Latest news with #SuperBowlXXXIX
USA Today
26-02-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
Veteran LB makes admission after watching 2004 Patriots defense
New England Patriots veteran defender Ja'Whaun Bentley has lofty goals heading into the 2025 season, and it all starts with the team improving at the linebacker position. Bentley recently shared episode 1 of '2004 – Yes, It's A Dynasty' podcast, which focuses on the team's legendary linebacker corps. It was a special group in time that featured Tedy Bruschi, Ted Johnson, Willie McGinest and current Patriots coach Mike Vrabel. Those three players played a major role in helping the Patriots finish the season with a 14-2 record that year and win Super Bowl XXXIX against the Philadelphia Eagles. Bentley referred to the group as 'legends' and admitted he wants to get back to playing at that high level with the current linebacker corps. Legends. Gettin back to this — JB (@NVBentley33) February 17, 2025 The Patriots and their fans would love it if the defense was able to return to the level of the 2004 team. They have a long way to go in that regard, but they have the assets to begin rebuilding with that goal in mind.
Los Angeles Times
10-02-2025
- Sport
- Los Angeles Times
How many Super Bowls have the Philadelphia Eagles won?
It took the Philadelphia Eagles 52 years to win their first Super Bowl. It didn't take them nearly as long to win their second, although it did take two tries. Seven years after the organization's first Super Bowl championship, the Eagles beat the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX 40-22 on Sunday at the Superdome in New Orleans. It was their second win in five Super Bowl appearances. The first two were losses — 27-10 to the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl XV following the 1980 season and 24-21 to the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XXXIX following the 2004 season. Then came Super Bowl LII following the 2017 season. The Eagles were led by quarterback Nick Foles, who was a backup at the start of the season before stepping in for the injured Carson Wentz in Week 14. Their opponents were the defending champion Patriots, who were seeking their sixth Super Bowl title behind quarterback Tom Brady and coach Bill Belichick. Brady completed 28 of 48 passes for a Super Bowl-record 505 yards and three touchdowns, but it wasn't enough. Foles was named the game's MVP after he passed for 373 yards and three touchdowns and also caught a touchdown pass as the Eagles defeated New England 41-33. The Eagles returned for Super Bowl LVII following the 2022 season, this time with Jalen Hurts as their quarterback. Hurts accounted for three touchdowns and a two-point conversion, but a last-second field goal lifted the Chiefs to a 38-35 win, with quarterback Patrick Mahomes being named MVP. Two years later, the Eagles avenged that loss to the Chiefs at Super Bowl LIX.
USA Today
09-02-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
When was the last time the Eagles won the Super Bowl?
The Philadelphia Eagles will battle the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX, a matchup that features the top seed from the AFC and the No. 2 seed in the NFC facing off for the second time in three years. The Eagles will play in their third Super Bowl in eight years and their fifth since 1981. Their previous appearance was in 2023, when they lost to Kansas City 38-35 in Super Bowl 57. Philadelphia's previous Super Bowl championship was best known for the trick play called the 'Philly Special,' where quarterback Nick Foles — in place of injured starter Carson Wentz — caught a touchdown pass on fourth and goal toward the end of the second quarter. Doug Pederson and Nick Foles' decision to go for the touchdown rather than a field goal on fourth down is considered one of the gutsiest play calls in Super Bowl history. Philadelphia's recent title came 13 years after the Eagles fell short against the New England Patriots in a 24-21 loss in Super Bowl XXXIX. Philadelphia's championship in 2018 marked their first-ever Super Bowl win. Before that, the Eagles won three NFL championships before the Super Bowl era (1948, 1949, 1960). You can stream the game via FuboTV (sign up for a free trial here).
