In walked Edmond “Clyde” Gates, a speedy receiver from Abilene Christian who was raised by his mother and grandfather because his father was in prison for murder during most of his childhood. Gates said his father had recently been released and that the two were “trying to get to know each other.” When Tannenbaum asked him if he could remove one possession from a burning house what it would be, Gates said, “I don’t have anything that important to me.”
My own favorite possession happened to be that Mini Cooper, the first car I had ever owned. The day before, someone had parked up against my bumper and left a deep scrape. When I mentioned this to DT, who prized his sporty BMW roadster, he told me, “You know what, you got to stop obsessing about that car. The stars have aligned and your bumper got scratched. You know what they tell you in Pop Warner? Move on! You’re a player now. You have a battle scar. Move on and enjoy that car.” Everybody could use a coach like DT.
Joey Clinkscales’s man Denarius Moore had arrived, a laid-back country boy from a two-stoplight Texas town, and each question sank him lower in his seat, so by the time I, seated on a couch to his left, asked Moore a question, he turned to face me and rested his chin on the chair’s armrest, peering at me like a cat.
UCLA’s potential bitch kitty Akeem Ayers wore monogrammed cuffs and said he aspired to go to law school some day. Tannenbaum told him that he himself had been. “How’d you like it?” inquired Ayers. “Lot of reading. Stick with pass rushing,” Tannenbaum advised.
Most kids who grew up in Texas want to play college football in Texas. Josh Thomas, a University of Buffalo cornerback, said he went so far afield from his Lone Star home because his mother remarried, and once the stepfather showed up, “things got hectic.” He’d found rescue when his grandmother took him in. If his home caught fire, Thomas said, he’d rescue the pen his grandmother used to pay his bills. And if Thomas made the NFL, with his own first check, he planned to fill her house with groceries. Tannenbaum decided Thomas was “the most sympathetic figure ever.”
Not to DT. Downstairs he and O’Neil were discussing Thomas’s struggles with their technical football questions. I told them about his grandmother’s pen. DT was appalled: “You want to win football games, you need some gangstas!” DT could hardly wait to meet Jimmy Smith and had graded that interview in advance: “Double plus!”
“How are you?” Tannenbaum asked Louisville running back Bilal Powell.
“I’m good, how are you?” Powell replied in the softest voice we’d yet heard. Powell wore inexpensive jeans and a thin gray polo shirt over a T-shirt.
“I’m pretty damn average,” said Tannenbaum from behind his desk. “I eat too much; I don’t exercise nearly as much as I need to.” Powell managed a smile. He described being raised by his hardworking mother in a rough part of Lakeland, Florida. His father was a drug addict, and Powell eventually joined a gang, the Brick Boyz. He was stabbed and nearly shot before he found a new kind of fellowship in Christianity and football. The implicit irony, and maybe not so ironic, was that the violence of the sport had saved Powell from a life of violence. Powell said he liked the game “because within the rules you can be a good person and hit somebody.” His worst experience in football involved a coach who “tried to make me give up my faith.” Ryan often celebrated football for bringing together every kind of person. He wanted to know if Powell minded playing with guys who have no faith. Powell said, “Everybody’s okay with me.”
After Powell left, Ryan and Tannenbaum were very moved. “He reminds me of Curtis Martin,” Tannenbaum said, referring to his all-time favorite Jet. The Hall of Fame running back, as a young boy, had watched his drug-addicted father punch his mother, scald her, and burn her hair with a lighter. Martin himself soon found trouble. When Martin was a teenager, a loaded gun was held to his head and the trigger pulled repeatedly. The gun did not fire. “Curtis woke up one day, his grandmother was stabbed, and it later changed his life,” Tannenbaum said. “This kid [Powell], in ninth grade he gets stabbed, he changes. That’s also a testament to coaching.” They agreed that Powell would do very well working with A-Lynn, the Jets running-backs coach.
Tannenbaum and Ryan were two prosperous men talking to young people who came from nothing. Ryan’s mother had a PhD. His father owned a Kentucky horse farm. Tannenbaum had grown up in a well-to-do Boston suburb. Neither had been fed with a silver spoon, but they’d always been provided for. And how many football players had they met? Yet over and over, they empathized with people most of whom they very likely would never meet again. They could draft only six of them.
