Every NFL team saw a six-five, 320-pound, fast, smart man out there in Washington and wondered the same thing: Did Hunter have the temperament to remain composed in charged athletic situations? Hunter wondered right along with them. Polynesians, Hunter said, “are aggressive people. Fun-loving, but when it comes to fighting we turn into beasts. Aggression, being hard, is cultural.” Football had appealed to him initially as “a good outlet for anything stressful. The game can be rough and I’ve been raised rough.”
After Hunter’s troubles in Seattle, his future career seemed in doubt until Brendan Prophett called from the Jets pro-personnel department at the end of 2007 and delivered him to Callahan. Watching offensive skill-position players, with their distinctive forms of athleticism, you can easily see football as an expression of self. But what football revealed in Hunter was, in truth, more profound. Had he played defense, there would have been too much aggression, a complete absence of control. “Because of the way I was raised, and because I’ve had so many off-field troubles with anger management, I try my hardest not to put myself in positions where I’ll snap,” Hunter said. “I’ve had so many fights, it’s been such a big issue. It almost ruined my chance to play.” Offensive line asked players to meld aggression with restraint, was “kind of passive-aggressive,” as Hunter thought of it. Yet while Hunter was emotionally better suited for the offensive line, he sometimes felt the inherent restrictions were incompatible with his nature. “The aggression of an offensive player is harder. You’re waiting for the guy to hit you. Sometimes it gets frustrating, irritating to take the blow. I’m a first-punch person.”
As Hunter saw it, ultimately, offensive-line play asked him to confront the central dilemma of his life. It provided him with a managed form of aggression that, if he could stay with it, would serve as antidote to his self-defeating impulses. That tension interested Callahan. Here was a player who needed him as much as any ever had. That Hunter was among the most intelligent and thoughtful players on the Jets team only made working with him more appealing to the coach. Hunter had initially been a Jet reserve. Late in the 2010 season, when the team’s right tackle Damien Woody was injured, Hunter became an emergency starter. He played the best football of his life as the team swept deep into the playoffs. Now he was a free agent, and Callahan worried that the Jets wouldn’t be able to keep him. There were so many players out there, so many potential teams for them choose from, and also the confinements of the salary cap. A coach, too, had to modulate his desire with distance.
Few people around the facility knew Hunter’s story, just as so many details of the troubles and hardships other players experienced as children were not known to most of their coaches and teammates. The players were so young that their pasts were close behind, but the facility and the democracy of tape were havens from all that. On tape was an entirely new autobiography. On tape you could be perfect.
Right now, in March 2011, building the team’s roster was the priority. Who to draft? Who to sign? Who to let go? All over the facility, day and night, people were watching college tape, debating and ranking the players who might still be available to the Jets with their thirtieth choice in the draft. Whatever needs weren’t satisfied by draft choices, the Jets would then have to fulfill with free agents. Accordingly, the organization was also ranking all NFL free agents. At various times, the upstairs scouting and personnel staff and the downstairs coaches paused their tape-watching and converged for progress reports. At one meeting, the defensive coaches and pro-personnel staff reviewed every free-agent NFL defensive player. When they got to the linebacker Antwan Barnes, who’d been with Pettine and Ryan in Baltimore, Pettine, low key until then, brightened. “Barnesy!” he said. Barnes wasn’t a classic bitch kitty, but he was close, and he would give the Jets the “suddenness” they currently lacked at the position. Not only that: “Everybody has their bitch,” said Pettine, and Barnes owned the Patriots left tackle Matt Light.
“We’d blitz him as a safety!” Ryan added.
