The Eagles damned the Patriots’ final Super Bowl drive with good kickoff coverage

There are two gadget plays you probably remember from the Super Bowl. One was the now immortalized Philly Special. The other is the drop by Tom Brady on his own reception attempt.

But there was a third attempted by New England in the game, and while it was only a minor disaster in the grand scheme, it got the Pats’ final drive off to a rather inauspicious start.

With 1:05 left for all the marbles, Tom Brady and the New England Patriots’ offense sat on the sidelines ready to go. The Pats would fail on their final drive, and a final pass attempt would fall incomplete, ending New England’s back-to-back Super Bowl dreams.

Perhaps you remember the lateral that the Pats tried to pull off?

In theory, running back Rex Burkhead would sneak back behind the length of the return formation and receive a lateral from return man Dion Lewis. Lewis would get the Eagles flowing one way, and Burkhead would hit them on the back side.

Here’s the theory:

Here’s what it looked like in practice.

Kickoff coverage is about two things: where the ball is kicked, and the lanes the coverage team takes down the field. The kicker has to put the ball in the right place if he’s not going to boot it into the end zone, and the coverage team has to stay disciplined and set the edges outside to keep things funneled to the inside.

After the game, the Patriots talked about what happened from their end.

“They had great placement on that kick and made it real tough on our guys,” special teams captain Matthew Slater said. “They made it tough for us to get leverage and we didn’t handle it well. Tip your hat to them – they kept it in play and they hadn’t been doing that.”

As with everything the Patriots do, it’s about exploiting tendencies. Philadelphia kicked off nine times in the game. Six of them went for touchbacks.

Slater’s referring to this when it comes to leverage. Look at the acres of space on the backside.

Maybe New England had seen the way Philly covered kicks during the bye week and put this play in the bag of tricks just in case.

There are acres of space because the Eagles’ coverage team is keyed on Lewis returning the ball to his right. Had the Patriots sprung the trick on this earlier kick, it probably would have worked. But this might have been the play they noticed Philadelphia’s tendency to overplay a kickoff and lose its leverage.

Head coach Bill Belichick is a special teams savant, and as a man who keys on the details to create the winning edge, trying to get cute with the kickoff is a way to steal yards or even points.

This is where Burkhead lined up on every other kickoff in the game, touchback or not.

But here’s where he lined up on the lateral.

In the event that the Eagles were observant enough to notice where Burkhead was, maybe they recognized that something was afoot.

Either way, because of the play’s result, it looks like a miscalculation by the Patriots. It’s not the reason why they lost the game, but maybe they would have liked the 10 or so extra yards they probably would have gained on a regular kick return compared to the one yard they lost on this lateral.