When Jimmy Smith finally appeared, he was, unbeknownst to him, a conquering hero. Yarnell and the scouts had signed off. So had the van driver. Tannenbaum, Ryan, and the coaches couldn’t wait to lay eyes on him, and Smith didn’t disappoint. He wore loafers, conservative gray trousers, and a diamond in one ear, an outfit that seemed to communicate many things to many constituencies. His conversation had similar complexity. In one moment, he told of how he “got popped” for having smoked marijuana. In the next, he was extolling the virtues of Perry Mason. His pet peeve: “I don’t hate to be told what to do, but sometimes I hate to be told what to do.” His brother had been in a gang, but Smith hadn’t, because “I’m not into getting jumped or jumping people or getting shot or stabbed. I’m scared.” What did a kid from the California hood think of Boulder, Colorado? Smith said he liked the hiking.
All this work and preparation, but so often the draft confounded it. You could study a person until you were sure you knew him, and then he turned out to be a different person on a football field. Everybody, said Pettine, “got fooled” evaluating players, first and foremost because “they’re still kids. So much depends upon putting a kid in the right system for him to succeed.”
The Jets’ 2010 first-round draft choice was cornerback Kyle Wilson. Wilson came from a close, well-educated Piscataway, New Jersey, family. His father was a mental-health clinician at a university hospital; his mother taught high-school math. Wilson had badly wanted to play for New Jersey’s state university, but Rutgers hesitated, and so he agreed to attend Boise State. Then Rutgers offered him the scholarship. Wilson turned it down, saying he’d given his word to Boise. To the Jets, this had been a sign that Wilson had integrity, could handle himself in life and so likewise would be able to handle it when his job struck back at him.
The job of a cornerback meant a crisis was always in the offing. Everyone who played the position gave up long plays. Good corners had short memories. As a collegian, Wilson was far better than good. He had pliant hips that allowed him to change direction at a sprint, minimizing the wasted motion that allows receivers to gain separation. At top speed he could look back for the ball, and looking back is how interceptions happen and interference penalties don’t. An aggressive, trash-talking defender on the field, off it Wilson was humble and well-spoken. The Jets were thrilled when he was available to them with the twenty-ninth pick of the first round.
A few weeks later, at the end of Wilson’s (impressive) rookie mini-camp with the Jets, his mother arrived at the facility to pick him up and take him back to Piscataway. Most of the other Jets rookies were boarding a bus for the airport, and right there, in front of everyone, Wilson greeted his mother with a big kiss. Kissing your mom in front of forty football players you’ve just met is only slightly harder than a fourteen-year-old boy coming in for one in front of forty fellow fourteen-year-olds. The Jets who heard about the kiss were even more certain that the one thing Wilson would never lose was his poise on a football field.
But he did. With Cromartie and Revis in place as the lead cover men, the Jets asked Wilson to protect the slot, where he’d never played before. And when opposing quarterbacks began to have their way with him, he became so demoralized that he lost his ability to react without thinking. Mike Westhoff, the special-teams coach, who had been in the NFL for nearly thirty years, said, “Saturday’s a great game too, but Sunday’s a man’s game and I don’t think Kyle
Wilson had a man’s body yet.” Soon Wilson was having difficulty looking back for the ball, flailing in space. There was a smell of burning. Eventually the Jets replaced him with Drew Coleman. Now the hope was that the lockout would end quickly enough to give Wilson sufficient time to remember how to forget.
On Friday, April 15, thirteen days before the draft, with the scheduled interviews concluded, the defensive coaching staff came upstairs to the draft room. By now the sanding had been done, the coats of primer and stain had been layered on, brushed, and sealed, and the time had come to apply the finishing varnish on the 2011 draft board—to pass final review on every defensive player the Jets would consider drafting. Offensive players had received their final review already. Because this process was so time-consuming and labor intensive, once the offensive review was done, the scouts and draft specialists had taken a few days outside the bunker to clear their heads. Now they were back inside to assess the defense. Special teams, as always, would have to wait until last.
Nineteen men in jeans and one in sweats (Ryan) sat around a long, wide, white table that filled most of the space in the draft room. The Jets’ eight full-time scouts were all in place, waiting to describe their year’s adventures. The defensive coaches and front-office draft people, including Joey Clinkscales, Terry Bradway, and Scott Cohen, were on hand. The floor rug was gray, the ceiling low, and there were no windows, no distractions. A video screen would drop at the push of a button so that a Combine photograph of each player and his draft card could be displayed as he was discussed. There were thick binders everywhere. There was a situation-room feel. A bucket of bubble gum was available to those in need.
