FOR FAMILY, A LOT ON LINE
Hennessy brothers at center of Jets, ATL battle in London
Long-snapping a football is easy, or so everyone says.
“If you can throw overhand, you can throw between your legs decently,” Jets long snapper Thomas Hennessy says.
“A lot of guys can snap the ball real well, they can hit a beer can off a window ledge at 40 yards,” his father, Tom Hennessy says.
“The ball spins the same number of revolutions every snap,” a kicker who played with Hennessy says.
If it’s so easy, then how did Hennessy end up here, the longest-tenured Jet (along with safety Marcus Maye) and arguably the best long snapper in the NFL?
Hennessy has graded as Pro Football Focus’ best or second-best long snapper each of the last two years and usually leads the NFL in tackles by a long snapper. But if you’re a Jets fan, here’s how you know he’s good: You may have never heard of him.
In his four-year NFL career, Hennessy has never had a punt or field goal not get off because of a snap. (That’s actually true dating back to his college career at Duke and his high school career, locally at Don Bosco Prep in New Jersey.) And he’s never been flagged for a penalty as a Jet.
The answer to why he’s so good may have a simple origin. Unlike most long snappers, he didn’t end up in the position by accident. Hennessy was focused on becoming a long snapper from the very beginning of his high school career, when he says he was too much of a “late bloomer” to make it on the field otherwise at Don Bosco, which was a national powerhouse when he played there.
“I was behind physically, it took me a while to get up to speed in that regard,” Hennessy tells the Daily News. “We had Division I offensive linemen and I was maxed out at maybe 210 (lbs) in high school, and not fast enough to get on the field as a tight end or receiver,” he says.
Hennessy is not kidding about how hard it was to crack the Don Bosco lineup. Four Don Bosco alums are currently playing in the NFL, including Hennessy and Giants safety Jabrill Peppers. And one of those Division I offensive linemen was four years behind Thomas: his younger brother Matt, who was a third-round pick out of Temple in 2020 and is now the Falcons’ starting center.
Because of the four-year age gap, Matt and Thomas never played with or against each other in organized sports. Sunday’s Jets-Falcons game at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium will be the first time the brothers have ever played against each other in uniform. At least eight family members and friends are making the trip across the pond, led by their father, Tom, who had shirts made by the designer Ryan Lynn for the occasion. (You may recognize Lynn’s work from a Miller Lite NFL campaign.) “It’s a dream come true,” Tom said of his sons playing each other in London. “This is the fruit of their labors.” The Jets’ long snapper, though, is approaching the moment with classic older brother confidence. “It feels like another week now that we’re in the workweek,” Thomas says. “I really think it’ll end up feeling like another game.”
But of course, for two maniacally competitive, athletic brothers, just because they haven’t suited up against each other doesn’t mean they don’t have a long head-tohead track record. “What started as a friendly Xbox game of Madden or Call of Duty would turn into a blood feud to the point where they had quartered to different floors in the house,” their father, Tom says. “I remember broken controllers that had been used as weapons.”
For his part, Thomas says that breaking a controller and using the shard like Roger Clemens on Mike Piazza did happen, but “less than a small handful of times.” But he laughs and says that the sibling rivalry went hard in every venue. “We were definitely sore losers with each other,” he says. “I’ll just say it would get extremely heated. If someone struck somebody out, if we played one-on-one basketball, if we played one-on-one tackle football, it would just get very heated very quickly.”
As Thomas and then Matt went through the college recruiting process, they became extremely close, talking frequently about football and life. “If we have something on our mind, good or bad, we’ll tell each other,” Thomas says. “We tell each other what we need to hear, whether it’s a critique or encouragement.”
There was a moment in 2020 where it seemed like the Giants or Jets were primed to draft Matt. Both teams needed (and still need) interior linemen; The News’ mock
draft had Matt going to the Jets. “It would be incredible,” Matt said before the draft of ending up back in New Jersey, with either team. But the storybook ending for the Hennessys wouldn’t have been in green. They grew up diehard Giants fans in Bardonia in Rockland County and season ticket holders, attending games well into their childhood. Matt says the two Giant Super Bowls “were two of my best childhood memories.” As an adult, he’ll have to settle for playing against his brother for the very first time on an international stage.
What sets Thomas apart from other long snappers, beyond even his sterling consistency, is that he can competently block and cover downfield on punts in addition to long snapping, a difficult (and uncommon) skillset to pack into a single NFL body. In high school, he modeled his game after longtime Giants long snapper Zak DeOssie, which is fitting, because Zak’s father, Steve, revolutionized long snapping. As Bill Belichick is fond of explaining, when the Cowboys made Steve DeOssie a snapper in the 1980s, NFL teams began changing their punt alignments to account for the fact that their snapper could actually block, allowing them to use gunners for the first time.
Many high school and college teams still punt out of the “spread” formation, meaning that many long snappers don’t come to the NFL with experience blocking or getting downfield out of the position. “Being able to protect and cover in the NFL, that’s what really separates you,” Hennessy explains. “In college, there are a lot of guys who can snap the ball pretty accurately. But doing that over the course of an NFL season while blocking better athletes and being a factor in coverage — affecting the return and even making tackles — that’s something that has helped me separate myself.”
Thomas has had to grind and plan every single edge to get to the point where he’s an entrenched NFL starter. But how talent is distributed, even within one family, can be funny. “Thomas had to fight his way in,” Tom Hennessy, 54, who works in the telecommunications industry, says of his older son. “Matthew was a natural-born killer. He always had the size advantage, naturally explosive.” According to Tom, then-Temple and now-Panthers coach Matt Rhule told Matt when recruiting him, “He’s gonna go to this school for three years, and he’s going to go to the NFL.” And that is more or less what happened.
Thomas was undrafted and traded from the Colts to the Jets in his first NFL training camp. Matt was a third-round pick. But they’ve ended up in a similar place, both millionaire NFL starters, sharing passions for finance and travel. (Thomas signed a four-year, $4.4 million extension with the Jets last year.) Thomas and his wife were joined by Matt and his fiancée for an offseason trip to Paris last year, although both will be too locked in to do any sightseeing in London this weekend; Thomas says he’s looking forward to going back to London in the offseason.
Matt has a degree in finance from Temple, and Thomas a bachelor’s in biology and a master’s in business from Duke. When they’re not talking about football, the two love talking about personal finance. “I invest and budget my own money,” Thomas says. And appropriately for a long snapper, whose name you never want to hear, he calls his approach “vanilla.”
“I try to not let macroeconomics affect my investing plan,” Thomas says. “I just don’t think anybody knows when the next crash will be, where interest rates will go, what inflation will be, where earnings growth will be — I think it’s all a crapshoot. I think the best thing is just to have a plan to help you withstand all conditions,” he says, which is not bad guidance financially or otherwise. Thomas is quick to clarify: “That’s not advice, that’s for informational purposes only.” Being a Jets fan is not much less of a crapshoot. But you might be able to get rich betting that they never blow a special teams snap.