by Ian O'Connor
With an assist from Romeo Crennel, his earnest defensive coordinator, Belichick had dismantled yet another offensive machine. So the Patriots headed for Houston and a date with the NFC-champion Carolina Panthers, in an attempt to make history with a 15th straight victory, while Peyton Manning headed home. It wouldn’t be the last time Belichick sent him there.
Dressed in a blue team windbreaker and not the gray Reebok hoodie he’d started wearing in November, Bill Belichick was doubled over with his hands on his knees as Adam Vinatieri was about to attempt a 41-yard field goal with eight seconds left in Super Bowl XXXVIII. The Patriots and the Panthers were locked in a 29–29 tie inside Reliant Stadium, and Belichick had everything on the line with this kick. He had already won a championship, yes, but he would become an historic figure in professional football with a second one.
He would be remembered as an all-time great with a second one.
This time around, Belichick had two weeks to prepare for the big game, one of the many reasons New England was the prohibitive favorite and the Panthers were assigned the underdog role given the 2001 Patriots. Belichick was already hailed as a chess master who knew best how to attack and contain his opponent’s most prized pieces, and his postseason experience gave him a decided edge over Carolina’s John Fox, who was in the playoffs for the first time as a head coach and who had needed only two seasons to turn George Seifert’s 1-15 Panthers into a title contender.
Life was good for Belichick on and off the field. His rocker friend, Jon Bon Jovi, had dedicated a song to him, “Bounce,” the title track of an album dedicated to the resilience of New York and the country in a post-9/11 world. (Years later, Bon Jovi would offer $50,000 at a fund-raiser for Hannah and Friends, a nonprofit for special-needs families inspired by Charlie Weis’s daughter, if Belichick and Weis would join him onstage to sing a few lines of “Wanted Dead or Alive.” They agreed, and performed as badly as advertised.) In the winter of 2004, the singer wasn’t just a sports fan anymore; he was the new owner of the Philadelphia Soul of the Arena Football League, a real football man just like his friend.
“Look,” Belichick said, “I like his music, he likes football. So that’s a good thing.” When they were together, the chemistry between them was obvious to everyone at the Patriots’ facility, from players busy practicing to others rehabbing injuries. “The only time Bill Belichick was distracted at practice was when Bon Jovi was there,” said Rosevelt Colvin. “Then he didn’t care what anyone was doing.”
Belichick hadn’t lost a game since September 28, when Washington beat New England by three points, and for that he was named NFL Coach of the Year. Belichick credited the pro’s pros on his roster for his success, and never hesitated in praising the veterans drafted in Parcells’s time, including Willie McGinest, Tedy Bruschi, and Ty Law. But he needed to use 42 starters this season—Patriots players lost 103 regular-season games to injuries, including Ted Washington’s six games to his broken leg—and to stitch together a patchwork offensive line that included a rookie and fifth-round draft choice (Dan Koppen), a guard who opened the season on the practice squad (Russ Hochstein), and a tackle who was active for one game in 2002 (Tom Ashworth). That line hadn’t allowed a sack all postseason.
Belichick was concerned about the Carolina defense and what it might do to his line and skill people. “He beat us down mentally throughout the entire two weeks about this defensive group,” Deion Branch said. “It gave me this little chip. I know for a fact I was going to show Coach, ‘We can defeat these guys.’ He wasn’t saying we couldn’t do it, but it was a mental challenge for us . . . Trust me, practice was the worst. We’d be in a stance, and a coach would be behind us holding our jersey when Tom snapped the ball, and we couldn’t run five yards. ‘This is what they’re going to do. They’re going to hold you.’ Coach made the game so much easier for us.”
On the other side of the ball, Belichick’s defensive secondary wasn’t affected at all by the loss of Milloy. In the regular season and postseason combined, Law had nine interceptions; Tyrone Poole had six; Harrison, who led the team in tackles, had five; and rookie Eugene Wilson had four.
Dan Reeves, an NFL head coach for 23 consecutive years before he was fired by Atlanta, said he watched a number of Patriots tapes and decided they “scheme as well as anybody I’ve ever seen.” New England would need all of Belichick’s creativity against the Panthers, who allowed only 36 points in their three playoff victories and who featured a running back, Stephen Davis, who had rushed for a career-high 1,444 yards.
