Super Bowl 49: Ranking the most dramatic finishes

There have been 15 amazing Super Bowl finishes, and we rank each of them. 

There have been 48 Super Bowl games played to date. And 15 of them have made us sweat, cry and caused our hearts to pump faster than we thought possible. For some of us it gave us gray hair, or left us with little at all.

That ratio is a little shy of one-third, or 33 percent. It is not a great ratio, considering the Super Bowl is supposed to match the two best teams in football. You’d expect for much more than 33 percent of such games to result in a memorable and exciting contest, especially given the hoopla the event gets nowadays.

But those 15 games…each one was fantastic! They mostly made up for the 33 dull Super Bowls some of us have had to sit through. Almost. Of course, there is a need to rank these games, as not all 15 were created equal. Even among the best games, a few stand out above the others.

Final score was important, but as the rankings will show, preference was given to games which were decided on literally the last play, or at least penultimate play. After all this is a list of the best finishes. Of course many of these games had amazing finishes, but required a kneel down at the end of the game. Basically, to qualify for this list, a  game had to be decided within the final five minutes of the game (none of them were decided before four minutes).

Next: No. 15 was a fun Super Bowl game overall