How long was scott norwoods kick

As for the Giants, a second victory in five seasons represented a quantum leap for Bill Parcells, who became only the eighth head coach to win multiple Super Bowl titles. The recently retired Parcells is universally regarded as a first-ballot Hall of Famer and one of the great head coaches of the modern era.

Norwood's miss remains one of the indelible plays in Super Bowl history, but how might that history be different today had the fairly reliable, young kicker split the uprights?

Could the Bills, perhaps buoyed by such a satisfying climax to their first title game appearance, have fared better in their other three trips to the plate? And what legacy would one-time Super Bowl champion Bill Parcells be leaving behind today? Mailbag: What if Norwood didn't miss? Send in your comments and we will post some of the best responses. Skip to main content Skip to navigation. What if Scott Norwood's kick had split the uprights? Tua helps Dolphins to win after Brissett injured.

Miami Dolphins. And by the time they figured out they had to pull him down and get enough bodies on him, he had already got there. With the ball at the Giants' yard line and 48 seconds on the clock, ABC color commentator Dan Dierdorf suggested Buffalo should probably be "targeting at least the yard line.

But from that point forward, Kelly threw a short pass and then handed off to Thomas, who saved the day with an yard gain. Not once on the final drive did Kelly attempt to take a shot down the field in order to make things easier for Norwood. I don't have any regrets that we should have called something else. There's things in every game—whether you win or lose —where you say, 'Oh gee, maybe I shouldn't have done that.

Let's not forget that this was the first time anyone on the Bills roster had played in a Super Bowl. They were going up against a more experienced opponent, and for what it's worth, it was only the third time in history in which there hasn't been a two-week break between the conference title games and the Super Bowl. The Bills didn't have a curfew early that week, and it's been suggested they may have partied excessively. Were they hungover on Super Bowl Sunday?

No, but you wonder if distractions from a wild week factored in. They were the team out and partying. Marv did not give them a curfew early in the week, and they took full advantage of that. They were a pretty fun-loving group that celebrated its success with maybe some excess, and that didn't stop in Tampa.

And multiple players have talked about that with a sense of regret, that they went down there and didn't treat it enough as a business trip. It's also enough to make you wonder what would have happened had this game been played later in that four-year Super Bowl run, especially since two of the next three championships took place on artificial turf.

If it's a touchdown pass to end the game, or any regular play, you need all 11 people on your side of the ball to beat the 11 people on the other side of the ball. But when it comes down to a kick that is fielded cleanly and put down cleanly and just missed, the target goes on one person. Failure may build character, but it also quite frequently reveals it. And the way the Bills and their fans responded to Norwood's miss did a lot to uncover the spirit at their core.

Reich, who hadn't worked as a holder until that season, still wonders if he could have done more. But when you're kicking a yarder, the thing that you want more than anything else is to give him the longest look possible. Regardless, the Bills insist they lost as a team.

Hell, Reich even contends they missed that kick as a team. So it's on Scott's record that he missed the kick, but snapper, holder, kicker are all together, so we all missed that kick. Less than 24 hours later, 1, miles north, about 30, fans were also volunteering to get in on the miss. That's about how many were chanting "We want Norwood" at an unprecedented rally to support a losing team in Buffalo's Niagara Square.

According to the Buffalo News , the "warmest, loudest and longest applause" that day was reserved for Norwood, who—while fighting back tears — declared to the forgiving-yet-freezing mass that he had " never felt more loved than right now. And I think the city of Buffalo owes him a lot for handling it the way that he did. Hear that? The city of Buffalo owes Scott Norwood? On the surface, it's hard to fathom. But Norwood never did shy away, and he did take responsibility.

That a city in mourning found a way to recognize that says a lot. They weren't defeated. It was like, 'Hey, we did this awesome thing. It's amazing, because the city was in economic decline as the manufacturing sector dissipated.

