Key takeaways
- Super Bowl LX recap in one line: Seattle 29, New England 13. The Seahawks led 12-0 going into the fourth quarter and never gave the lead up. Every New England point came after the game was effectively decided.
- Kenneth Walker III is the MVP. 27 carries, 135 yards, and the first running back to win the award since Terrell Davis after the 1997 season.
- Jason Myers set a Super Bowl record with five field goals. A kicker was the leading scorer in the biggest game of the year, which tells you everything about how it was played.
- New England now owns two records it did not want. Most Super Bowl appearances (12) and most Super Bowl losses (6).
- The 2026 NFL Honors landed too: Matthew Stafford is MVP at 37, Myles Garrett broke the single-season sack record, and Mike Vrabel is Coach of the Year.
Here is your Super Bowl LX recap, and the short version is that Seattle won 29-13 at Levi's Stadium on February 8 in a game that was never as close as a 16-point margin makes it sound. The Seahawks led 12-0 into the fourth quarter. New England scored 13 points, all of them in the last fifteen minutes, most of them after the outcome had stopped being in doubt.
The quarter-by-quarter is almost funny: Seattle 3, 6, 3, 17. New England 0, 0, 0, 13. Three full quarters of the Patriots not putting a single point on the board in a Super Bowl.
It was a defensive game, then a Seattle running game, then a scoreboard that finally caught up to how lopsided it had been all night. Let's go through it.
Super Bowl LX recap: how Seattle controlled the whole night
Three quarters, twelve points, and a game that felt completely under control anyway. That is a strange combination, and it happened because New England could not do anything on offense.
Seattle sacked Drake Maye six times. Six. Against a quarterback who spent the season as one of the best stories in football and finished as the runner-up for league MVP. The Seahawks spent the night in his lap, and a New England offense that had gotten through three playoff games on efficiency and discipline simply stopped functioning.
Sam Darnold threw for 202 yards and a touchdown. That is not a highlight-reel line and it did not need to be. Seattle's plan clearly was not to win a throwing contest — it was to hand the ball off, force New England into obvious passing downs, and let the pass rush do the rest.
You do not need to score thirty points to bury a team. You need to make sure they cannot score any, and then you need to be patient enough to take three points a dozen times without getting bored.
Jason Myers kicked five field goals, a Super Bowl record. There is a version of this game where that stat is a warning sign about a stalling offense. This was not that version. Seattle kept moving the ball, kept flipping the field, and kept adding points while New England put up nothing for three quarters. Then the fourth quarter arrived, Seattle scored 17, and the game was over before the Patriots' 13 meant anything.
Kenneth Walker III, Super Bowl MVP
Twenty-seven carries. One hundred thirty-five yards. And the first running back to win Super Bowl MVP since Terrell Davis after the 1997 season.
Sit with that gap for a second. Nearly three decades of Super Bowls decided by quarterbacks, receivers and the occasional defensive player, and then a game gets won by a back carrying it 27 times. Twenty-seven carries in a modern Super Bowl is a philosophical statement.
The number that matters is not the yardage, it is the volume. Twenty-seven carries means Seattle was ahead, comfortable, and willing to make New England burn clock chasing them. It means the game plan worked from the opening drive. Nobody hands a back 27 carries in a Super Bowl unless the script is going exactly how they drew it.
It also means New England's defense — the unit that allowed three points to the Chargers, 16 to Houston and seven to Denver on the way here, as we laid out in the conference championship preview — got worn down by the most old-fashioned method available.
New England's night in the record book
The Patriots leave Santa Clara holding two league records, and neither one is the kind you frame.
- Most Super Bowl appearances: 12. No franchise has been here more often. That is a genuine dynasty-scale achievement across multiple eras and it should not get lost in a bad night.
- Most Super Bowl losses: 6. The unavoidable other side of the same coin. Show up twelve times and you will lose some.
The context makes it sting less than it might. New England went 14-3 in Mike Vrabel's first season on the job after finishing ten games worse the year before. They won a wild card game, a divisional game, and a 10-7 conference championship in Denver. Getting to the Super Bowl was not the plan in August. It was barely a fantasy.
