3rd & 10: Super Bowl XLVIII by the Numbers

I know that Seattle fans are obviously leaping up and down because their team is clearly the best in the league.
Forgive me for my lack of excitement.

I won’t do boring recap of what happened. Instead let’s take a look at the numbers of Super Bowl XLVIII.

ZERO

The number of players on the Seahawks who had previously been a Super Bowl.

The amount of points that the Seahawks scored on the Broncos first play. That failed snap that soared past Peyton’s face sealed the Bronco’s fate. Peyton Manning was rattled and never seemed to recover.

EIGHT:

The amount of points that the Broncos managed to score. Something that no one could ever predict. Who would have thought the team with the most points scored, with the MVP and offensive player of the year would score only 8 points? Turns out that “defenses win championships” saying is a hundred percent accurate.

The Seahawks blitzed on just six of Peyton Manning‘s 51 dropbacks.

Peyton Manning scrambled and danced and never got anything going. He was under so much pressure that he never got the chance to have anything develop down field.

EIGHTY-SEVEN:

This number means two things. It was the moment you knew that the Broncos were not coming back and it proved the worth of Percy Harvin. It was the beginning of the third quarter and Prater kicked short, Harvin grabbed the ball, cut right, ran upfield and ran right through the middle of the Broncos. It brought the score to 29-0. It also validated the expense of a player that only played 19 snaps the entire season.

The transportation to and from Metlife was expected to be a problem. However, how bad it ended up being was completely unexpected. It was expected that around 15,000 would take the train from Secaucus to the Meadowlands.Instead around 27,000 people took the train. This meant that 90 minutes after the game ended there were still 14,000 people waiting for the train. Imagine being a Broncos fan seeing that game AND waiting over 90 minutes to be squished into a sauna like sardine container.