Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches

by Myers, Gary

  “Okay, guys, see you later,” he said.

  Teams live in fear of their players riding motorcycles, especially franchise quarterbacks. Ben Roethlisberger almost killed himself in an accident in the streets of Pittsburgh in 2006. Sanchez was only kidding. After Ryan did a double take, Sanchez got in his car. Ryan loves that kind of personality. On draft day, the Jets traded up from the number seventeen spot to the number five spot in a deal with Cleveland, which now was run by Mangini, who was hired by the Browns less than one week after the Jets fired him. The Jets gave up their first-round and second-round picks and three backup players: defensive end Kenyon Coleman, safety Abram Elam, and quarterback Brett Ratliff.

  Through three seasons, Sanchez had not developed as quickly as the Jets hoped, and they created a quarterback controversy when they traded for Denver’s Tim Tebow. The Jets insisted that Sanchez was still their guy, but they were challenging him by bringing in the most popular player in the NFL to be his backup.

  Ryan worked hard teaching Sanchez what it meant to be a professional, and that certainly didn’t include doing anything to embarrass the opposition. But the rookie quarterback tested the patience of the rookie coach.

  Ryan was seated comfortably on the Jets’ charter flight home from Oakland after a satisfying 38–0 victory in his first season, the most one-sided regular season home loss in Raiders history. The turbulence on the flight home had nothing to do with any rough air current. It came after Ryan learned about Sanchez snacking on the sideline during the game.

  Ryan had settled into his seat in the front of the plane when he was told of Sanchez’s antics. He had removed him in the fourth quarter with the game out of reach. These are the best times on an NFL winning sideline. Players clown around. They root for teammates who otherwise rarely get on the field except for special teams. Sanchez was just a rookie and had the Jets perplexed with his lack of maturity. He was twenty-two going on fifteen. He had a lot of growing up to do in the biggest market in the country. There was no escaping the scrutiny. After Ryan removed him from the Oakland game with the outcome secure, Sanchez realized he was hungry and could not wait for the snack waiting in the locker room or dinner on the plane. The television cameras caught Sanchez sitting on the bench eating a hot dog as if he were competing in the annual Nathan’s contest in Coney Island on the Fourth of July. He had his head down and he was trying to hide the hot dog. Sanchez was just a kid, and he was hungry. It remains a mystery how he acquired the hot dog. If he had gone into the stands in full uniform and bought it from a vendor, he probably would have been noticed as he walked up the aisle. He had a coconspirator in the great hot dog caper and wasn’t about to reveal that person’s name. In the world of supersized egos that get insulted easily, this was worse than Kurt Warner once signing autographs for fans seated behind the Rams’ bench with three minutes left in a one-sided victory over the Jets at Giants Stadium. The next day, he faxed a letter of apology to Jets coach Herm Edwards.

  Ryan didn’t know anything about Sanchez and the hot dog until he was on the airplane. “Oh, it pissed me off,” he said. “I was pissed at him. It just brought attention to himself. You don’t need that. Your team won 38–0; don’t make the story be about you eating a hot dog. I was really disappointed in him.”

  Ryan lectured him at thirty thousand feet. “Dude, you showed up a team,” he told him. “You were disrespectful to the game, and you were disrespectful to your opponent.” Sanchez was ridiculed in the newspaper. He tried to restore his image a few days later by donating five hundred hot dogs and five hundred hamburgers, along with the rolls and buns, to the Community Soup Kitchen in Morristown, New Jersey. His goal was to buy a thousand of each, but there was not enough freezer space.

  Ryan helped ease concerns that he was a pushover and too permissive with his players by the way he came down on Sanchez. He had to take a stand and not allow his quarterback to open a hot dog stand at the 50-yard line. Sanchez had burned a lot of calories during the game, but he chose the wrong time to try to replenish his system. Ryan didn’t let it go after lecturing Sanchez. He told the team, “Make sure you guys eat your hot dogs before the game, not during the game, like Mark,” Revis said.

