Adam Vinatieri didn’t just have the talent to be a…

Not every year for a kicker will be like Vinatieri’s 2014 season, in which he connected on a league-leading 96.8 percent of his field goals and earned first-team AP All-Pro honors at the age of 42. The mentality to push through a missed kick, a rough week or even an “off” year allowed Vinatieri to have the success he had.

Especially because he was one bad game away from being cut as a rookie – and who knows if he’d have a gold jacket had former New England Patriots coach Bill Parcells jettisoned him back in 1996.

Long before he was known as the greatest kicker in NFL history, Vinatieri was trying to stick in the league after playing his college ball at South Dakota State and kicking for the Amsterdam Admirals in NFL Europe. He earned a roster spot with Patriots, but in his second game, he missed three of four field goal attempts against the Buffalo Bills.

Parcells – a notoriously tough and demanding coach, to say the least – wasn’t pleased.

“I remember coach Parcells, I look at our sideline and it looked like his head was going to explode,” Vinatieri recalled. “He’s screaming at me, and I really wanted to walk to the other sideline at that point.”

A few days later, Parcells didn’t exactly offer a vote of confidence for his young kicker.

“That week, I remember him saying in the media our kicker is week to week,” Vinatieri said. “Which, I know what that means.

“If you have one more bad game, you’re never going to be heard from again.”

As a rookie from a small school who had only kicked in Europe previously, Vinatieri genuinely couldn’t afford another bad game. He went one for two the next week, but then in Week 4 he connected on five of six field goals, including a game-winning 40-yarder in overtime.

From there, Vinatieri was on solid footing – and he’d go on to connect on some of the biggest kicks in NFL history, helping the Patriots win three Super Bowls and the Colts win one.

“At that point, I just built a ton of confidence knowing that, hey, you can have a bad game,” Vinatieri said. “Everyone has a bad game. We’re all human. But turn around and refocus and get the monkey off your back and start helping your team win games.”

And Vinatieri, certainly, helped his teams win games in his career – 221 in the regular season and 21 in the playoffs, both standing as the second-highest totals in NFL history.