It's so Patriots, isn't it?
That they are going to another Super Bowl because of another diamond in the rough, another unheralded player who emerged as a threat under Bill Belichick, a player who had more yards receiving Sunday than he amassed his entire college career is just so awfully Patriots.
The Pats found Tom Brady in the sixth round of the draft and now he's Super Bowl-bound, thanks to the heroics of another player who came out of nowhere.
Actually, Chris Hogan's road to the biggest stage in sports was paved straight out of a lacrosse field.
Hogan, a former Penn State lax standout, had nine catches and two TDs in the AFC Championship Game against Pittsburgh. His 180 yards receiving are a franchise playoff record and dwarf the 147 yards he posted at Monmouth University in his brief time on the football team, proving that despite a long, winding path to the NFL, Hogan, Belichick and the Patriots are a perfect match.
"It has been a long journey, but I've worked really hard to get to this point, and I just couldn't be happier that I get to be a part of this team, this whole thing," Hogan said Sunday.
New England is a franchise built on versatile character players and a religious dedication to the Patriot Way. Say what you want about the Pats, their QB and the guy in the hoodie, but this is an all-time team that's raised the bar for dominance in pro sports and that always seems to find a guy the rest of the NFL either gives up on or never heard about.
Bill Belichick.
(Jim Rogash/Getty Images)
Hogan was not a big-time college recruit as a football player at Ramapo High School in New Jersey, but he could have gone anywhere he wanted on a lacrosse scholarship. He picked Penn State because it was an emerging program on the national stage.
The 6-3, 200-pound Hogan was a physically imposing, hard-working lacrosse player for the Nittany Lions from 2007-2010. As a junior, he scored 29 goals, pretty good for a midfielder, and was voted a team captain his senior year.
"He certainly played lacrosse like a football player,'' former Penn State coach Glenn Thiel told the Boston Globe last year. "He was very physical and he was such an athlete. Physically, he could just overwhelm lacrosse players.''
While playing lacrosse kept him off the football field for four years, it may have been the most attractive quality he brought to the Pats last summer as a free agent.
Bill Belichick has always been a big lacrosse fan since playing as a kid growing up in Annapolis at at Wesleyan University. His daughter Amanda played at Wesleyan and is coaching at Holy Cross. His sons Stephen and Brian also played the game in college before they became assistants with the Patriots.
New England could field quite a team: former Johns Hopkins lacrosse standout Mike Pellegrino is also on the staff.
Chris Hogan was Tom Brady's favorite receiver Sunday night.
(Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
Belichick is close with Hopkins lacrosse coach Dave Pietramala, regularly attends NCAA games (the Final Four is being held this year in Foxborough) and does tons of charity work in the lacrosse community. The Bill Belichick Foundation built a lacrosse field (Belichick Field) in Uganda.
"It's a great sport," Belichick said during the season prior to a game against Baltimore, one of the nation's traditional lacrosse hotbeds. "I was fortunate enough to grow up in that area and have been able to enjoy so much of lacrosse and all that goes with it. What a great spring sport tradition it is in that area."
When he was a sophomore at Penn State, Hogan suffered an ankle injury that left him with a year of NCAA eligibility after he graduated. With his lacrosse career over, he decided to return home and use that one remaining year to play one more season of football with his old buddies at Monmouth in 2010.
"We thought it was a great opportunity for us," Monmouth coach Kyle Callahan told the Daily News. "It was very obvious, almost immediately, that he was an extremely talented athlete. There wasn't anything he couldn't do."
That included starting at both wide receiver and cornerback, pretty good for a kid Callahan never even saw play lacrosse.
"If you're going to play a high level of lacrosse … you have to have a physical toughness about you," Callahan said. "All I had to do was come out and watch him run around the first day of practice. That's all I needed to see.
He was different and you noticed it right away.
He was very easy to pick out."
It may have been easy for Belichick, too. Not so much for the rest of the NFL.
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