more pressure in the second half without wavering from or altering their game plan. No matter what, they were going to bracket Jones with double coverage and make the Falcons’ running backs or non-Jones receivers beat them.

And the Falcons were enjoying roaring success with Freeman, who averaged 6.8 yards per carry on the night. Quinn and Shanahan had the chance to be coaching legends by capitalizing on what was working, shifting toward the effective ground game to gain yards and burn time. Instead, Ryan continued to pass, and the Atlanta offense stalled as the Patriots started to soar.

It actually is possible for a coach to go toe-to-toe with Belichick, but doing so involves finding the confidence to attempt the midgame adjustments that many NFL coaches are too stubborn or too uncomfortable to make. That hesitation plays into the Patriots’ already-loaded hands.

Maybe the next team that plays the Patriots in a Super Bowl will learn from these lessons. But if Sunday night’s game — and the past 15 years — have taught us anything, it’s that the next squad that squares off against New England with the Lombardi Trophy on the line will likely make the same silly mistakes.