Super Bowl 2025: Eagles defense puts kibosh on three-peat for Patrick Mahomes and Kansas City

NEW ORLEANS — Three-peat? There was a time when it looked as if Kansas City wouldn’t score three points.

That was mostly because of a swarming Eagles defense that turned Patrick Mahomes into something we’ve rarely seen him be on Super Bowl stages: Rattled, miserable and lost.

The Eagles pressured him up the middle and from the edges all game long, mostly with a four-man rush and few blitzes. The result was a dominant 40-22 victory for Philadelphia in Super Bowl LIX at Caesars Superdome on Sunday night.

Mahomes came into the game amid talk of supplanting Tom Brady as the greatest quarterback of all time. He still has a chance to do that, as he will turn 30 in September, but his coronation turned into a complete collapse at the hands of Philadelphia.

Mahomes was sacked six times, threw two interceptions and lost a fumble. “We were on him right away,” All-Pro linebacker Zack Baun said. “We were just trying to stay locked in.”

Mahomes was 8-0 against defenses run by the Eagles’ first-year coordinator, Vic Fangio. “He’s won the chess match against me, the final score,” Fangio said last week. “We’ll see if we can come up with something.”

Checkmate.

Consider the remarkable string of plays the Eagles’ defense churned out in the final 8:38 of the second quarter. One three-play series featured a sack by Josh Sweat, a sack by Jalyx Hunt and an interception by Cooper DeJean that he returned for a 38-yard touchdown. “That was cool,” said the rookie, who turned 22 on Sunday.

When Kansas City got the ball back, the Eagles stuffed two run attempts by Isiah Pacheco and Milton Williams sacked Mahomes to force a punt.

In a span of just under four minutes of playing time, Kansas City ran six offensive plays, lost 14 net yards and allowed a defensive touchdown that gave the Eagles a 17-0 lead.

And they weren’t finished yet.

After the Eagles were forced to punt with 1:49 left in the half, Mahomes attempted a pass from deep in his own territory that was picked off by Baun. Mahomes had one career interception in the first halves of all of his previous postseason games combined. On Sunday, he had two.

The Eagles turned that one into a touchdown two plays later when Jalen Hurts hit A.J. Brown with an 11-yard scoring pass.

Still want more?  Mahomes hit Hollywood Brown for a gain of 9 on second-and-20, KC’s only play of more than 5 yards in the second quarter, but on the next snap, a wide-open DeAndre Hopkins dropped a pass that would have been a first down.

Sweat, who accumulated a career-high 2.5 sacks in his final game before free agency, said it is fun when a defense plays like that and added, “I was just running around like, ‘Dang, they’re letting me go crazy!’ ”

The result was a shockingly bad 23 net yards of offense for Kansas City and a 24-0 deficit at halftime. This was the only time since 2000 that a team had fewer yards than its opponent had points at halftime of a postseason game. Kansas City never got beyond its own 40 in the first half. Those 23 yards at halftime were the fewest in any Kansas City game Mahomes has started in his career.

Mahomes threw three touchdown passes and completed 21 of 32 passes for 257 yards, but Kansas City didn’t score its first points until the next-to-last play of the third quarter. Mahomes found Xavier Worthy for a 23-yard touchdown, but the two-point pass attempt was incomplete, leaving the score 34-6.

The final stomp was a strip-sack by Williams that he recovered at the Kansas City 33 with 9:42 left in the game. That set up a field goal for a 40-6 lead.

“Credit to the Eagles, man, they played better than us from start to finish,” Mahomes said. “I just didn’t play to my standard and I have to be better the next time.”

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.