The Patriots’ coach respected Fox and his Carolina staff, including Parcells’s old friend, offensive coordinator Dan Henning; strength coach Jerry Simmons, who worked under Belichick in Cleveland; and another member of that old Browns staff, Scott O’Brien, who might’ve been the league’s finest special teams coach. Belichick actually owned four season tickets to Panthers games, dating back to their first year in existence, 1995, when he bought them to show support to then–Panthers GM Bill Polian and personnel man Dom Anile, another ex-Clevelander. Now it was time for Belichick to do everything he could to devalue those tickets.
In a pregame speech to his players in a hotel ballroom, Belichick planted the Super Bowl XXXVI Lombardi Trophy on a table and declared that it represented a team. “That’s what it symbolizes,” he said. “Not the guy who leads the league in punting, not the guy who’s got 15 sacks, not the guy who’s got 1,200 yards rushing. It represents the team that’s the toughest, smartest, most confident team. If you think back on our season, no matter what tough spot you’ve been in, in the end, the reason why you won is because you identified the situation, you heard the call, and you did your job. That’s what execution is about. This game is about execution. There’s one champion—it will be us if we play well.”
But Belichick was also pissed off over the amount of talking Carolina had done. Richard Seymour and Panthers defensive tackle Brentson Buckner got into a heated on-field exchange in the pregame that was joined by other players, and tensions were sky-high. When Belichick addressed his players before they took the field, he had angrily rejected the notion that the 2003 Panthers were the equivalent of the 2001 Patriots and that they were about to secure the same result. One player told the Globe’s Michael Smith that the message went like this: “They’re not us. They’ll never be fucking us. They’ll never be champions. We’re the fucking champions, and the trophy is coming back where it belongs.”
This was a seething Belichick the players almost never saw or heard. “To me,” said tight end Christian Fauria, “it was the most passionate I’ve heard him. You could tell it was personal . . . Bill wasn’t busting a cooler and didn’t have his veins popping, but he was very calculated and direct with his words and message.”
The Patriots were again introduced as a team, not as individuals, and engaged the upstart Panthers in what some would consider another Super Bowl classic. Brady was tremendous, completing 32 of 48 passes for 354 yards and three touchdowns while that patchwork offensive line didn’t allow him to get sacked. Carolina quarterback Jake Delhomme was nearly Brady’s equal—he threw for 323 yards and three touchdowns—but he was sacked four times. The Panthers stayed right with the Patriots by scoring on big plays, including an 85-yard pass from Delhomme to Muhsin Muhammad—who had 141 yards on only four catches—that gave Carolina its first lead, 22–21, in the middle of the fourth quarter. (The Panthers failed on their two-point conversion attempt.)
It was a strange game. New England and Carolina did no scoring in the first and third quarters, and lit it up in the final three minutes of the second and all of the fourth. Belichick also made a rare disastrous mistake on a stage so big, choosing to squib-kick to the Panthers after a Brady touchdown pass to David Givens with 18 seconds left in the first half. “Can I say one more time how much I hate the squib kick?” Belichick’s former co-worker with the Giants, Phil Simms, said on the CBS broadcast. Carolina recovered, and after the Patriots gave up a 21-yard Davis run, John Kasay
kicked a 50-yard field goal on the last play of the half to cut New England’s lead to 14–10.
The halftime show would feature another unforced error when Justin Timberlake exposed Janet Jackson’s breast before 143.6 million witnesses in what he later called a “wardrobe malfunction.” The Patriots and Panthers had a tough act to follow, and they didn’t disappoint. New England took a 21–10 lead early in the fourth quarter, and Carolina receiver Ricky Proehl—who had scored the tying touchdown for the Rams in the Super Bowl two years earlier—said the Patriots started “talking junk. They were like ‘OK, we’re getting ready to put the final nail in your coffin.’”
The Panthers suddenly emerged from their casket by scoring on a 33-yard DeShaun Foster run and again—after Reggie Howard intercepted Brady in the end zone—on the Delhomme heave to Muhammad, who beat the rookie Wilson down the field and finished him off with a stiff-arm. Fox made the mistake of chasing points and going for two after both touchdowns, failing both times, and New England responded with a 68-yard drive.