USA Today
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Super Bowl XXXIX: Inside the numbers of Jacksonville's Super Sunday, 20 years ago
Super Bowl XXXIX: Inside the numbers of Jacksonville's Super Sunday, 20 years ago The scoreboard at Alltel Stadium read 24-21, but on the night that lifted Jacksonville into the club of Super Bowl host cities, the final score was only the beginning. Thursday marks 20 years to the day since Super Bowl XXXIX arrived in Jacksonville, bringing the New England Patriots, the Philadelphia Eagles and the eyes of much of the planet to the First Coast on Feb. 6, 2015. Here are some of the numbers to remember from Jacksonville's week in the Super Bowl spotlight. 0: Amount of food remaining at some Super Bowl XXXIX vendors by the second half. Oops. 1: Number of Super Bowls held in Jacksonville. 2: Interceptions by New England Patriots safety Rodney Harrison in Super Bowl XXXIX, one shy of the game's record. 3: Number of special park-and-ride lots opened ahead of Super Bowl festivities from Thursday through Sunday. Those lots were at Interstate 10 and Lane Avenue, Interstate 95 and Emerson Street and the Imeson Industrial Park lots along Busch Drive. 3: Number of roasted pepper types (red, yellow and green) served for the famously vegetarian Paul McCartney, in a menu prepared by Florida Community College at Jacksonville Culinary School lead instructor Joe Harrold. Also on the menu, per Times-Union archives: a salad of wild mushrooms with fresh herb balsamic dressing; creamy tofu hummus; black bean and corn salad; marinated grilled tofu steaks with a fresh tomato and red onion salsa; eggplant casserole topped off with shredded vegan cheese; brown rice and assorted baby organic vegetables; and organic fruits with a sweet soy yogurt. 4: Songs performed by Paul McCartney on the Alltel Stadium field during the halftime show. Theset list: "Drive My Car," "Get Back," "Live and Let Die" and "Hey Jude." 7: Planes used for two separate Super Bowl flyovers. The first featured vintage aircraft, a B-25 escorted by two T-6 Texans. The second wave included two F/A 22 Raptors and two F/A-18 Super Hornets. 7: Trash trucks — two measuring 13 yards in length, five 18 yards — used to clear trash, litter and general debris from the Jacksonville Landing. 7: Super Bowl championships won by Tom Brady. Super Bowl XXXIX was his third. 7: Driving distance, in miles, between Alltel Stadium and Raines High School, where Eagles defensive backs Brian Dawkins and Lito Sheppard played. 8: Hours of pregame coverage on Fox leading up to Super Bowl XXXIX, beginning at 10 a.m. 15.59: Weight, in pounds, of the seven bass caught by former Jaguars lineman Eugene Chung and Wayne Stumpe to win the VIP portion of the Super Celebration Bass Tournament in Palatka on the Saturday before the game. 34: Fox TV cameras at Alltel Stadium for the game. 35: In dollars, price of a Patriots championship cap after the game. 39: New homeowners at the HabiJax SuperBuild XXXIX dedication in Jacksonville on the Wednesday before the Super Bowl, part of the NFL home-construction program with Habitat for Humanity. 58.9: TV rating (with a 77 share) for Super Bowl XXXIX among Jacksonville viewers, the highest recorded since Nielsen Media Research added the city in 1998. That was the third-highest rating recorded to that point for any city for any Super Bowl. 101: Number of golf balls landing on the green, out of 1,650 attempts, for the 17th hole at the Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass at the Tuesday party for media and the Super Bowl XXXIX host committee. 160: NFL Alumni Association members playing the TPC Sawgrass Stadium Course on the Friday before Super Bowl XXXIX. 190: Number of Jacksonville Transportation Authority shuttle buses used on Super Bowl Sunday. 200: Concourse level at Alltel Stadium, where a plumbing overflow spewed water into malodorous puddles during the Super Bowl. Susie Wiles — then spokeswoman for Mayor John Peyton, now White House Chief of Staff in the administration of President Donald Trump — attributed the problem to a pipe failure on the stadium's west side, unrelated to the stadium's packed capacity. 308: Yards rushing for Jerome Messam of Team Canada against Team USA in the Global Junior Championship, played at the Bolles School the night before the Super Bowl. 357: Passing yards for Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb in Super Bowl XXXIX. It wasn't enough. 400: In dollars, minimum ticket price for the Taste of the NFL event at ATP headquarters in Ponte Vedra. 1,558: Jacksonville's days to prepare between Nov. 1, 2000, when NFL owners voted to award the city hosting rights for Super Bowl XXXIX, and Feb. 6, 2005, when the game kicked off. 3,667: Number of rooms in five cruise ships docked in the St. Johns River for Super Bowl XXXIX. The ships — the Seven Seas Navigator, Carnival Miracle and Holland America's Volendam, Zaandam and Zuiderdam — provided Jacksonville the necessary luxury lodging capacity of 17,500 required to hold the Super Bowl. 4,600: In dollars, maximum street price observed for Super Bowl tickets on the day of the game. 9,000: Local volunteers for Super Bowl XXXIX events. 