SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Stop me if you’ve heard me say this before, especially about the Super Bowl: the winning team will have the offensive line that plays the best in the game.
For Super Bowl LX between the Patriots and Seahawks, it will likely come down to one aspect of offensive line play: how each side handles the stunts or “games” from the opposing defense, and the head coaches know it.
“It will be a huge factor in the game,” Mike Vrabel said Thursday.
“It’s going to be a pretty big driving force behind how you affect the quarterback this game,” said Mike Macdonald, later in the day. “That’ll be interesting.”
Leading into the Chargers’ playoff game, we laid out how much the Patriots love to stunt, especially on third downs (61%), because the Chargers’ offensive line was terrible at defending against them, and that played out in the wild-card round.
Well, the Seahawks are more stunt-crazy than the Patriots. The Seahawks rank second in stunt frequency (35.7%), and the Patriots rank fifth (32.9%) out of 32 NFL teams during the 2025 regular season.
What is a stunt? It’s basically just two defensive linemen exchanging gap responsibilities designed to confuse offensive linemen. The two most common types of stunts are: End/Tackle (ET) stunts and Tackle/End (TE) stunts. The Seahawks and Patriots have different flavors of stunts — Seattle is more traditional, and it’s often on the fly, not pre-determined; New England is well-coordinated and, at times, involves the linebackers, as the great Greg Cosell lays out here:
Both the Patriots and Seahawks are incredibly good at stunting. Both teams get pressure on the QB about four out of every 10 stunts they run in the game.
Seattle Seahawks
Total QB Pressures: 280
Pressures from Stunts: 119
Percentage from Stunts: 42.50%
New England Patriots
Total QB Pressures: 218
Pressures from Stunts: 89
Percentage from Stunts: 40.83%
“They’re pretty good at it. Not pretty good, they are really good at it,” Vrabel said of the Seahawks. “That’s a strength of what they do. That’s how they are able to apply pressure with a four-man rush, is they can straight rush and guys work off of each other, but then guys work well together to get somebody else free or even be the guy that gets free. They pick, they drive to the quarterback and they make it difficult on you. So, that will be a huge factor in the game, our ability to protect those in passing downs and passing situations, and not let the guy get to the back hip of the lineman, and then be able to drive, and then you create a two-on-one.”
Several players on each team generated over half their pressure from stunts.
Patriots: LB Robert Spillane (66.67%), DT Milton Williams (58.62%), DE Harold Landry (58.06%), DE Elijah Ponder (58.33%)