Trailing by a point in the closing minutes, Brady called 136 X-Cross Z-Flag on second-and-goal from the one-yard line. In other words, he called Mike Vrabel’s number. The linebacker had caught a touchdown pass against San Diego in 2002, but this was different. This was late in the fourth quarter of a Super Bowl that was nerve-racking enough to inspire Belichick to admit, “I was having a heart attack out there.” Vrabel already had two sacks, and his second-quarter strip of Delhomme had led to a Seymour recovery and ultimately New England’s first touchdown.
The coach had turned a kicking-game afterthought with the Pittsburgh Steelers into a burgeoning star. Belichick loved Vrabel’s versatility, intelligence, instincts, leadership skills, and effectiveness on special teams. “One of the toughest players I’ve ever coached,” Belichick said, “mentally and physically.” Vrabel was also a jokester who could get away with saying things to Belichick few others could. Sometimes he’d give the coach advice on what defensive calls he should make. “Mike,” Belichick would tell him, “when you’re a coach and you’re calling the defenses, you should go ahead and do that.”
More than anything, Vrabel was a football player’s football player. “We had a roomful of guys like that,” McGinest said of the linebackers. “We had guys in there who didn’t need playbooks . . . Vrabel’s one of the smartest guys and players I’ve ever been around.”
Vrabel would catch ten touchdown passes over the years for Belichick, so the coach bristled when someone described the linebacker’s pass routes as gadget plays. “He was part of our goal-line offense that was a standard formation,” Belichick said. “It was a standard play.”
Lined up to Brady’s left, Vrabel ran a crossing pattern that compelled two defenders to run into each other, leaving the 6´4˝, 261-pound tight end open. Brady didn’t hesitate in throwing his way. Big, hulking men who aren’t in the habit of catching footballs often use their bodies as a backstop when trying to gather in a pass. Vrabel didn’t have that luxury, or that need. He was an athlete, after all. He extended his arms and caught the touchdown pass with his hands. Kevin Faulk’s two-point conversion run made it 29–22 New England, with 2:51 to go.
The Panthers responded as if they were anything but first-timers in the Super Bowl. A schoolyard quarterback who projected a fun, draw-’em-up-in-the-dirt vibe, Delhomme led Carolina down the field. Harrison broke his arm on that possession, weakening the Patriots’ secondary, and right away Delhomme hit Proehl for 31 yards, to the New England 14. Three plays later, he found Proehl again for a 12-yard touchdown. Fox didn’t go for two this time; his Panthers made it 29–29 with 68 seconds left.
“The Patriots were the superior team,” Proehl said years later. “They were just a great football team, and they looked at us in the pregame like ‘This is going to be a joke.’ You felt that as a player on the other side . . . But after I scored, I felt like We’ve got this game. They’re on the ropes . . . They were looking at each other and yelling at each other, and you could sense the tide turning. They’ve got guys pulling up with cramps, and we’re going to win this game.”
The Panthers’ mood immediately darkened when their kicker, Kasay, booted the ball out of bounds, advancing New England to the 40-yard line. Brady opened the drive with an incompletion but then worked around an offensive pass interference call with throws to Troy Brown (who was playing through a broken nose), Daniel Graham, and Deion Branch (who had ten catches for 143 yards and a touchdown) to reach the Carolina 23 before Belichick used his last timeout with nine seconds left. Vinatieri trotted out to attempt to kick the Patriots to another parade.
“To see them get into field goal position, you want to throw up,” said Proehl, who had seen this movie before with the Rams. “I was just sick to my stomach. What are the chances of this happening?”
But Proehl had no idea that across the field, two Patriots also felt sick to their stomachs: Belichick and his accidental 38-year-old long snapper, Brian Kinchen, his former tight end with the Browns. The team’s regular long snapper, Lonie Paxton, had gone down with an injury, and so had his replacement. Belichick had arranged for a late-season tryout and, though Kinchen hadn’t played in the NFL in three years (he was teaching Bible classes) and had airmailed a snap over the holder’s head during his audition, he beat out three other candidates to land the job.