“We’d invent ways to use him!” Pettine said, getting more enthusiastic. “He’s got some coverage ability too. We have too many guys who win on effort. We need some explosiveness.” They were pleading their case to Tannenbaum—Pettine really wanted Barnes—and Ryan and Pettine were also warming under the influence of each other, liking Barnes more and more for the Jets, seeing him as a Jet. Rosters changed so dramatically in the course of each year that part of the off-season challenge for a coach was being able to imagine how an assortment of potential players might be integrated to complete the various roles in his scheme. That was really half of NFL coaching—thinking of one’s players as characters, each with a set of skills to model in the endless sequence of narrative experiments that sixteen times a regular season became a game plan.
The conversation between Pettine and Ryan pivoted from Barnes to more general musings about the evolving position of linebacker. Instead of “big thumper types” primed to stifle the run, both coaches now preferred “a bloated safety” capable of both pass rushing and covering tight ends and running backs on pass plays. It was nice to dream of a bloat who could also thump but not wise to think you were going to find one. The ground flow would need to be stanched in some other way. So Pettine and Ryan looked at Tannenbaum, and Pettine said, “You get us a dominant big lineman, we’ll make it right around him.”
To that end, Pettine watched more film of Muhammad Wilkerson of Temple late one afternoon. Wilkerson was now a controversial player among the Jets evaluators. On film he’d occasionally make extraordinary plays, and then you wouldn’t see anything from him for long stretches of action. And this against the less-than-imposing Mid-American Conference opponents then filling Temple’s schedule. Among the Jets, just about everybody registered a “not sold” on Wilkerson because his effort from play to play was so obviously fickle. But from the start, Pettine had been a Wilkerson advocate, and that he remained. “Guys without great motors scare you,” Pettine said. “But at number thirty, that’s who you get.” Pettine was explaining his theory of scouting—which held that you determined a player’s peak level of skill, and then it was up to his coaches to get the player to play to it consistently—when into his office walked Dave Szott, a former Chiefs and later Jets guard who was now the Jets director of player development. Szott’s responsibility was player well-being, and in the organization, he was respected for understanding the emotional vicissitudes of football players. Looking at Wilkerson on the screen, Szott said, “I see some passion!”
“Eighty-five-inch wingspan is hard to coach,” Pettine said. Ryan appeared. “My rankings are way different than upstairs’,” he reported, referring to Tannenbaum and the pro-personnel department’s read on the draft. Ryan liked “the Missouri guy,” Aldon Smith, even though he was deficient on the bench press.
“What’s the easiest thing to do in the NFL?” Pettine asked, leaving Ryan to finish—“Add strength!” Alas, there was no chance Smith was still going to be around at the thirtieth pick.
“You can’t lengthen arms,” Pettine said, steering the conversation back to Wilkerson. The more Pettine and Ryan discussed Wilkerson’s arms, the more absorbing they found the subject, until they were calling in everybody who was nearby and lining them up against Pettine’s wall so Pettine could measure wingspans. Ryan’s was eighty inches, Pettine’s seventy-four, and Mike Smith’s only seventy-three and a half. Stepping back from talk of individuals, Ryan said it was “a size and speed league,” and he was with Bill Belichick, whose drafting mantra was, in Ryan’s version, “The bigger they are, the harder they hit.” In other words, when in doubt, take the larger player.
“The bigger they are, the harder they hit”—a play on the boxing cliché “The bigger they are, the harder they fall”—neatly expressed the Jets defensive strategy of creating the expectation of something familiar before doing something surprising. The phrase, of course, extolled the virtues of aggression and toughness, and more subtly it also carried with it the echo of it
s original meaning, the old warning that if you found success, you had to stay true to what got you there or risk sudden destruction.
Four
AN INEXACT SCIENCE
Can’t act. Slightly bald. Also dances.
