Tom Brady Mailbag: Who is the best player ‘the GOAT’ ever faced in the Super Bowl?

When you’ve played in 10 Super Bowls, you’ve faced off against many great players. FOX Sports’ Tom Brady can attest to that, going up against the Seattle Seahawks’ “Legion of Boom” defense in one Super Bowl and the “Greatest Show on Turf” in another. 

In the most recent edition of his Verizon mailbag, Brady was asked which opposing defensive player in his 10 Super Bowl appearances was the best. He didn’t hesitate to answer.

“This is an easy one,” Brady said. “There’s one guy late in my career who I went against who every time we played him, he was an absolute nuisance, and I didn’t get him very often. In fact, he got me a lot. He beat me a lot. 

“But in the Super Bowl in 2018 against the Rams, we faced Aaron Donald. We actually limited his ability to make a lot of plays in that game because we had a lot of double teams. Every single play — run, pass, including pass protection — was designed to keep him out of the backfield and to keep him from making limited plays.”

As Brady alluded to, the New England Patriots got the best of Donald’s Rams in Super Bowl LIII, winning 13-3. Even though the game was a defensive slugfest, Donald recorded just one solo tackle and didn’t sack Brady after recording 20.5 sacks in the regular season, which won him Defensive Player of the Year. In fact, Donald only recorded two pressures in the Super Bowl, his second-fewest amount that season, per Pro Football Focus.

So, New England’s plan to slow down Los Angeles’ defensive menace worked, even if Brady & Co. only scored 13 points in the winning effort.

“Now, he didn’t make many negative plays,” Brady said. “And at the same time, we only scored 13 points in the entire game. It was one of the hardest games and one of the biggest challenges I ever faced because he forced us to do so many things that we didn’t necessarily want to do from a game plan standpoint. And even though we limited his ability to impact the game on the stat sheet, it affected our ability to score points.”

Brady’s performance in Super Bowl LIII was arguably the worst of his 10 Super Bowl performances. He completed 21 of 35 passes for 262 yards and an interception as the Patriots didn’t find the end zone until the middle of the fourth quarter, with a 29-yard completion to Rob Gronkowski setting up a 2-yard touchdown run by Sony Michel. 

Donald was able to get his own Super Bowl title three years later, which came a few weeks after he and the Rams took down Brady’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers squad. Donald had a better showing in that divisional-round win, recording five total tackles, two tackles for loss, a sack and eight pressures.

But Brady won the game that mattered the most between the two, and he’s thankful that one side of the ball showed up in Super Bowl LIII. 

“Thank God our defense played so great or we wouldn’t have won that game.”

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