Super Bowl XLII: How 18-0 Ended

For eighteen games the 2007 Patriots did not lose. They ran the first 16-0 regular season in NFL history, dispatched Jacksonville and San Diego in the playoffs, and walked into Super Bowl XLII on February 3, 2008 as an 18-0 team one win from a perfect 19-0. Then, in a little over four hours, the whole thing came apart.

The team standing in the way

The New York Giants had no business being the obstacle. They’d finished 10-6, sneaked in as a Wild Card, and spent January winning three straight road games — at Tampa Bay, at Dallas, and at Green Bay in a frozen overtime that ended on a Lawrence Tynes field goal. They had already played the Patriots once, in the regular-season finale, and lost by three in the game that preserved New England’s 16-0.

What the Giants brought to Arizona was a pass rush. Osi Umenyiora, Justin Tuck, and Michael Strahan spent the night in the New England backfield, sacking Tom Brady five times and turning the most productive offense in league history into something ordinary.

A low-scoring slog

This was not the shootout the numbers predicted. The Patriots’ record-setting offense — 589 points in the regular season, 50 touchdown passes from Brady — was held to 14 points. New England led 14-10 with under three minutes to play, and the perfect season was three minutes of defense away from being complete.

It didn’t survive the drive that followed.

The play that will not die

On third-and-five with about 1:15 left, Eli Manning dropped back and was swallowed by the Patriots’ rush. Jerseys had him; the sack looked finished. He wrenched free, staggered clear of the pile, and heaved the ball downfield toward David Tyree — a role player with three catches all postseason — who leaped, got a hand on the ball, and pinned it against the top of his own helmet as he fell backward with a defender draped on him. Thirty-two yards. First down.

Four plays later Manning found Plaxico Burress alone in the end zone for a 13-yard touchdown with 35 seconds to go. Giants 17, Patriots 14. Brady got the ball back with time for one desperation heave that fell incomplete, and the perfect season was gone.

18-1

The final record — 18-1 — is one of the strangest lines in football. It contains the greatest regular season ever played and one of the most famous upsets in American sports, welded together. The Patriots had done something no team had done before or since under the 16-game schedule, and they still ended the year as the answer to a trivia question about who lost.

That gap is the entire reason a perfect season is such a fragile thing. Sixteen straight wins were not enough; even eighteen were not enough. One game undid all of it.

Why this game matters here

Super Bowl XLII is the sharpest illustration of the difference between a perfect regular season and a perfect season. The 2007 Patriots reached the first and missed the second by three points, leaving the 1972 Dolphins alone as the only team to run the entire table.

For the team that did complete it, see the 1972 Dolphins’ only perfect season. For the record New England did set, read the only 16-0 regular season, and for every other team that got within a game, see the closest teams to a perfect regular season. Then draft a roster of your own and see whether you can protect a perfect run all the way to the end.