—Screen-test report on Fred Astaire
At the end of March, all eyes were looking to the 2011 draft, which was to be held over three days beginning on Thursday, April 28. Here it was, early spring, the players now officially locked out, and even if that could soon be resolved, pro football was still months away from actual football, and yet every day at the facility, one heard the bright hum of volition. The preoccupation had shifted to the things tape couldn’t tell you about football players. Tape might not lie, but tape withheld, tape concealed. To look behind the tape, eight Jets scouts had visited two hundred and fifty schools—some of them more than once—and evaluated twelve hundred players in five thousand reports that assessed qualities like personal character, football intelligence, athletic ability, toughness, and competitive nature, as well as position-specific traits. Quarterbacks, for instance, were rated on arm strength, passing touch, pocket poise, the quickness of their feet, decision-making skills, and courage. The scouts had talked with coaches, teammates, professors, and family. Jets coaches had fanned out across the country to attend numerous pro days at big college football programs, where they worked players out, asked them questions, and challenged them to diagram plays. Local players, including New Jersey native Muhammad Wilkerson, had visited the Jets facility. During his workout, Wilkerson had put Jeff Weeks in physical danger; Weeks was atop a blocking sled, and Wilkerson raised it as if he were a sea creature and the sled a ship full of sailors. I’d watched as Wilkerson went through the drills, and as he responded to each command to sprint, change direction, or smash into something, it became clear that he was a large person who moved like a small person. That was football, the inversion of physical expectations.
All the NFL teams were engrossed in these careful assessments. And yet, at the end of April, many teams would still make mistakes because, said Joey Clinkscales, who directed the draft for the Jets, one quality remained elusive: “If there were a meter on heart, a way to measure how much a guy cares, we’d draft only Revises.”
Up in the draft room, football’s version of a political-campaign war room, where all the final decisions would eventually be made, Tannenbaum was watching film of draft candidates and thinking about how to measure another person’s desire. The walls of the large rectangular meeting space were stark white and emblazoned with green slogans. One of them read “In God we trust; for everyone else we need data.” Another said “Talent and character. You can’t have one without the other.” In front of the ten yards of vast draft board, heavy white stage-style curtains were drawn together, and where the two sections met there was a padlock.
As he watched the film, Tannenbaum said that those skill players who were willing to block indicated they likely had the “urgency” he was looking for. Another possible augury was “guys with no escape clause, guys with nothing else” going for them in life except football. Still, the GM said, you often learned the most about young men by sitting across a desk and asking them questions. In mid-April, every NFL team would have the opportunity to invite up to thirty draft-eligible players to spend a “get to know you” day at the team’s facility. (Teams were allowed additional unlimited invitations for local players who grew up or went to college near where the team was based.) Tannenbaum said I should think up a series of interview questions that might reveal something about a person’s drive and ambition. If my questions were good enough, I could join him and Ryan when they interviewed potential Jets rookies, and, he said, “We’ll let you have at them. We don’t have any pride about taking credit for these things; we just want to get them right.”
It was ironic that I was suddenly the desire guy. At lunch Pettine and Smitty had been speculating about what kind of driver I was.
Smith: “You’re careful. Very cautious.”
Pettine: “Ten to two on the wheel.”
Smith: “How fast do you go?”
Me: “Oh, very fast! At least seventy-five. Absolute minimum seventy-five. Faster in a speed trap!”
Smith: “Yeah, you’re the slow guy ahead of me in the fast lane who won’t switch lanes!”
When I got home that night and told my wife about it, she said she wondered if they’d read something I’d once written about learning to ride a motorcycle. “Hon,” she said. “Do they know you’re the author of ‘The Mild One’?”
I wanted to get a feel for how the people who were said to be the most skilled at seeing into players did it, and so I visited with Terry Bradway, the former Jets GM, who was generally credited by Tannenbaum for convincing him to draft Darrelle Revis; and also with Sara Hickmann, the team’s psychologist. Bradway now lived a couple of hours south, down near Atlantic City, and even though he said that his current role with the team was to appear intermittently and “stir it up,” everybody at the facility looked forward to his visits. Tannenbaum referred to him as “Ray of Sunshine.”
