‘He’s going, baby! Don’t run out of gas!’: An oral history of two plays that defined Julius Peppers’ HOF career

Julius Peppers never chased publicity. He never chased the spotlight. He never chased sacks.

Funny thing, though. The nine-time Pro Bowl edge rusher, who had more sacks (159.5) than all but three other players in NFL history and played power forward in the Final Four for the University of North Carolina, spent his entire career being chased by the public spotlight.

And now that spotlight lands on Peppers once again, as the 44-year-old from Wilson, North Carolina — who was drafted No. 2 overall by the Carolina Panthers in 2002 and also played for the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers — will be enshrined into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday.

When asked what defined this 6-foot-7, 295-pound player’s career and made him worthy of a bust in Canton, Ohio, those who coached Peppers, coached against him and played with him pointed not to his historic sack total but to consecutive plays against the Denver Broncos in 2004.

“You could have found some highlight sacks, but those plays, back-to-back, tell you about his wisdom. They talk about his agility, about his speed. They talk about not quitting,” said Mike Rucker, Peppers’ teammate from 2002 to 2007.

“To me, that should be circulating through football at all levels, and showing when you do that, here’s the result. … That’s classic ball right there.”

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The QB chase

It’s Oct. 10, 2004, and the Panthers are at Mile High Stadium for a Week 5 matchup in Denver. The Broncos are ahead, 13-10, with 7:12 left in the third quarter, threatening to extend their lead on third-and-goal from the 3. Broncos coach Mike Shanahan calls a naked bootleg to the right for quarterback Jake Plummer, who seemingly has a clear path to the end zone after Peppers bites on the reverse from the left side.

Peppers: First of all, I was already exhausted from the whole drive, because it was a long drive [this was the ninth play].

Mike Minter (Carolina safety 1997-2006): I was in coverage. [Peppers] had to contain. They sucked him in a little bit. … He lost contain. Which makes what happened next more special.

Mike Rucker (Carolina end 1999-2007): Pep gets essentially all the way to the other side of the hashmarks. Jake rolls out and he’s at least on the other side of the hashmarks. …. That’s like a walk-off homer. That’s a walk into the end zone. Easy six points.

Minter: Usually a player who takes one wrong step and loses contain never gets back to the quarterback — every freaking player in NFL history.

Brentson Buckner (Carolina defensive tackle, 2001-05): Denver was one of the top running teams at the time, so you’re really loading up to stop the run. And then they pull the bootleg out. Any other end who has got to play the hard run and the quarterback goes to a naked bootleg, that’s just a race to the pylon. You’ve seen a [slower quarterback like] Peyton Manning make it to the pylon.

Mike Shanahan (Denver coach, 1995-2008): When you’re playing a guy like Julius Peppers and he is playing the run, and he leaves Jake Plummer with pretty good speed, you’d think Jake would be able to outrun him to the end zone.

Peppers sees Plummer has the ball, sticks his right foot into the ground, accelerates and catches the quarterback in time to shove him out of bounds at the 1-yard line.

Rucker: Plummer has all the green grass. But Pep, just like on the “Wild Kingdom” [TV show], turns to instincts, turns and is just wide open.

John Fox (Carolina head coach 2002-10, current senior assistant for Detroit Lions): What was most impressive to me was the angle he took. First of all, a lot of guys never see the fake. But he saw it, and then the body angles and mechanics it took to put his foot in the ground and take a great angle … ”

Mike Trgovac (Carolina defensive coordinator 2003-08; Peppers’ long-time position coach): When he set that right foot in the ground … Boom!

If you just read the box score for what happened next — (7:12) J. Plummer right end pushed ob at CAR 1 for 2 yards (J. Peppers) — it sounded routine. It was anything but.

Trgovac: Jake wasn’t a stiff. He wasn’t some big, slow Peyton Manning-type quarterback. Jake could run.

Buckner: You just saw in Pep what God created. When he said “elite athlete, a super-human being,” that’s what you saw.

Peppers: All I thought was now it’s a footrace. You’ve got to show some speed right here. I knew he was fast. I just didn’t know how fast I was going to be.

Shanahan: That’s when you saw what kind of talent he had. You were like, ‘Man, I wish we had a guy like that.’

Plummer: “He was just so big and long. You’d have two guys blocking him and he’d still get an arm free and make a play. He was phenomenal, just so strong and big and ate up so much space.”

Buckner: He didn’t just push him out of bounds. He damn near pushed him out of the stadium. That just let you know he wasn’t diving as a last resort. He had closed enough ground to get power pushing him out of bounds.

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The 101-yard pick

Now it is fourth-and-goal from the 1-yard line. Shanahan opts to go for it, believing the defense is winded. He calls a play-action pass.

Peppers: [The play before] was like a 30-yard sprint. So I’m already dog tired, my tongue hanging out my mouth. So we call a play where the ends drop, and we had [their] tight ends on the coverage on both sides.