The jovial Clinkscales, wearing designer eyeglasses and a cashmere sweater (his mother was a beautician—chic ran in the family), sat at the head of the table and led the meetings. Tannenbaum and Ryan were to his right. Off on the other side of the room, watching the team’s back, was Bradway. Bradway had with him two ring binders; two notebooks; a laptop; a stack of internal reports, including the player evaluations made by Ryan, Pettine, and the positional coaches on the basis of all those winter weeks of film study; and memos from outside psychological experts with comments on the order of “Low motivation because believes has no control over events in his life. Raised in extreme poverty. No belief system.” Among the coaches, Sutton had the most documentation with him. It spoke well of both Ryan and Tannenbaum, many scouts said, that such fine football men as Bradway and Sutton should accept lower positions with the Jets rather than going to work somewhere else.
The thick white curtain along the front wall was unpadlocked, revealing the draft board itself, a periodic table of college football players consisting of colored magnetized cards ranking the 190 players the Jets considered draft-worthy. Top players (rated 6.4 and above) got purple cards, then came blue (6.25), red (6.0), and green (5.7). There was also a small cluster of black-dotted cards indicating players who, for reasons of health or temperament, the Jets would not consider. Next to one such player’s card was a photograph of him brandishing a gun. What a world, I thought, where gangstas are desirable, but a player with a gun is taking the tough-guy thing way too far.
The cards were arranged by positional groups and ranked. As the draft neared, the rankings would fluctuate like political tracking polls. On one end wall was the side board, which displayed the cards of the second-tier players and their free-agent grades. The Jets would attempt to sign them after the draft if no other team took them; the Jets themselves had never drafted a player from their side board. On the long back wall were 224 empty slots, one for each pick in the draft’s seven rounds. As players were chosen during the draft, their cards would move across the table from the Jets board and into their selection slots on the back wall.
One way that Tannenbaum signaled his faith in the organization was by his willingness to trade away clumps of lower draft choices for a higher draft choice that would enable the Jets to select a player they’d targeted but feared they might lose to another team drafting before them. The Patriots under Belichick tended to go the other way, trading down to amass extra choices, apparently reasoning that the more tickets they bought in a raffle, the likelier they were to win the prize. Last year the Jets had kept only four choices, drafting Kyle Wilson and three offensive players. This year a trade had left the Jets with no second-round pick. Pettine and the defense were feeling entitled to most of the remaining six. “Linemen,” Clinkscales said. “Marcell Dareus, Alabama,” and the review began.
Close to an hour of discussion was devoted to every last player, even the most acclaimed stars of the year, like Cam Newton, cornerback Patrick Peterson, receiver A. J. Green, and pass rushers Von Miller and Aldon Smith, none of whom the Jets had bothered to bring in for interviews because all would be long gone before the thirtieth choice came around on draft night. “Is there any hope?” Tannenbaum asked when they got to players like Miller and Robert Quinn of North Carolina, sounding like a Republican presidential candidate talking about the chances of winning Massachusetts. No, he was told, none at all. With Peterson, again the same question, and again the same answer. Ryan’s solution to the painful image of another team’s uniform on J. J. Watt, the offense-wrecking Wisconsin lineman, was to become his champion, offering the bet of a Frappuccino to anybody who didn’t think that Watt would go in the top ten. “Whoever you get at thirty, there’s something wrong,” said Tannenbaum, summarizing the predicament. “That’s why they’re still there at thirty.”
On the one hand, Wilkerson had a trick shoulder and that sometimes-sputtering engine. On the other hand, he’d left home for a military academy. Would he play with intensity? Here was a quandary Wilkerson himself had said he couldn’t resolve.
Pettine was steadfast. The Jets, he said, needed linemen and linebackers with movement skills because more rules regulating contact were surely in the offing, and they’d only make a fast sport faster: “A boundary-to-boundary video game is what’s coming,” Pettine said. Ryan agreed. His father, Buddy, once told him never to pass up the chance to draft an “unusual defensive lineman.” So now, whenever concerns were voiced concerning Wilkerson, the head coach told all the others again about the young Haloti Ngata.
