Bedard: Vrabel and Macdonald know the Super Bowl could become a stunt-off to determine winner

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%)

Seahawks: DT Leonard Williams (64.58%), DT Byron Murphy (53.33%), DE Uchenna Nwosu (51.22%)

"It does allow you to rush less people, and try to create pressure as well. So that's one of the reasons that we do it," said Macdonald. "And I think in order to be effective about it, you can't be robots. You know, there's a lot of like, chemistry that has to happen for you. There's the timing of the stunts and like angles and things like that are really just kind of like chilled away at over the course of time, where you understand, like, how guys learn different stunts and the timing of it and then versus different protection schemes as well how guys set there's several variables going on there, but now the common denominator there is, like, how well you can do it with the with the people lined up with you, so you can kind of create that synergistic type idea."

As a result, the respective offensive line coaches have been working overtime this week.

"It's definitely a challenge," said Seahawks line coach John Benton. "And the biggest challenge, really, is that you're able to stay aggressive and physical. The tendency is to get passive and slow down. Some we've been preaching all week, we have to go, still attack the front and be ready for the stunts on the way."

"I can tell you this week, this team they do a great job in their games," said Doug Marrone. "They do a great job of coordinating and reading it and doing that, and that's something that maybe not a lot of other teams can do. Meaning that they can read stuff on the run and figure out who's going first, who's going second, you know, on some of the things that they do. Seattle is very, very coordinated on what they do with their games. They know exactly where they want to be, what they want to do, forcing the quarterback into mistakes."

The work to prepare for defensive line games can be tedious. It often involves 2-on-2 line drills, or half-line drills. But the real issue is you can't simulate the speed — or physicality — in practice. I mean, you're not going to let Christian Elliss earhole Jared Wilson during practice, or allow Harold Landry to blast Mike Onwenu in the kidney, but that's what happens in the games. And with two weeks between game speed, both offensive lines might get off to slow starts.

"We call them picks, because now that's what they're doing, is they're picking linemen to try to free up other guys, whether that's linebackers doing it or other defensive linemen," Josh McDaniels said. "I think a part of this is also married together with the mobility of the quarterbacks. Because if you just straight rush nowadays, and then you leave a gap open a lot of times, it opens it up for the QB to take off and run, you know. So we used to see more of it when people were trying to stop us from having success with screens.

"We work on (stunts) probably as much as we work on anything in pass protection, because the two linemen that are basically involved in handling the game and the pick or the stunt, they've got to stay connected, and they've got to do it really well. It's kind of like synchronized swimming. If one of them is different than the other, then you usually have a bad play. So we're going to be put to the test on Sunday. For sure. This is a violent team that will pick and stunt and game a lot, with a really talented defensive line, so much work still ahead of us the next three days."

There are drawbacks to the defensive line in stunting, and it's something the Patriots will likely look to take advantage of on Super Sunday. It can screw up run fits if you catch them stunting on a run. The Rams hit the Seahawks a few times on draws because of this. Rush lanes can get screwed up, which could allow Drake Maye to run. 

If the regular season is any indication, the Seahawks have the edge going into the game in protecting against stunts. The Seahawks offensive line ranks 5th-best in the NFL at handling stunts with a 36.36% pressure rate. The Patriots' offensive line ranks 26th (6th-worst) with a 45.07% pressure rate during the 2025 regular season

Here's how the offensive line linemen stack up in protecting against stunts, from best to worst:

Patriots
RT Morgan Moses 48.67% pressure rate
RG Michael Onwenu 49.02% pressure rate
C Garrett Bradbury 49.02% pressure rate
LT Will Campbell 49.12% pressure rate
LG Jared Wilson 50.79% pressure rate

The Falcons got Onwenu on this game to force a strip sack of Drake Maye:

Seahawks
LT Charles Cross 37.25% pressure rate
RG Anthony Bradford 38.40% pressure rate
RT Abraham Lucas 38.40% pressure rate
LG Grey Zabel 39.67% pressure rate
C Jalen Sundell 41.98% pressure rate

Note: Injured third-down back Zach Charbonneau was excellent (20%) — Rhamondre Stevenson is at 55% — and there's a huge dropoff to Kenneth Walker and the other backs. Expect the Patriots to go after them.

As it normally happens, the guys in the trenches may well decide the Super Bowl winner.

"The games are part of this, an integral part of most defensive schemes," said Moses. "They're a part of what Seattle does, and they do it in a great way where they have guys from the second level pick and incorporate them into the stunts. And so I think that's why you got to keep yourself out of third down and long

"I think it's gonna be a hell of a game. I think it's gonna be a hell of a challenge for both sides. And, you know, we got to come out there and ready to play."