The Spurs vs Knicks Collapse That Took Us Back to Super Bowl LI And Tom Brady

When the San Antonio Spurs threw away a 29-point lead against the New York Knicks in Game 4, the conversation immediately turned to the last time something this painful happened on the biggest stage. And that takes us all the way back to Super Bowl LI, where the Atlanta Falcons did the unthinkable against Tom Brady and the New England Patriots.

Nobody in NFL history had ever blown a 25-point lead in a Super Bowl. Nobody even came close. Yet on February 5, 2017, Atlanta let the Patriots rip off 31 unanswered points to win 34-28 in overtime.

Atlanta was dominant for most of Super Bowl LI. The Patriots were unable to fashion a touchdown in the first half, punting three times and committing two turnovers, including a pick-six, when cornerback Robert Alford returned an interception into New England's end zone. New England tacked on a field goal before halftime to make it 21-3, and Atlanta's second drive after the break ended with a six-yard touchdown by running back Tevin Coleman to push it to 28-3. The game looked completely over.

With 21 minutes to go, the Falcons had a 99.8 percent chance of claiming their first Super Bowl. Then everything unravelled in the most avoidable way possible.

The conventional thinking was to run the ball three times and kick a field goal to make it a 10-point lead. The Patriots would have used all three of their timeouts, making a comeback down 10 without any timeouts extremely difficult. The Falcons did run it on first down but lost a yard. Then the wheels came off. They tried to throw on second down and Matt Ryan was sacked for a loss of 12. After a hold was called on third down, Ryan threw incomplete from the 45 and they had to punt up 8 with 3:38 left.

That sequence handed Brady the opening he needed. James White ran two yards for a touchdown on the first possession of overtime, completing a comeback from 25 points down for a 34-28 Patriots win, the first Super Bowl to ever go to overtime.

Ryan later reflected honestly on the clock management breakdown. "Kyle's play calls, he would take time to get stuff in," Ryan said. "As I was getting it, you're looking at the clock and you're talking 16 seconds before it cuts out. You don't have a lot of time to say, there's 16 seconds, no, no, no, we're not going to do that."

Neither Ryan nor head coach Dan Quinn hid from what happened. Quinn admitted openly that he should have stepped in and overridden the play calls late in the fourth quarter, something he said he would learn from going forward.

Quinn talked about the difficulty of losing after building such a commanding lead. "There's never going to be a way to get over the loss, but what it does have is, some of that toughness that you have to go through, it does make you stronger," Quinn said.

Ryan, meanwhile, spent weeks trying to process it. He watched the game film, and Falcons coach Dan Quinn later asked him to watch it one more time. "The third time was to just flush it out of the system," Ryan said. "That helped. It was advice I got from people I was close to, to try and embrace it and deal with it as quickly as possible and start to move on. But it did take a little longer to get over because we were so close."

The Falcons never made it back to a Super Bowl after that night. The score 28-3 became shorthand for collapse, a cultural punchline that followed Atlanta football for years. The Falcons had squandered a 25-point lead in the second half and lost in overtime to Tom Brady and the New England Patriots, a reality that began sinking in the moment the offseason workouts started.

The Falcons' young, speed-based defense was on the field for the equivalent of a game and a half, against the greatest quarterback of all time, which is what many point to as the root cause of the biggest collapse in Super Bowl history. But the clock management failure in the fourth quarter is what sealed it. When you have a chance to run out the clock and you don't, against Bill Belichick and Tom Brady, you pay for it. Atlanta paid the ultimate price.