Patriots legend: Bill Belichick’s meticulous foresight led to historic comeback in 28-3 Super Bowl

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Patriots legend: Bill Belichick’s meticulous foresight led to historic comeback in 28-3 Super Bowl

Chris Mason · MassLive

Fri, Jan 9, 2026 ·

2 min read

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Playoff experience is helpful, but according to Devin McCourty , it isn’t the only thing that aids teams when the calendar hits January.

To illustrate this, the former Patriots safety shared a Bill Belichick Super Bowl story on WEEI’s Greg Hill Show Friday morning.

As the Patriots went into halftime of Super Bowl LI, they trailed the Atlanta Falcons 21-3 after a disastrous first half. However, New England didn’t panic, and not just because a good chunk of the team had won Super Bowl XLIX two years earlier.

Belichick made sure everybody on the roster practiced for this moment. Not just for the Super Bowl — for Super Bowl halftime.

“That Super Bowl was won by our head coach coming in there and saying, ‘Halftime is different. We’re going to practice halftime,’” McCourty said. “We literally went on the field and we did halftime in practice.”

Leading up to the Super Bowl, Belichick stopped practice halfway through and players went with positional groups and simulated the game’s longer-than-usual halftime. They assessed what had gone well at practice and what needed to be improved.

“We took a good 20 to 25 minutes to practice halftime,” McCourty said. “So when we got in that game, everybody, whether you’d played in a Super Bowl before or not, you were like, ‘Man, I remember when we practiced this,’ and you went straight into your halftime routine and what you needed to do.”

McCourty believes that wound up being the catalyst to New England’s second half comeback.

“I think without actually practicing halftime and guys knowing, we would have went into that locker room and would have been just defeated — which Atlanta did," McCourty said. “They went in the locker room and they just celebrated like they won because they were so stuck in the moment.”

Ultimately, it was the Patriots who celebrated, erasing a 28-3 deficit to win in overtime, 34-28.

So while Drake Maye is set to make his playoff debut on Sunday Night Football, there are certainly ways coach Mike Vrabel can help to prepare him. Just ask McCourty.

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