Back in 2007, the Jets had held the twenty-fifth pick in the draft. Bradway traveled to see Revis work out at the University of Pittsburgh pro day, which took place in a snowstorm. It seemed to Bradway that Revis, out on the wet, murky field, could imagine no better place to be. Bradway never saw him drop a ball, and in the movement drills Revis displayed such a gift for the efficient use of space, Bradway called Tannenbaum and told him, “We have to trade up and get this guy.” They did, with the fourteenth pick.
Bradway told me about Revis because I’d asked him to. On his own he brought up Vernon Gholston and Trezelle Jenkins, “the two dud first-round picks I’ve been involved with.” Jenkins was an offensive lineman who’d been drafted in the first round in 1995 when Bradway was with the Chiefs and played in only nine NFL games. To keep himself from persistent regret, Bradway said he took to heart the experience of former San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh, the great silver-haired guru of quarterbacks. In 2000, when Walsh returned to the team as its GM, he brought to the 49ers facility for a local workout a slow, gangly University of Michigan signal caller. The kid had grown up right over the hill in San Mateo rooting for the 49ers. When the draft came, in the third round, instead of selecting the Michigan quarterback, Walsh chose Hofstra’s Giovanni Carmazzi, who failed to make the San Francisco roster. “Never played an NFL snap,” said Bradway. “Now he’s a sheep farmer and a yoga guy. Has no TV or phone. There’s your exact science.” The Patriots didn’t know what they had either. They took the slow, gangly Michigan kid, Tom Brady, as an afterthought, late in the sixth round.
Sara Hickmann was a blond former college gymnast who wore muted yet stylish skirt-and-sweater ensembles to work. The players liked to critique her outfits. There were very few women around the team at the facility, and I admired Hickmann’s ability to maintain a self-effacing yet distinctive presence there, a keeper of the players’ and coaches’ private thoughts who brightened in their company. Football players were trained to ignore pain, to never admit weakness and shun those who did, but over the years, enough of them had opened up to Hickmann that she had learned much about the inner lives of football players. After five minutes in conversation with someone new, she could reliably guess what position he played. She said that the police arrested the Xs more often than the Os because “they’re trained to defend, are more reactive and protective—more aggressive.” Linebackers were the most aggressive defensive players; cornerbacks exuded conspicuous self-confidence; and safeties tended to have excellent memories and be inclusive people.
Plenty of others besides Hickmann subscribed to this idea of positional personality prototypes. The Jets scout Michael Davis said of wide receivers, “They’re always on the edge.” Pettine believed that cornerbacks were “the wide receivers of the defense,” while safeties typically had “football smarts.” Bradway noticed that defensive players had the messier lockers. But back in his
(orderly) office, DT said he didn’t know about all that. “I want playmakers!” he roared. “Give me Ed Reed! Troy Polamalu! You think they’re worried about protecting anybody?” All of them were right. Appraising football players was a fundamentally inexact science.
Tannenbaum, more than most people, valued punctuality, and when I arrived late to a pre-draft pro-personnel meeting in his office, I was fined just as anybody else would have been. Tannenbaum gave me a choice: I could pay the standard one hundred dollars or roll the dice and cover the cost of the day’s draft-room four o’clock coffee-and-treats order from Starbucks. I rolled. Everyone vowed to order half the menu. Then Joey Clinkscales turned his attention to the purple-bandanna headband I’d worn while working out and still had on. He said there were “headband concerns.” I was getting used to being evaluated by these expert evaluators. With its need to make many people conform to a unified purpose, football did not prize difference. I was different. In this SUV world, my car was a Mini Cooper. At lunchtime, I was the only one eating beet salads from the cafeteria salad bar. When coaches spoke of a pass route, they pronounced the word “rout,” and I kept pronouncing it “root.” Too often, when someone extended his hand to greet me with a fist bump, I thought he meant to shake and… ugh. “It’s because you are used to the world of business!” said Smitty, trying to help. All my life I had gone by Nicky, but here above my locker the nameplate said “Nick Dawidoff.” This was because Nick hit harder than Nicky.
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