10,000: Estimated attendance for rapper Snoop Dogg's Snooper Bowl, a charity youth football game for ages 9 to 12, at Raines High School on the Saturday before Super Bowl XXXIX. 10,000: Estimated rental cars used at Jacksonville International Airport during Super Bowl XXXIX weekend. 18,355: Career rushing yards for NFL all-time leader Emmitt Smith. Three days before the Super Bowl, the former Florida Gator announced his retirement at a press conference inside Jacksonville's Prime Osborn Convention Center. 25,000: Estimated fliers departing the airport on the Monday after the Super Bowl, more than three times the usual average. 40,000: Visitors to the St. Marys Mardi Gras in Georgia on the Saturday before Super Bowl XXXIX. 50,000: Visitors at the Jacksonville Landing on the night before Super Bowl XXXIX. 68,000: Winner's share, in dollars per player, for Super Bowl XXXIX. 78,125: Number of fans attending Super Bowl XXXIX. 2.4 million: Price, in dollars, of a 30-second commercial during Super Bowl XXXIX. 12 million: Estimated amount, in dollars, raised by the Jacksonville Super Bowl Host Committee. 86,072,000: People in the United States who watched Super Bowl XXXIX, per Nielsen statistics. In a March 2005 release, the NFL recorded millions of international viewers as well, including more than 20 million in China, 12 million in Mexico, 4 million in Japan and 2 million in the United Kingdom.
New York Times
05-02-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
Advice for Tom Brady, from previous Super Bowl TV first-timers: ‘Just chill'
Even 20 years later, Joe Buck remembers the nerves before the call of Super Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville. Buck was just 35 years old in February 2005, the youngest broadcaster ever to call the Super Bowl for the lead television rights holder. In fact, the entire Fox Sports broadcast booth that night — Buck, Troy Aikman and Cris Collinsworth — were Super Bowl broadcast rookies. Collinsworth had some experience as a Super Bowl pregame host, but this was fresh (and nerve-wracking) territory for the trio. Advertisement To quell his nerves on game day, Buck provided himself a couple of visual cues on his broadcast boards, the cheat sheets broadcasters use to list rosters, notes and stats for all of the participants. There are never many empty spaces on a broadcaster's board, but in the top-left corner where he had written the defensive starters, Buck provided some inspiration for himself. He wrote, 'F— IT.' He also added: 'Relax' and 'Have Fun.' 'It was a reminder that what I was doing was not going to change the rotation of the earth, so just enjoy it, have fun and do what you have always done,' Buck said. 'It was a visual cue to just chill and to remember that life will go back to normal within three hours.' Sunday, Tom Brady will stand alongside Kevin Burkhardt for the call of Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans, the capstone to Brady's first year in the broadcast booth. With a near-ideal matchup between the two-time champion Kansas City Chiefs and Saquon Barkley-led Philadelphia Eagles, the game has a legit chance to set a Super Bowl viewership record, surpassing last year's record audience of 123.4 million viewers that watched the Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers in overtime. Brady is the sport's greatest Super Bowl winner, but Super Bowl broadcasting is uncharted territory for him. Sunday's game will be far and away the biggest of the 21 games he has broadcast this season (44.2 million watched the NFC Championship Game he called), and there will be tens of millions of people tuning in who have never heard Brady call a game until now. Plus, the reality for broadcasters is this: The Super Bowl is generally the one game each season in which viewers remember how the broadcasters did. To get some insight into what it might be like for Brady, I spoke with Buck, Al Michaels, Boomer Esiason and longtime NFL producer Fred Gaudelli about their first Super Bowl experience, as well as the magnitude of the game for broadcasters. 'It definitely feels bigger,' said Esiason, whose first Super Bowl broadcast came in January 1990 with Al Michaels on ABC. Esiason ended up calling another 18 Super Bowls for Westwood One as the radio analyst. 'You know there are more people watching, more people listening, and everybody's going to have an opinion on what you're saying and how you're saying it,' Esiason said. 'Every Super Bowl that I did … you feel it. You know that millions of people are watching.' Advertisement Buck recalled being very nervous for the on-camera hit the group did before the New England Patriots kicked off Super Bowl XXXIX. (Of course, that is always an awkward, nervous spot for broadcasters.) 'I was nervous for that, and I still am, at 55, trying to get through it without saying something stupid and embarrassing yourself,' Buck said. 'You're on-screen with that lead-in. You can't hide. But once the on-camera was finished for my first Super Bowl, I felt pretty good. Then when the game happened, I felt even more relaxed. 