"I heard throughout my college career, `You can't pass block.' I heard it every day," he says. "I heard it all the time at the camps I went to. And I couldn't when I came in, because we never did a lot of it [at Nebraska]. I'm still trying to get better at it, and I still struggle at times with that."
They also said, in the weeks leading up to Super Bowl XXXVIII, that New England's offensive line would struggle mightily against the Powder Blue Wrecking Crew, also known as the Carolina Panthers' defensive line. Sapp, Hochstein's former teammate in Tampa Bay, even went so far as to say that Damien Woody's replacement at left guard couldn't block a pair of sports talk-show hosts. Hochstein showed him, and the Patriots showed them, not yielding a sack for the third straight postseason game.
Hochstein, best described simply as a sweet guy (his agents' sons took him to their elementary school's "Show and Tell"), never yielded to temptation and fired back at Sapp.
"In my situation, it was the right thing to do," Hochstein says. "I was a new guy who hadn't played a lot [the Super Bowl was his third career start]. When you're in the Super Bowl, it's the biggest game of the year, and people nitpick at things and look down the roster and see who's there and say, `This guy doesn't have any experience.' I expected that. My O-line coach [Dante Scarnecchia] had me in one afternoon and told me, `Expect to get a lot of heat. You're the most unproven guy here as far as experience.' Then he goes, `I believe in you, the guys around you believe in you, and that's all that matters. Whatever those guys say to you, it's all lip service, because they're not playing the game.' And it's true. The only people that mattered to me were my teammates and the Carolina Panthers. I tried just to keep it that way, and I think I came out all right in the end in that."