  It was interesting that Ryan was so critical of Sanchez’s eating because it came at a time in his life when he was having big trouble controlling what he ate. After Ryan’s first season, the Jets paid for him to go to the famous weight loss center at Duke University, where he took classes. But he decided to undergo lap-band surgery after consulting with former NFL offensive lineman Jamie Dukes. He checked into NYU under the alias Roy Rogers. He was forty-seven years old and weighed 348 pounds.

  “I want to be around. I want to enjoy my kids. I want to see grandkids,” Ryan said. “I don’t need to get diabetes, high blood pressure, heart problems. I’m trying to avoid all of it.”

  In a little more than two years following the surgery, Ryan lost 106 pounds.

  Ryan won over the Jets fans when he made the comment about Belichick’s rings. They were tired of being bullied by Brady and Belichick and had had enough of the Jets taking a beating and not fighting back. Ryan had not even made it to training camp, and already he was imposing his will on his team, forcing it to take on his personality. The Jets might not win the fight, but at least they were going to fight.

  Then, in the second game of Ryan’s first season, the Jets beat the Patriots at Giants Stadium. They did it again in the second game of the 2010 season. Each year, however, the Jets lost the return match in New England. In the 2010 divisional round of the playoffs, the Jets beat the Patriots in Foxborough, completely confusing Brady. The picture on the cover of Sports Illustrated the next week showed linebacker Calvin Pace crushing Brady. “That was a great picture,” Ryan said. “His eyes were this big. That one’s up on the wall.”

  The playoff victory over the Patriots was the second most important in Jets history, right after Super Bowl III. It came one month after the Jets were embarrassed by the Patriots at Gillette Stadium 45–3 in a Monday night game. The Jets felt Brady was mocking them by being a little too enthusiastic after throwing a touchdown pass to make it 38–3 early in the fourth quarter and that Belichick was rubbing it in by having Brady play the entire game. Brady pointed to the Jets’ sideline after the score, and Ryan later complained about Brady’s “antics” and “Brady being Brady.”

  Football players want the coach to lead. They want him to set a schedule and tell them where they need to be and what time they need to be there. It’s been that way since they started getting serious about football in high school. It’s a sport that demands discipline. The players also want the coach to have their backs. Ryan was not afraid to criticize an opponent, and he encouraged his players to say what was on their minds. A few days before the playoff game against the Patriots, cornerback Antonio Cromartie made it clear that he didn’t hold Brady in high regard. He told the New York Daily News that Brady was “an asshole. Fuck him.”

  Brady countered by saying he had been called worse. Playing for any other team, Cromartie would have earned a trip to the head coach’s office. “I think that language was a little strong for me,” said Ryan, looking for laughs.

  That was the environment he created. It was the language he spoke on Hard Knocks.

  “I’m surprised how vulgar Cromartie was. It didn’t make a lot of sense,” said Damon Huard, a former Brady backup. “Tom looks at it like: What is this guy talking about? It’s out of left field. In my mind it’s classless. Maybe Rex Ryan doesn’t care and lets guys get away with that. There is no place for that.”

  Ryan loves to get little digs in on Brady at every opportunity. He has said no one studies like Peyton Manning and implied that Brady’s success is a result of having Belichick as his coach. When the Jets were playing the Colts on a Saturday night in the wild-card round before they eliminated New England the next week Brady was with his supermodel wife, Gisele Bundchen, attending Lombardi on Broadway. “Peyton Manning would have been watching
our game,” Ryan said. Brady later said he was monitoring the game on his cell phone and got home in time to watch the second half.

  As much as the long-suffering Jets fans would love for Ryan to trash talk Belichick—they’re still upset that he bailed on the team after one day as the head coach in 2000—Rex has never done it. Rex’s brother Rob won two Super Bowl rings as an assistant working for Belichick. The Ryan family holds Belichick in high regard.

  “There is no coach in the league I respect more than Bill Belichick,” Ryan said. “That’s the truth. But I got the same job he does. I’m going to try to kick his butt every time. He’s going to try to kick mine. There is no question. I want to try to knock him off the top. There is no reason why my goal shouldn’t be like that. Do the New England Patriots have an advantage over the New York Jets in the head coaching position? Absolutely. But I got news for you: They got it over every team in the league. The guy is a superstar in coaching.”