'Prior to kickoff there's just so much buildup, so much hype, so much talk, and I let that little voice creep into my head that said, 'Am I going to be able to do this?'' Buck noted that, for a first-time Super Bowl broadcaster, it is 'an odd feeling to know that you're holding an instrument in your hand, in this case a microphone, and you're looking into another piece of equipment, which is a camera, and on the other end of it is over 100 million people.' 'At least for me, once the game started, it was almost a relief,' he said. Michaels was only in his second year as the lead game caller for 'Monday Night Football' when he called his first Super Bowl on Jan. 31, 1988, a three-person booth with Frank Gifford and Dan Dierdorf. There was an expectation that the Denver Broncos and Washington would produce a sizzling Super Bowl, especially given the lack of drama in some of the previous Super Bowl games. So much for that. The final score was 42-10. 'The three of us treated the lead-up to the game much as we did for every 'Monday Night Football' game,' Michaels recalled. 'In fact, we thought of our weekly 'Monday Night Football' game, especially the best matchups, as mini-Super Bowls. Obviously, this was of a different breed, but we tried not to get caught up in the hype and buildup. Once the game started, I felt very much in my comfort zone. Only when the looming blowout set in did I feel a sense of deflation.' Advertisement Brady is immortal as far as handling pressure in the biggest moments. But Buck, who has worked with Hall of Famers in multiple sports, does not necessarily believe experience with pressure as an athlete is an indicator of how it will be calling a Super Bowl. 'As a player, I would imagine once you get into the rhythm and flow of a game, it's easier than how do I put my mind and words to something where I don't know what's coming,' Buck said. 'If you're playing, you know the plays and you know what you've been practicing. There's no practice for when you're broadcasting here. You're seeing something fresh and trying to describe it for 100 million people. 'You have to quiet that voice that keeps saying in your head — don't make a mistake. This is all relatively new for Tom, so it'll be a bit intimidating. I know from talking to Troy and Cris and different guys, they said it was almost easier to play in it than it was to broadcast it.' Fred Gaudelli, the executive producer of the NFL for NBC Sports, said he would always take a walk around the Super Bowl field an hour or so before the start of the game. He did that to remind himself he had achieved a career goal. During his career, Gaudelli produced nine Super Bowls, including seven for the U.S. host TV broadcaster and two for an international audience. 'That walk calmed me down, centered me a little bit, and got me ready for what the next 3 1/2 or four hours would be like,' Gaudelli said. 'One thing I always told our sideline reporters, especially those new to the Super Bowl, was when you get to that 30 minutes before kickoff … if you're on the field, it really gets overwhelming. 'If you're not ready for it, it can really have an effect on the rest of the day.' One of the things we learned about Brady in his new role as TV talent was that he reached out to many broadcasters before the season to get insight into the profession. His Fox production team said he is very coachable. What would our group say to Brady if he reached out for advice about how to handle Super Bowl LIX? Advertisement Buck: 'My advice would be to go slow. Your mind tricks you into going faster than you need to go and trying to just spit everything out right at the top. There's two weeks of information that you've built up before this game kicks off, and that's already abnormal. It's such a cliche, but let the game come to you. The game will develop, and you'll develop along with it, but you can't spill everything in the first five minutes. You're just going to trip yourself up.' Gaudelli: 'Tom is a unicorn here because he's been to 10 of these. He's been in the game. I don't know if anything about this is going to feel all that foreign to him. I don't think he's going to be like any regular first-time broadcaster during the Super Bowl.' Esiason: 'I would tell him the same thing I would say if he were playing in his first Super Bowl — enjoy it, have fun and let people know how much you appreciate the job. People want to hear somebody that is really into it and really loves it.' Michaels: 'I think he'll feel much the way he did when he played. He'll be ready to go and can't wait for the buildup to end and for the game to start. Once he gets going, he'll settle in and get into that comfort zone. … The platform will be his biggest, but the game will take him where he needs to go as a broadcaster.' Michaels had one final bit of advice for Brady: 'Maybe in the commercial breaks, lean back once in a while and savor the moment. That's something he couldn't do as a player. It's exhilarating, so try to soak it all in.'