This team was all a lot of Western New Yorkers had, but they couldn't stay mad at it. The team let a lot of people down, but they couldn't help but embrace it anyway. Actually, you won't likely find footage of the Giants' rally, because there wasn't one.

No rally, no parade, no White House visit. According to Steeg, the team accidentally left the Vince Lombardi Trophy in the locker room after the game. That was our Super Bowl party. We didn't stop to eat them. You just grabbed it on your way back to your room. Part of that had to do with Desert Storm, but the juxtaposition is strong enough to extinguish, at least in this particular case, the popular and usually legitimate notion that losers are forgotten.

Ironically, that same afternoon, Ralph Wilson was declaring the loser the winner. Like it or not, Wikipedia has become the unofficial website of record for public figures. And on Norwood's Wikipedia page , a link is rightly acknowledged between his real-world failure and the quasi-fictional archetype that has become embedded into pop culture as a result of said failure. The Ace Ventura: Pet Detective character who may or may not have been inspired by Norwood was a bitter recluse, a pariah who dreamed of getting revenge against his holder for leaving the laces in.

Contrary to what many folks outside of Buffalo are inclined to believe, the miss didn't even end his career. He was the only guy who was perfect in that game. That kick gets blown out of proportion in terms of how it affected that team and how it was perceived by a lot of people afterwards. Norwood's field-goal success rate dropped for a third straight year in , which might explain why he lasted only one season beyond Super Bowl XXV.

But he did make all five of his kicks in the '91 playoffs, including a yard attempt against the Chiefs and his only attempt in the Bills' Super Bowl XXVI loss to Washington. By no means does he seek limelight. It took about two years for ESPN and NFL Films to coordinate their interview with him, and the only other published quotes from Norwood this century came in a year-old Sports Illustrated story that declared him to be "almost a recluse.

But Norwood isn't Ray Finkle. He's not a pariah. He's become a businessman. He has a wife and three kids. His life didn't end on Jan. Bill Buckner had over 2, hits, but it's hard for most fans to recall any of them. It's easy to say that we care about getting up when you get knocked down and that winning isn't everything and it's how you play the game, but that's not true at all.

If you really study what we cheer for, we cheer for winners. We love winners. The Bills and Norwood are defined in many people's minds as losers, even though they had more resiliency than any team maybe ever. The problem might be that we don't celebrate resiliency like we do prosperity, which is why Norwood and the Bills typically garnered nothing but pity—and eventually some resentment as a result of overexposure —on a non-local level.

The star quarterback delivered on that promise, but the Bills lost three lopsided Super Bowls in a row to Washington, Dallas and Dallas again in , and It's true. They may be the greatest team to never win a championship. But that still puts them behind the worst team that actually won one. Unless the NFL adopts fractional points, there'll never be a closer one. Buffalo relied on a no-huddle offense as New York controlled the clock, maintaining possession for a Super Bowl record 40 minutes and 33 seconds.

The NFL championship game was also memorable as it came shortly after the U. The Buffalo Bills returned to the Super Bowl the following three years, but lost all four years in a row. Note to readers: if you purchase something through one of our affiliate links we may earn a commission.

Hicks put it more diplomatically. But if you look at things in the big scheme--but people have a tendency not to do that--going into the game, I had hit my previous 12 out of 13 kicks. There was another blip at home in the regular-season finale against Detroit, when Norwood missed two field goals in an overtime loss. Despite his problems, the ax never fell on Norwood.

The prevailing theory is that Norwood was spared after his performance against the Raiders because the Bills were assured of playing all of their remaining games through the Super Bowl on artificial turf, a surface on which Norwood usually excels. The Bills and their fans had helped create a sympathetic figure in Norwood, which might have made it difficult to cut him loose so unceremoniously. Four for four in the playoffs. A year later, Norwood looks forward to his second-chance Super Bowl, in which he might quickly distance himself from the miss and the memory.

He also covered skiing at the Winter Olympics and wrote extensively on most sports.