  The Jets have to deal with the Patriots twice a year. They have to deal with the Giants almost every single day. They meet only once every four years in the regular season, and they play a meaningless preseason game every summer. They elbow each other for attention in New York. The Giants let Ryan do all the talking, and they do all the winning. The Jets are starved for attention. After the Giants beat the Patriots again in the Super Bowl after the 2011 season, the Jets traded for Tebow and dominated the headlines for weeks. Eli Manning commented that the Giants just won the Super Bowl but he was just the third most talked about quarterback in “my own city.”

  The Jets’ victory over the Colts in Super Bowl III was the greatest upset in pro football history. But in New York, the Giants were still the kings. Even though the Jets were the NFL champions, they didn’t become the champions of New York until they easily defeated the Giants in their first-ever meeting that summer of 1969 in a preseason game at the Yale Bowl. For that short period, the Jets were the big brothers in their relationship with the Giants. As much as Ryan has made it his mission, the Jets have not been able to overcome the Giants’ tight relationship with their loyal fan base. He attempted to make a case for it after the Jets advanced to the AFC championship game in his first two seasons while the Giants failed to make the playoffs. After his second season with the Jets, Ryan wrote a book, Play Like You Mean It. He antagonized the Giants when he said the Jets were the better team and the big brother and “we are going to remain the better team for the next ten years.”

  In the week leading up to the important Jets-Giants regular season game late in 2011, Ryan didn’t tone down the rhetoric. The Giants were coming off a bad loss to the Redskins. The Jets had just lost to the Eagles. The winner would be in good shape to make the playoffs. The loser would be in big trouble. The game was at MetLife Stadium, the $1.7 billion stadium the teams financed as 50–50 partners. This was a Jets home game, which allowed them to dress up the stadium in green. The Giants and Jets had fought over who had the honor of hosting the first regular season game when the stadium opened in 2010. When there was no agreement, Roger Goodell flipped a coin, and it came up Giants. They opened against Carolina on a Sunday afternoon, and the Jets’ consolation prize was opening against Baltimore on Monday Night Football. The Jets even came in second when they fought with the Giants over which team would get the home locker room closest to the players’ parking lot. They lost that coin flip, too. The Jets considered themselves second-class citizens for the twenty-six years they played at Giants Stadium. As the Jets pulled into the parking lot, the big blue Giants Stadium sign was staring right at them. The Giants had their offices in the stadium and were there 365 days a year. The Jets were there for eight regular season games and two preseason games, and for all but the last two years their headquarters were in Hempstead, Long Island. The Sunday night traffic after games was brutal. It could take the players two hours to cross two bridges and get home.

  When the teams agreed to work together on the new stadium, the Jets insisted that the Giants not have their offices and training facility in the stadium. They built a new training center in the outer reaches of the stadium parking lot. The Jets built a lavish facility in suburban Florham Park, New Jersey, about forty minutes from the Meadowlands. Still, when it came time for the grand opening of the new stadium, they felt like second-class citizens all over again. That was how they tried to make the Giants feel when they met in that 2011 regular season game. On the wall outside the Giants locker room are painted logos from their Super Bowl appearances along with paintings of their Vince Lombardi Trophies. The Jets players walk past that wall on the way to the locker room when they enter the stadium from the parking lot. That’s why Jets management puts up a curtain in front of that wall for every home game. The curtain went unnoticed until the Giants played the Jets with the Jets as the home team. The Giants players were livid.

  As far as the Giants were concerned, they had had enough of the Jets. They had had enough of Ryan talking big leading up to the game. They felt they were the big brother even if the Jets had had more success the previous two seasons. The Giants won the showdown game and credited Ryan for getting them fired up with his constant big brother–little brother talk. The Giants live by Tom Coughlin’s motto of “Talk is cheap. Play the game.” Coughlin reiterated that with all the stuff coming from the Jets leading up to the game. Ryan, who insisted that he respects Coughlin, lives by a different philosophy. “That’s the old saying, Talk is cheap. Money buys whiskey. I understand all that. That’s the truth, but I don’t care about Tom Coughlin or anybody else,” Ryan said. “I know how I believe, and I don’t care if it’s acceptable in everybody’s opinion. I really don’t care. I’m worried about my opinion. This is how I feel. Quite honestly, I couldn’t care less what anybody thinks.”