The room was rife with analogy. Everybody was similar to somebody else, which meant that when the coaches got to the University of Miami’s Allen Bailey, his chiseled physique up on the video screen elicited the dread comparison. “Somebody trying to kill him!” a voice from the far end of the table murmured. “Somebody just did!” exclaimed Clinkscales. Tannenbaum shook his head. “It’s becoming a verb, to Vernon someone,” he said.
During the Kenrick Ellis discussion, Tannenbaum turned to Michael Davis and put the scout on the spot: “You legitimately, sincerely trust this guy?”
“I do,” said Davis who before becoming a scout had coached for nine years at Virginia State, a historically black university, like Hampton. Davis had visited Hampton to see Ellis four times. “When his mother said, ‘You’ll never amount to nothing,’ it had a big effect on him.” Ellis mentioned his mother so often that Davis had asked what she was like. The scout said he had heard she was a difficult person. Ellis told him, “Mr. Mike, fuck that! My mama’s a church lady!”
The draft was a vacillating game of chance featuring sufficient clues and variables to create the illusion that certitude was possible. It wasn’t. The Jets didn’t know whom they’d have a chance to draft or what the man they did draft would turn out to be like. In a world that was out of the Jets’ control, there was comfort only in spending these twelve-to-thirteen-hour draft-room days reviewing more data, dedicating themselves to the process.
There were many moments of indecision about players, and to overcome them, the men fell back on that single reassuring phrase—“Tape don’t lie!”—lowered the video screen, and looked at the cut-ups again. But what was on film did not always bring clarity. After watching Wilkerson yet again, Clinkscales said, “The reason we have a debate is half the time he’s jo
gging around.” In the end, all they could do was make clearer the potential risks and rewards. A useful way to do so was by comparing players head-to-head. One of these virtual Oklahoma drills featured Clemson’s Da’Quan Bowers against Robert Quinn. Bowers, perhaps the most gifted player in the draft, had suffered the dreaded microfractures in his knee, a potentially career-ending injury. Quinn was, after J. J. Watt, Ryan’s favorite defender, but he had a brain tumor. Nobody knew what to say; they were all men in need of good horses choosing their mounts from Thomas Hobson’s stable. “Quinn!” said Ryan, only because everyone relied on him to go first. “A brain tumor’s not something you just tape up,” said Tannenbaum, and the impossibility of the choice resonated anew.
Tannenbaum thought of the Jets as an enlightened company where the input of everyone throughout the hierarchy was crucial. Here, he was seeking guidance through dissent that, he hoped, would lead to consensus. Often consensus would not be possible, but the eventual draft choices, Tannenbaum thought, should follow logically from transparent discussions. Somebody had to choose, and Tannenbaum was the somebody, but what the GM wanted was institutional momentum. His lone concession to spontaneity was to “give” one low draft pick a year to Ryan. Last year the coach had selected Kentucky fullback John Conner, who blocked like a crate of bourbon and had receiving hands to match. During the subsequent rookie camp, Ryan would say, “Conner’s my fullback until he drops a couple. Then he’s Tannenbaum’s!”
The scouts respected Ryan’s written reports and the way he helped them understand what kind of players would succeed in his system even as he expressed a willingness to find a role for any kind of legitimate talent. Ryan’s motto, Play like a Jet, meant tenacious physical play, but even then he loved Cromartie, wouldn’t say a word against his tackling. In the draft room, the scouts appreciated that the head coach’s opinions were delivered clean and crisp as the snow-white thermal shirts he often wore: “This guy couldn’t play dead in a B Western” was a typical Ryan analysis. (Clinkscales, getting into the spirit, said of one defender, “He gets beat like Sunday eggs.”) But during the long, tense days inside close walls with Ryan, the former draft-obsessed college student who now got to play for real, there was always a little time for joy. In that regard, they all relied on Ryan’s new scheme for shedding weight—a liquid diet. At lunch, he spooned himself meager sips of soup broth and afterward spoke dirges to all the heaping platters of Mexican food—he called it “Rexican”—that were out in the world passing him by—right up until the late-afternoon Starbucks order arrived with a Frappuccino the size of a grain silo marked “Rex.” After a long, revitalizing swill he’d report, “That’ll jack you up!” When his chair popped a screw, the coach was instantly indignant: “And I’ve lost weight!” When snacks were brought in on a tray, Ryan would look up hopefully, and if he beheld only vegetables, he’d fix Tannenbaum a look: “Who did this?”
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