Super Bowl XLII was an American football game between the National Football Conference (NFC) champion New York Giants and the American Football Conference (AFC) champion New England Patriots to decide the National Football League (NFL) champion for the 2007 season. The Giants defeated the Patriots by the score of 17–14. The game was played on February 3, 2008, at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.

The game is regarded as one of the biggest upsets in Super Bowl history. The Patriots entered the game as 12-point favorites after becoming the first team to complete the first perfect regular season since the 1972 Miami Dolphins, and the only one since the league expanded to a 16-game regular season schedule in 1978. The Giants, who finished the regular season with a 10–6 record, were seeking to become the first NFC wild card team to win a Super Bowl, and the franchise's third overall Super Bowl win. This Super Bowl was also a rematch of the final game of the regular season, in which New England won, 38–35.

The Super Bowl is the annual championship game of the National Football League (NFL), the highest level of professional American football in the United States, culminating a season that begins in the late summer of the previous calendar year. The Super Bowl uses Roman numerals to identify each game, rather than the year in which it is held. For example, Super Bowl I was played on January 15, 1967, following the 1966 regular season, while the most recent game, Super Bowl XLVI, was played on February 5, 2012, to determine the champion of the 2011 season.

The game was created as part of a merger agreement between the NFL and its then-rival league, the American Football League (AFL). It was agreed that the two leagues' champion teams would play in an AFL–NFL World Championship Game until the merger was to officially begin in 1970. After the merger, each league was redesignated as a "conference", and the game was then played between the conference champions. Currently, the NFC leads the series with 25 wins to 21 wins for the AFC.

William Stephen "Bill" Belichick (pronounced /ˈbɛlɨtʃɪk/; born April 16, 1952) is an American football head coach for the New England Patriots of the National Football League. Coaching continuously in various roles in the NFL since 1975, Belichick earned his first head coaching job with the Cleveland Browns in 1991. Following his firing in 1995, he did not serve as a head coach again until 2000 with the Patriots. Since then, Belichick has coached the Patriots to five Super Bowl appearances: victories in Super Bowls XXXVI, XXXVIII, and XXXIX, and subsequent losses in Super Bowl XLII and Super Bowl XLVI. He was named the AP NFL Coach of the Year for the 2003, 2007 and 2010 seasons. He is the NFL's second-longest tenured active head coach, behind Andy Reid.

Bill Belichick was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and raised in Annapolis, Maryland, where his father Steve Belichick was an assistant football coach at the United States Naval Academy. He graduated from Annapolis High School in 1970. While there, he played American football and lacrosse, with the latter being his favorite sport. He enrolled at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts for a postgraduate year, with the intention of improving his grades and test scores in order to be admitted into a quality college. The school would honor him forty years later by inducting him into its Athletics Hall of Honor in 2011.