In Super Bowl LV, Tom Brady will be facing the man whose stifling defense deprived the New England Patriots of their shot at a perfect season and sent Brady to his first Super Bowl loss.

Steve Spagnuolo, now the Kansas City Chiefs’ defensive coordinator, held the same position with the New York Giants for Super Bowl XLII, when his aggressive game plan frustrated Brady and the Patriots, who came into the game with the highest-scoring offense in NFL history.

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Kansas City Chiefs defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo during a news conference at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Mo., last month. AP file photo

“I’ve been around Tom numerous times, and I’ve never brought up a Super Bowl or our games versus them,” Eli Manning, whose Giants twice won Super Bowls against Brady and the Patriots, told the New York Post last year. “He actually brings it up. It still bothers him a little bit, especially the ’07 one when they had the chance to go down as the greatest team of all time.”

Brady confirmed that Monday. “That game,” he admitted, “is one of my least favorite football memories.”

In the game, the Giants’ defense brought Brady to the ground five times in a 17-14 stunner, stopping an offense that had averaged 36.8 points and a Brady-Randy Moss connection that produced 23 touchdowns during the regular season. But a Patriots-Giants meeting in Week 17, a 38-35 victory by New England, taught the Giants something.

“We were walking off of the field after the game, and it was Justin Tuck, as we walked through the end zone of Giants Stadium, he said, ‘Coach, if we get the chance to play those guys again, let’s just line up our top four guys and let us get after Brady,’ ” Spagnuolo said during a 2015 Philadelphia radio interview.

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“In other words, they were convinced at that point, because it was a real close game, even though the score was very high, both teams played pretty good, they just felt like they had a lot of confidence and they could move that offensive line and put some pressure on Brady,” continued Spagnuolo, who was Andy Reid’s linebackers coach when the Patriots beat the Eagles in Super Bowl XXXIX as well as Reid’s defensive coordinator with the Chiefs since 2019. “And that helped going forward a month later when we played them in the Super Bowl.”

The Giants’ road to the Super Bowl that year began in Tampa, and Spagnuolo recalled it as “one of the scariest games in that run for me. … It was really hot. We played the Patriots the week before. We had a couple guys get injured. We had already clinched. Most teams, to Coach (Tom) Coughlin’s credit, we went after that game to win it, and we lost a couple guys in the process. And the heat down there I thought would really get to us. But our guys, they rose up to win that game.”

The Giants went on to beat the Cowboys and Packers on the road.

“Dallas during the season had beat us twice,” Spagnuolo said. “Green Bay had beaten us earlier in the year, and the Patriots had beaten us in the last game of the season. So I guess sometimes you learn a lot more from defeat and adversity than you do from winning. Certainly our guys took all the knowledge from playing those teams.”

In the Super Bowl, Brady was repeatedly subjected to the thing that he hates most — being made uncomfortable in the pocket. Moss caught five passes for only 62 yards and one touchdown, with Brady relegated to finding Wes Welker on short passes for 103 yards. The Giants caught a big break with David Tyree’s helmet catch and scored 14 points in the fourth quarter while the defense followed a simple formula.

“Jessie Armstead teases me about this, but at one point during the week I said, ‘Look, it doesn’t matter whether we stop (Brady) from throwing it or not; let’s just make sure that we hit him,’ ” Spagnuolo told “Good Morning Football” in 2018. “He told me this later, he said, ‘That doesn’t sound right.’ He said, ‘Coach, I’m not so sure that I was on board with that.’ But our guys bought into it and we hoped — the hope was that we could frustrate him a little bit. That was the first thing. . . .

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“The second thing was, let’s not give up passes over 20 yards. I mean everyone talks about explosive plays, right? And the guys did that, too; I think they had one catch for 19 and two each for 18 yards.”

In 2008, Spagnuolo left the Giants for a stint as the St. Louis Rams’ head coach. Fired after the 2011 season, he had several assistant stops around the league before a reunion with Reid in Kansas City. No doubt he remembers Super Bowl XLII as well as Brady does, and all Tampa Bay coaches have to do to be reminded of Brady’s Kryptonite is to talk to pass rusher Jason Pierre-Paul. He was a member of the Giants team that beat Brady in Super Bowl XLVI and now plays for the Buccaneers. In a 2012 interview before that Super Bowl, Pierre-Paul spoke of a regular season game in which the Giants rattled Brady.

“If you give him time in the pocket to pick on your secondary and throw the ball, he is going to hurt you,” he said. “Us, as a D-line, we know that the pressure is mostly going to be on us. If we don’t rush, then he has all day to throw the ball. Everybody knows that.”

Just as a regular season matchup was a big deal back then, the same is true now. In Week 12, the Chiefs held on for a 27-24 win over the Buccaneers, with Patrick Mahomes passing for 462 yards and three touchdowns and Brady throwing for 345 yards and three touchdowns with two interceptions.

“Spags runs a great scheme and I think he really caters to the strength of his players,” Brady said Monday. “I think his scheme has evolved and I’ve played him several times over the last 13, 14 years. He’s a tremendous coach and everybody seems to love to play for him. It’s a tough game. I know he’ll have those guys ready.”


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