Trgovac: I sent the two safeties off the corner because I wasn’t going to let them run the bootleg again.

Rucker: Pep just pretty much emptied the tank the play before. When you’re running for your life to save the play, you’re not reserving any energy.

Buckner: They were thinking Pep had already chased down the boot, he’ll chase the boot again, so now we’ll throw it this time. This time Pep’s in coverage, and they ran an out route. If you find a defensive back that breaks better than he did on that play, I’ll give you a million dollars.

Plummer fires a pass into the end zone, but Peppers intercepts it and sprints 101 yards to the 3-yard line.

Minter: I’m coming in on the blitz. I’m free. I’m in Jake’s face. I’m thinking I’m about to get the sack. This man’s got nowhere to throw the ball. When Jake throws the ball, I turn around and I see Pep right there. You don’t even see the tight end on the play. And Pep catches the ball and I’m thinking, ‘OK, he’s out of here.’

Buckner: And he one-handed the interception. Everybody talks about Odell Beckham [Jr.] and these wide receivers making one-handed catches, and here you’ve got a 290-pound defensive end one-handing an interception in the end zone.

Peppers: I undercut the ball [four yards deep in the end zone] and I bobbled it three or four times before I catch it. So I’m running. I’m running. I’m trying to make it. I get past the 50. I get past the 40. I’m getting tired. I can feel my legs getting weak and my lungs burning.

Trgovac: He ran right past our bench. I was looking straight down at Pep, and I said, ‘Oh, s—! He might score!’ … Just like the play in Atlanta where he picked that ball off and ran it in. I mean, he made it look so easy. For anybody else, you’re like, ‘Wow!’ For him, it’s almost kind of routine.

Plummer: “I kind of remember that play [laughing], but you really as a quarterback want to wash those away. And that’s one I probably want to wash away — way away.”

Visiting teams in Denver are reminded constantly why it’s called Mile High Stadium, as they play in thin air at 5,280 feet above sea level. Peppers felt it as Broncos wide receiver Rod Smith touched him down after he stumbled to the ground at the 3-yard line. At the time, it was the longest interception return that didn’t result in a touchdown.

Bill Rosinski, the Panthers’ play-by-play radio announcer at the time, saw it coming, saying, “He’s going, baby! Don’t run out of gas!”

Rosinski: We kind of chuckled during the call, as he was running out of gas and just fell, because we just felt he wasn’t going to make it.

Peppers: Once I got to about the 10, I knew I wasn’t going to make it because my legs were giving up [he laughs]. I took a couple of more steps and tried to dive as far as I could. I put the ball out and landed at the 3-yard line. The rest of the game, I couldn’t get my energy back. That was the most tired I had been in any game or anything before — ever.

Trgovac: It was the only time I ever knew he was human.

Rosinski: We were skewed. Covering and seeing him play every week, we came to expect stuff like that from him. He made the impossible seem, you know, ho-hum.

Minter: Those two plays back-to-back, of course you’re going to be worn out. Hell, he ran about 300 yards, right?

Buckner: You talk about Michael Jordan being in a “zone”. That was a football version of the zone on the defensive side. He just took over a drive. We had offensive plays where we lined him up at the goal line. Had they done that after the pick and he caught a fade ball for a touchdown, they might have stopped the game and given him his [Hall of Fame] gold jacket then.

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The smile

That neither of these career-defining plays included a sack doesn’t surprise the players or those who knew him. To them, Peppers was defined by his effort and the smile he had on the sideline following the interception.

Rucker: His calling card is that smile, not sacks. He’s a guy that didn’t talk a lot, but if he’s smiling, you know he’s in a good place. Winded or not, if you see that smile, that’s what you’re looking for.

Fox: Everything gets judged by sacks, but there is so much more to the game, for defensive linemen, than that. Julius could do it all.

Buckner: Those are the plays that separate him from any other defensive end that played the game, to me. … He just did stuff that was just physically impossible. And he made it look so graceful. Normally, guys that are that big; it’s a bull in a china shop. He made it look like a diver off the high platform, how they do all those twists and go into the water so effortlessly. In a whole bunch of chaos, you just saw this smooth athlete making these plays.

Plummer: “You could have someone engaged with him on a block and he’d find a way. Like, ‘OK, you’re blocking my hip and my left leg, but I’m just going to free everything else up and make all kinds of plays.’ Just a phenomenal player. But that interception? Washed away [laughing].

Peppers: I played the game for the love of it, and I played it the way I thought it was supposed to be played … not chasing sacks or chasing any other kind of statistic. [Those two plays] show something that I was very proud of throughout my career, the versatility to be able to change directions and make plays on the goal line. It’s a little bit of everything mixed up in those plays. Really, they showed something I hung my hat on.