Drake Maye got sacked six times and it ended his season badly. He also finished as the fantasy QB2 and the MVP runner-up in his breakout year. Both things are true, and only one of them is a problem you fix in an offseason.
The 2026 NFL Honors, in full
The 2026 NFL Honors were handed out in the run-up to the game, and one of them is genuinely historic.
- MVP: Matthew Stafford, QB, LA Rams. The first MVP at 37 years old, in his 17th season, after leading the league in passing yards (4,707) and touchdown passes (46). Drake Maye was the runner-up. Stafford's season also included being the fantasy QB1 from Week 4 onward as a late-round draft pick, which we covered in the fantasy awards.
- Offensive Player of the Year: Jaxon Smith-Njigba, WR, Seattle. An NFL-best 1,793 receiving yards and 10 touchdowns, plus first-team All-Pro. He now has the OPOY and a ring in the same week.
- Defensive Player of the Year: Myles Garrett, DE, Cleveland. 23.0 sacks, which broke the official single-season record, along with 33 tackles for loss.
- Offensive Rookie of the Year: Tetairoa McMillan, WR, Carolina. 70 catches, 1,014 yards, 7 touchdowns for a team that won a division at 8-9.
- Defensive Rookie of the Year: Carson Schwesinger, LB, Cleveland. 146 tackles, 11 tackles for loss, 2 interceptions.
- Coach of the Year: Mike Vrabel, New England. The 14-3 finish and a ten-game improvement that ties the NFL record.
- Comeback Player of the Year: Christian McCaffrey, RB, San Francisco. 2,126 scrimmage yards, 17 total touchdowns, all 19 games played.
- Assistant Coach of the Year: Josh McDaniels, OC, New England. Maye completed 72% of his throws with a 77.1 QBR.
The best oddity of the night: Garrett and Schwesinger swept the defensive honors for a 5-12 team. Cleveland finished last in the AFC North and produced both the Defensive Player of the Year and the Defensive Rookie of the Year. Football is not a fair sport and this is the cleanest evidence of it all season.
The Stafford footnote worth keeping: he led the NFL in passing yards and touchdowns, won MVP at 37, and his season ended with a four-point loss in Seattle in the NFC Championship. The best individual season in the league does not come with a guarantee attached.
The pick'em angle: what this season did to pools
Close the book on 2025 and the theme is consistent from Week 1 through the Super Bowl: favorites were not safe, ever.
Survivor pools were carnage all year. Thanksgiving wiped out 94.5% of the remaining Circa Survivor field in a single slate. Week 14 took out another 62% and left ten entries alive. Both 3-seeds lost at home in the wild card round. The AFC's top seed lost at home in the conference championship while scoring seven points. And then the Super Bowl, the most analyzed single game on the calendar, was a 12-0 game through three quarters.
If you want one operating principle out of this season, it is that the scoring environment changed and most pools did not adjust. No quarterback averaged 23 fantasy points per game, the first time in five years. Games landed in the teens and twenties. In that league, an eight-point favorite is not a formality, and a survivor pick built on "they are just better" is a coin flip with extra steps.
The people who did well in pick'em pools this year were the ones who stopped assuming the good team wins by two scores. Go look at how your own pool's results actually broke down on the leaderboard — in a year this flat, the winners are usually the entries that took the points more often than felt comfortable.
What carries into 2026
Seattle has its second Lombardi Trophy and its first since Super Bowl XLVIII, won with a run game, a pass rush and a kicker having the best night of his life. New England has a first-year coach, a 14-3 season, an MVP runner-up at quarterback and a very short offseason to figure out how to protect him better.
The offseason starts now, and this one has a lot of moving parts: ten head coaching changes already worked through, a draft class to sort out, and a league that just spent seventeen weeks proving nobody is as far ahead as their record suggests. We will be back on it before the schedule drops. Enjoy the quiet — there is not much of it.