  The Giants beat the Jets and did not lose again on the way to their fourth Super Bowl victory.

  After the game, Ryan and Giants running back Brandon Jacobs came face to face on the field. Jacobs, at six feet four inches and 264 pounds is an imposing figure. Ryan is a large man who is not used to backing down.

  He was not about to back down from Jacobs. Their mouths were inches apart, and their left shoulders were touching.

  “It’s time to shut up, fat boy,” Jacobs said.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Ryan said.

  Classy.

  A little more than one month later, the Giants won another Super Bowl.

  “Quite honestly, it’s hard to argue. They did win the Super Bowl,” Ryan said. “But the two previous years, we were better than they were. The game against them changed two organizations. Unfortunately, we couldn’t respond, and they went on and won the Super Bowl. Even then, I’ll still never consider myself a little brother. I’m going to be fighting you. I’m going to try to get to that big brother status. They are not going to shut me up.”

  Ryan does not have a filter. It’s part genetic. He inherited that from Buddy. It’s part environmental. Some of his formative years were spent without a lot of structure in the house.

  After his parents were divorced, he lived in Toronto with his mother, Doris, his twin brother, Rob, and older brother, Jim. Rex and Rob were inseparable. “I was supposed to get deported. Absolutely. I wouldn’t go to school. I think that was part of being dyslexic and struggling and all that stuff,” he said. “I had a morning paper route, afternoon paper route, paid for everything, stole things. I wouldn’t steal a kid’s lunch money or anything like that. But we weren’t anybody you wanted to mess with, my brother and I. We basically did what we wanted. My mom was teaching all the time or she was gone.” By the time he reached high school, Rex was back living with his father.

  Rex didn’t want his sons to follow that same path of getting into trouble, but as hard as parents try, there are times kids just do dumb things. Both of Ryan’s boys became a bit too mischievous one year before the Jets hired him. “I’ve had some issues with my kids. You can check the record,” Ryan said. “It was harmless little pranks like Payton spray painting a si
gn. And they talked Seth into it, too. They had to do community service.”

  Ryan doesn’t always set the best example for his children or as a role model. One week before the Saints were playing the Colts in Super Bowl XLIV in Miami, Ryan was in town for a mixed martial arts event in Sunrise, Florida. After an interview in which he promised the Jets would beat the Dolphins twice in 2010 was broadcast throughout the arena, he was verbally harassed by some fans. Ryan showed them his middle finger. A quick-triggered fan captured the moment on his cell phone camera, and it soon went viral. The Jets fined Ryan $50,000.

  Did he learn his lesson? Not really. At halftime of a 21-point Jets loss at home to the Patriots in 2011—they were trailing only 13–9 in the first half, but the Pats scored a touchdown with only nine seconds left—Ryan was walking toward the tunnel behind the Jets’ bench leading to the locker room when a fan shouted at him.

  “Hey, Rex. Belichick is better than you,” he said.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Ryan responded.

  “Fuck you,” the fan said.

  That cost Ryan $75,000. This time the NFL fined him.

  With all the theatrics that go on around Ryan’s Jets and the way fans yell at Ryan, the Jets have a WWE feel to them.

  “Fans cuss me constantly,” Ryan said. “Usually, it’s ‘you fat ass.’ You name it, I get it. I love that part of football. I don’t want to be liked by the opposition. I want to be respected. The reason the opposing place can’t stand me is because I can beat you. That’s fine with me. They are great as long as they can kick your ass all the time. They know they can’t do that with me. I’m not going to take my rightful place underneath their team. That’s not flying with me. You can hate me; that’s fine. But if I ever coached for that team, that team would love me because they know how passionate I am and how committed I am.”