New England Patriots Win Super Bowl LIII

The New England Patriots won Super Bowl LIII, earning a 13-3 victory after scoring 10 points in the final quarter of the game.

For most of the night, the discourse around the Super Bowl was how slow it was, with punts playing a bigger role than any other kind of play throughout the game. Through three quarters, the game was tied at 3.

This marks the sixth Super Bowl victory for the Patriots franchise, tying them with the Pittsburgh Steelers for the most ever. Of those six, superstar quarterback Tom Brady has quarterbacked all six, giving him enough Super Bowl wins in his career that it will be borderline impossible for another player to break his record anytime soon.

In addition, head coach Bill Belichick is now the oldest coach ever to win a Super Bowl, supplanting Tom Coughlin, who beat the Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI.

As far as the game’s nerd cred goes? Famed New England Patriots fan Chris Evans (Avengers: Endgame) will be pretty happy, although Arrow star Stephen Amell, who trekked down to Atlanta to root for the Los Angeles Rams, will likely not be thrilled.

A tweet from the Patriots Twitter account tried to turn the deliberative, low-scoring game into a plus, touting the old wisdom that “defense wins championships.” That is difficult to argue. The Patriots’s offense was asleep at the wheel for much of the game’s first half, and commentators on CBS were attributing part of their win to the fact that by the end of the night, the Rams defense had been on the field so much that it was only natural their performance would start to degrade as they got tired and sore.

With a game that felt more like a soccer game than an American football game in terms of offense, fans took to replaying movie trailers for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Avengers: Endgame, Captain Marvel, and more over and over, and commenting on social media about the excitement they had for what was coming AFTER the game.

The excitement ratcheted up in the end, though, as the Patriots scored the game’s first touchdown with 8 minutes left and managed to hold onto that lead despite some aggressive offense by Los Angeles.

The tight score and relatively little offense (so, yeah, no domination by Brady) managed to keep fans invested in the game start to finish, though. That can be a challenge given how dominant the Patriots have been for so long; once they take the lead, it’s easy enough to just assume they will win and wander off.

Next year’s host city will be Miami, Florida, with Super Bowl LIV being played at Hard Rock Stadium on Sunday, February 2, 2020. The venue, with a capacity of 65,326, is home to the Miami Dolphins and Miami Hurricanes.