ARAB TIMES, TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2017
SPORTS
42
Stunning rally raises question: How do Pats rank in history?
Brady stands alone after Super Bowl epic
HOUSTON, Feb 6, (Agencies): With
four Super Bowl victories in his previous six appearances, Tom Brady had
already carved himself onto the Mount
Rushmore of quarterback icons.
But after inspiring the New England Patriots to the greatest comeback
in Super Bowl history, the 39-year-old
earned a monument all to himself.
Brady’s fifth Super Bowl win on
Sunday wiped away any lingering
doubt that the veteran deserves to be regarded as the best quarterback the sport
has seen.
The
pulsating
victory took Brady
one clear of his
childhood idol, Joe
Montana, and Terry
Bradshaw of the
Pittsburgh Steelers,
who both won four
Super Bowls.
Yet it was the
manner of Brady’s
fifth Super Bowl
triumph, as much
Montana
as the statistical
milestone of a fifth ring, that confirmed
his place at the head of the quarterback
pantheon.
Down 28-3 in the third quarter, Brady
and the Patriots looked dead and buried.
A bruising first half had seen Brady
get roughed up relentlessly by Atlanta’s
FOOTBALL
aggressive pass rush. He was sacked
five times in the game, and hit many
times more.
“There was a lot shit tonight. And I
got hit pretty hard,” Brady told journalists later as he tried to recall the details
of his game.
But, like many other times in his
career, Brady’s sheer will carried him
through what had been a brutal ordeal,
until he could sense the tide turning in
his team’s favor.
“He was motivating us the whole
game, even when we were down,” Patriots running back James White confided to reporters afterwards.
“He just willed us to another victory,” said White, who scored three
touchdowns.
Patrick Chung, the Patriots’s outspoken safety, said Brady’s performance
had ended the debate about his standing
among the best quarterbacks.
“He just proved to you guys that he
is the greatest, period,” Chung said. “So
all of you haters need to shut up and just
own up to it that he is the greatest. We
all saw that today.”
Wide receiver Chris Hogan said
Brady had refused to concede defeat
even as the Falcons romped into a
Atlanta Falcons’ Julio Jones (11) makes a catch against New England Patriots’ Eric Rowe (25) during the second half of the NFL Super Bowl 51 football
game on Feb 5, in Houston. (AP)
SB lures rush hour crowd as NFL seeks China TD
BEIJING/LOS ANGELES, Feb 6,
(RTRS): As millions around the
world settled into couches and
tuned into the Super Bowl on bigscreen TVs on Sunday, fans in
China watched the New England
Patriots stun the Atlanta Falcons
on mobile phones and tablets — on
their way to work.
The National Football League
is looking to score with viewers in
China, where games often start during morning rush hour, via a push
online. For the first time, the Super
Bowl streamed live on popular messaging platform Sina Weibo.
The stakes are high for the
league’s bid to tap the enormous potential of China’s 1.4 billion people.
US sports leagues and media
companies are increasingly looking
to China’s market for growth. World
Wrestling Entertainment, for example, is training Chinese athletes in
hopes of turning them into television
sensations.
As the Patriots mounted a stirring
comeback against the Falcons, a
major hurdle was that the Sunday
afternoon US kickoff was at 7:30 on
Monday morning in China, 14 hours
ahead of game time at NRG Sta-
dium in Houston, Texas.
“I watched the first half when
stuck in a traffic jam,” one viewer
wrote in the Weibo livestream forum. “For the second half, I had to
be careful not to be caught by my
boss at work.”
Just over 3 million people tuned
into the livestream to watch the
game, according to a viewer count
on the site. Other watched via platforms like Tencent and LeSports.
China’s interest in football, however, remains a challenge. The
sport is still new to China, and the
NFL is pushing tie-ups with more
than a dozen platforms on regular
television and online to reach viewers, even at rush hour, NFL China
managing director Richard Young
told Reuters in recent interviews.
“They watch (the games), they
pause them. They get on and off the
bus and on and off the taxi,” Young
said.
The NFL wants to build enthusiasm in China and other overseas
markets after a season in which US
television viewership dropped 8 percent, according to Nielsen data, to
a weekly average audience of 16.5
million.
25-point lead.
“The entire time, there wasn’t a moment where he looked like he knew this
thing was over,” Hogan said.
Brady, who finished the game with
466 passing yards, a new record for the
Super Bowl, has long maintained that
he is not interested in the glory of his
standing in the game.
“I don’t think anything about, you
know, personal legacy,” he said in the
build-up to Sunday’s finale.
“I never thought I’d play professional
football. Didn’t think I’d play any professional sports.”
Brady shied away from suggestions
that he had carried the team, hailing the
Patriots’s mentality and tight-knit locker-room bond.
“We all brought each other back,”
Brady remarked.
“We’re in the locker room with each
other every day and we know what
we’re all about. That’s what it comes
down to.”
Head coach Bill Belichick, who
picked Brady in the sixth round of the
2000 draft, declined to be drawn into
ranking the quarterback’s performance,
emphasizing victory had been a team
effort.
“Tom has had a lot of great ones; tonight was one of them,” Belichick said.
“There were a lot of great players playing out there tonight.”
But for Danny Amendola, the longserving Patriots receiver, there was only
one verdict.
“He was the same as he always is,
cool, calm and collected,” Amendola
said of Brady’s second-half display.
“He’s the leader, the general, the best
ever and that is the end of the story.”
The Patriots have the biggest comeback in Super Bowl history. Cue the
debate on whether it translates into the
greatest dynasty in the NFL, and maybe
where New England ranks among dominant pro sports franchises.
Perhaps the discussion hinges on the
record-setting duo of quarterback Tom
Brady and coach Bill Belichick.
There are some numbers that aren’t
debatable, like most Super Bowl appearances for a team (nine) and a
quarterback (seven). Brady’s five wins
put him one ahead of Hall of Famers
Bradshaw and Montana for the most by
a quarterback, and Belichick’s five are
one better than Bradshaw’s coach in
Pittsburgh, Chuck Noll.
Bradshaw and Montana never had
a Super Bowl rally that even remotely
resembled the 25-point recovery engineered by Brady in a 34-28 win over
Atlanta on Sunday night in the first Super Bowl to go to overtime.
“We’ve got the greatest quarterback,”
defensive lineman Trey Flowers said.
“Calm, cool, collective and just make
plays. That’s what he’s been doing all
his career.”
Green Bay won the first two Super
Bowls with Bart Starr and has four titles. Bradshaw’s Steelers became the
team of the 1970s, with Roger Staubach and the Dallas Cowboys not far
behind. Montana’s 49ers dominated
the ‘80s.
Troy Aikman helped the Cowboys
become the first team to win three titles in four seasons in the 1990s — and
Brady matched him a decade later.
Starr, Bradshaw, Staubach (they
called him Captain Comeback), Montana, Aikman.