In the freezing cold during the Tennessee playoff victory, Kinchen had snapped a ball into the ground and started a downward spiral that left him a broken athlete. He lost all confidence in his ability to perform the task, and his snapping problems became much like the throwing problems Chuck Knoblauch and Rick Ankiel experienced in baseball. His special teams coach, Brad Seely, got all over him, and so did offensive coordinator Charlie Weis, who, like his former boss Parcells, had a piercing sense of humor. Kinchen resorted to lobbing the ball for the sake of accuracy, and Weis told him one day, “Man, you really showed your age. You could’ve timed your snaps with a sundial.”
The long snapper locked himself in his hotel room at night, dressed in his full uniform, and practiced dozens of snaps into the pillows he stuffed beneath his window. Even that didn’t work; he bounced nearly every snap he tried to deliver the next day. He called Scott Pioli four nights before the Super Bowl and asked to be cut, and Pioli relayed the request to Belichick, who knew he had no better options available so close to showtime. During practice the following day, Kinchen caught Belichick’s eye from a distance, and the coach gave him a thumbs-up. “Never in his lifetime had Bill given me the OK sign,” Kinchen said. “It was so not him. But that was his way to let me know he was watching and that everything is going to be just fine.”
Only on Super Bowl Sunday, everything was a million miles removed from fine. During the pregame meal, Kinchen was working a hard bread roll with a steak knife when he badly cut up his index finger. Belichick was beyond angry with the rented long snapper who had proven to be more trouble than he was worth. “Stitch it up, put a tourniquet on it, whatever you want to do,” the coach told Kinchen. “But you know what? You’re playing. It’s a Super Bowl.”
And play in the Super Bowl Brian Kinchen did. He bounced two balls to holder Ken Walter, on a punt and an extra-point attempt, and Walter handled the bounces like a big-league shortstop. As Kinchen exited the field after the extra-point bounce, near the end of the first half, an incredulous Belichick chased after him. “Brian,” he barked, “do you realize this is the Super Bowl? You do know you’re not doing the job we hired you to do correctly, right?” Long snapping was the one football skill Belichick had mastered as a player, and he’d be damned if he was going to lose a championship because one of his Patriots couldn’t perform the task. Kinchen felt humiliated. “I felt like saying, ‘You called me,’” he remembered. “ ‘Shut up and let me do my job or just don’t pick up the phone next time.’”
Kinchen prayed and prayed that the Panthers wouldn’t tie it on their final possession, and that it wouldn’t come down to a Vinatieri fie
ld goal attempt in the closing seconds. “So imagine the anxiety I felt,” Kinchen said, “when it did.” As he prepared to snap the ball, Carolina called time out. The Panthers weren’t trying to ice the kicker as much as they were trying to ice the snapper.
Kinchen paced about and thought of Bill Buckner, the Red Sox first baseman who helped blow the 1986 World Series by missing a simple ground ball from the Mets’ Mookie Wilson. He thought of Trey Junkin, the long snapper who had come out of retirement the previous year, at 41, and lost a playoff game for the New York Giants on a botched delivery in San Francisco. Finally, Kinchen told himself that, unlike Junkin, he would fire the snap as hard as he could and hope for the best.
This was why Belichick was doubled over, hands on knees. This was why Belichick said he felt like he was having a heart attack. Vinatieri had already missed one field goal in this brutally physical game and had another one blocked, and it was clear that Kinchen’s weeks-long meltdown had affected him. Vinatieri had made 31 of 35 indoor kicks in his career; strangely enough, all four misses had come at Reliant Stadium. But he had proven himself to be one of the NFL’s signature clutch players two years earlier with his remarkable field goal against Oakland and then his title clincher against St. Louis. He believed he would make this kick against Carolina, if only Kinchen gave him a chance.
Terrified of the moment and the potential consequences of failure, Kinchen lowered himself over the ball, near the right hash mark, grabbed it with both hands, and cut it loose. He heard the thud of foot meeting ball and watched the 41-yard kick sail straight through the uprights with four seconds to play. He quickly scanned the field left to right for any sign of a flag, and when all was clear, he dropped his elbows to his side and screamed from his toes like he’d never screamed in his life, exposing every vein in his arms and neck.