DENVER — The New England Patriots had never won a playoff game in Denver, losing in their first four tries.
Quarterback Drake Maye and head coach Mike Vrabel succeeded in their first shot at ending that postseason skid in the Mile High City, doing something even Tom Brady and Bill Belichick fell short of in three chances.
Maye handled the sloppy, snowy conditions better than the home team, and he scored New England’s only touchdown with a 6-yard run to propel the second-seeded Patriots to their 12th Super Bowl appearance with a 10-7 win over the top-seeded Denver Broncos in the AFC championship game Sunday at Empower Field at Mile High.
Maye threw for just 86 yards, but the second-year pro ran for 65 and iced the win with a 7-yard keeper on third-and-5 in the game’s waning minutes. The victory sends the franchise to the Super Bowl for the first time since the Patriots capped the 2018 season with their sixth NFL title — all of those won during the Brady and Belichick era, and three of them coming with Vrabel as a linebacker for New England.
Super Bowl LX is set for 6:30 p.m. Eastern on Feb. 8 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, and the game will be televised by NBC and streamed by Peacock. The Patriots, who are 17-3 this season counting their trio of playoff victories, will take on the Seattle Seahawks (16-3), who won the NFC championship as the No. 1 seed in that conference.
The host Seahawks beat the fifth-seeded Los Angeles Rams 31-27 later Sunday at Lumen Field to book their spot in the 60th edition of the NFL’s big game. It’s the fourth Super Bowl appearance for Seattle, and the first since the Seahawks made a second straight appearance to cap the 2014 season (and lost to the Patriots); a year before that, the Seahawks won their lone NFL title by beating the Broncos.
The 23-year-old Maye, who was the No. 3 pick of the 2024 NFL draft, is the second-youngest starting quarterback to reach the Super Bowl. Pro Football Hall of Famer Dan Marino was also 23 — but less than a month younger than Maye currently is — when he led the Miami Dolphins to Super Bowl XIX to cap the 1984 season.
“I’m just proud of this team,” Maye said. “Don’t have many words. Just thankful for this team. Love each and every one of them. It took everybody.”
Christian Gonzalez intercepted Jarrett Stidham, starting in place of an injured Bo Nix, with 2:11 remaining for New England’s second takeaway. The first set up the Patriots with a short field and led to Maye’s touchdown scamper that tied it at 7 heading into halftime.
With Nix looking on from a stadium suite after ankle surgery Tuesday in Alabama, Stidham made his first start in more than two years. His first completion since the 2023 regular-season finale was a 52-yard dart to Marvin Mims Jr. to the New England 7-yard line that set up Courtland Sutton’s 6-yard touchdown catch.
That was Stidham’s highlight as he turned the ball over twice and finished 17-of-31 passing for 133 yards with the touchdown.
“I was super excited for the opportunity,” Stidham said, “and just hate that we fell short.”
New England, which went 4-13 last year under Jerod Mayo, became the third team in the Super Bowl era to win a conference championship game with 10 points or less. The Buffalo Bills beat Denver 10-7 in the 1991 season’s AFC title game, and the Rams beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 9-0 in the 1979 NFC championship game.
Vrabel could become the first person in NFL history to also win as a head coach for the same franchise.
“I won’t win it. It’ll be the players that’ll win the game,” said Vrabel, whose first head coaching opportunity was a six-year run with the Tennessee Titans from 2018-23 that produced one trip to the AFC title game but no Super Bowl appearance. “I promise you, it won’t be me that’ll win it, and I promise you that I’ll do everything I can, and our staff, to have them ready for the game.”
The Broncos (15-4) finished one step shy of fulfilling third-year head coach Sean Payton’s preseason prediction of a trip to the Super Bowl, and he pointed the finger right at himself.
He said he regretted his call on fourth-and-1 from the New England 14 in the second quarter when a chip-shot field goal before the snow came in would have given Denver a double-digit lead. Stidham’s throw to running back R.J. Harvey was incomplete, and the Broncos’ early momentum vanished.
“There’s always regrets,” said Payton, who coached the New Orleans Saints from 2006-21 and led that franchise to its lone Super Bowl title in the 2009 season. “Yeah, I mean, look, I felt like here we are, fourth-and-1. We felt close enough … So, yeah, there’ll always be second thoughts.”
The Broncos were left clinging to a 7-0 lead that was short-lived. Elijah Ponder recovered Stidham’s backward pass at the Denver 12, setting up the tying touchdown two plays later.
“I thought I threw it forward, and obviously the replay said differently,” Stidham said. “Probably should have just eaten the sack and let (Jeremy) Crawshaw punt the ball and flip the field.”
Both kickers missed two field-goal attempts in the frigid conditions with Denver’s Wil Lutz and New England’s Andy Borregales wide on long tries just before the snow came in at halftime. Lutz’s 45-yard attempt late in the fourth quarter was tipped by Leonard Taylor III.
The Patriots’ victory was their 40th in the playoffs, breaking a tie with the San Francisco 49ers for the most in NFL history.
It was sunny at kickoff with a temperature of 26 degrees, but by halftime the snowflakes began falling and grounds crews had to use snowblowers to mark the hash marks and yard lines by the fourth quarter, when it was 16 degrees.
“It was a lot of fun out there,” Broncos cornerback Pat Surtain II said. “Snow game, for the conference, to go to the Super Bowl — it doesn’t get any better than that. I felt like I was a little kid out there just playing in the snow.”
And the Patriots had the most fun of all.
“What an atmosphere out here,” Maye said. “Battle of the elements. Love this team. How about the defense? I love each and every one of them.”
The Patriots have allowed 26 points across three playoff games this season. The only team to allow fewer points over three playoff games before a Super Bowl appearance was the 2000 Baltimore Ravens, who allowed just 16.
After gaining just 72 yards in the first half, the Patriots opened the second half in swirling snow with a 16-play, 64-yard drive that ate up 9 1/2 minutes of the game clock and ended with a 23-yard field goal by Borregales that proved the difference.
Stidham, who was drafted by the Patriots in 2019, made his first start since the 2023 regular-season finale. The Broncos were the only team in the league that didn’t give their backup quarterbacks any snaps or handoffs the past two seasons.
The Patriots have averaged 18 points per game in the playoffs, the fewest by any team to make the Super Bowl since the 1979 Rams, who averaged 15.
“I’ll take an ugly win before I take a pretty loss,” Diggs said. “Nobody’s satisfied. Happy, but not complacent. We’re blessed to be where we are, but we know there’s more out there for us.”