An extreme version of what coaching could do to you and what could happen if you didn’t have the job anymore was the recent plight of former NFL coach Corwin Brown. Some of the Jets coaches had worked with Brown and described him as a first-rate person but too dedicated a worker. After, at most, a couple of hours of sleep, he’d be awake and back to it. Gradually, Brown had begun to lose control. The Patriots, his last team, let him go, and he soon became hard to locate. The old telephone numbers went out of service, people stopped hearing from him, and then he was in a standoff with a SWAT team outside his Indiana home. Brown held his wife hostage and, eventually, shot and wounded himself. The talk of Brown among the Jets coaches was the rare intrusion at the facility of the world out there. It wasn’t that the coaches were dull men. When you work all the time, the other aspects of your identity recede until they seem to have disappeared.
The storm turned out to be Hurricane Irene, a killing disaster of high wind, hard rain, power outages, and worse, so it was wise that the Jets had boarded up the windows and taken down the practice-field goalposts. Schotty waited out the storm at home alone, sleeping and overseeing the offense as best he could, and Pettine likewise was “bunkered down in my place.” The Ryans lost power and checked in to a hotel.
Two days later, the exhibition game with the Giants was finally played. Steve Weatherford of the Giants had been the Jets punter the previous year, but Westhoff had declared that he didn’t do the job and let him go. Out on the field before the game, Weatherford angled a practice punt toward his old mentor and just missed him. Meanwhile, a young Giants coach was busily making notes, and Smitty walked over to say hello. Looking down, Smitty saw that the coach’s notes consisted entirely of scribbles. What was up with that? Smitty asked. The young coach confessed that that he had no idea what coaches did on the field before a game, so every few minutes he’d take out his pen and scribble thoughtfully, just in case Giants head coach Tom Coughlin was watching. Coughlin was a fabled perfectionist, and nobody ever knew what would get him worked up.
Supposedly, according to the New York tabloid newspapers, the Jets were filled with antipathy for the Giants, the team with whom they shared a stadium and a city. But the Jets coaches didn’t feel that way. They respected Coughlin and many of the Giants players. The two teams would play in earnest at the end of the regular season, so the coaching tactics on display during a 17–3 Jets victory had a restrained feel; both teams’ staffs were holding back for the appropriate time and place—except for Coughlin, it turned out. While watching the film the next day, the Jets defensive coaches were amused to see many shots of him at a characteristic boil, looking like a guy whom the dry cleaner had just told, “Sorry, sir. Six suits you say? Never heard of them.”
Since no Jet player had generated anything remotely like a bitch-kitty pass rush so far, Tannenbaum went looking out in the street and brought to camp Aaron Maybin. The linebacker had been a first-round choice of the Bills, but his two years in Buffalo had been marked by his inability to record a single sack, and now the Bills had cut him. Maybin’s first-round background made him a curiosity to the others. Players and coaches took in his loud speaking voice and his high-strung way on and away from the field and were at first put off. There were denigrating rumors that Maybin didn’t know how to drive, denigrating nicknames like Megaphone, and denigrating assessments like “one-trick pony.” Maybin just went about his high-pitched business and ran, said Pettine, “like a gazelle with an Achilles.” Standing still, he was in a hurry.
“In the two years we’ve been here, we haven’t had a guy who could explode off the edge like that,” Pettine said. He told Smitty to pay extra attention to Maybin. After that, everywhere that Smitty went, Maybin was sure to go. If you closed your eyes during their impromptu tutorials as Smitty told Maybin, “We don’t coach effort. This ain’t Buffalo,” you could mistake Smitty for Pettine.
One more preseason game remained to be played, against the Eagles. To an NFL team, the last exhibition was virtually meaningless. Starters were held out for fear of injury, and the only people who prepared much for it were the young players striving to make the roster. Final cuts would come after the game. Beforehand, Ryan told them all more or less exactly what he’d told the rookie Mike Smith back in Baltimore days: “The truth of the matter is that for some of you, this will be the last game you ever play in your life. This is the cold, hard facts. It’s the business. So make sure you’re going out representing whoever coached you, your parents.” Then Brian Smith, who’d nearly made the 49ers ten years earlier, stood before the players and described the dark moment at home after San Francisco let him go, when he sat on his couch and realized “the game I loved all my life was gone for me.” Looking out at the players, B-Smitty, the quietest of the Jets coaches, talked with feeling of how much he envied them. B-Smitty worked long, uncomplaining hours and seemed bashful around his superiors. He was a minister’s son, a studious cum laude graduate of the University of Massachusetts. Then I saw him away from the facility, and it turned out he had a switch of his own. He greeted me merrily as Nicky Barnes—a reference to the Harlem drug kingpin who was Mr. Untouchable, until he wasn’t.
The last preseason game mattered so little that Pettine intended to give the other defensive coaches the experience of calling a play series under live conditions. The day before the game, each of them received a call sheet. “Nicky,” Pettine told me, “study up.” He handed me a color-coded glossy piece of paper with calls from the playbook listed under the various personnel groups and then divided further by the down-and-distance situation. “Be ready,” he said. “You’ll be in control of a multimillion-dollar machine.” Immediately there was a sense of panic. From the installs, I had a vague understanding of some of the plays. I had no confidence I’d remember them under pressure, much less know how to select them in relation to the strengths and weaknesses of young Eagles players I’d never heard of. Still, who could resist? I began to work up mnemonics to memorize calls like Odd Wolf Fire Zone, 3-2 Crown 1, Nickel Dog 1, and Dime Spike 1 (Vegas)—calls that were, of course, mnemonics already.
Invariably interesting was the etymology of the call names. Zip Double Field was for Jason Taylor, the former Jets pass rusher who’d played his college ball at the University of Akron, whose team was the Zips. Squirrel dated back to the Ravens and referred to the linebacker Jarret Johnson, whose rural, small-town southern childhood was said to involve squirrel hunting and maybe also squirrel eating. The players thrived on these little recognitions. With the calls, the point, of course, was to create names the players could easily remember. For instance, the first two letters of the call Snake signified a safety and nickel blitz. Many of the calls were variations on one another. A pressure called Cable, dreamed up for a game against the Raiders and named for then Oakland coach Tom Cable, had since yielded related calls like Comcast and others, all named for cable-service providers. As for Dime Spike 1 (Vegas), it had its origins in a pass coverage drop Ryan had created in Baltimore for a big defensive lineman named Keith Washington who’d played his college football at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas.
The usual way for Schottenheimer to install his game plan during the season was across three days. First- and second-down plays would be addressed on Wednesday. Thursday was for third down, and on Friday came the red-zone calls (money-zone, in Schotty’s personal terminology). But none of that for this week. McElroy would play quarterback against the Eagles, and so Cavanaugh was preparing him by asking questions about the offensive playbook. After McElroy finally answered one incorrectly, he said, “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to say you’re sorry,” Cavanaugh told him.
“You’re demanded to say you’re sorry at Alabama,” McElroy explained.
“Are you at Alabama?”
“No.”
“I’ll get tired of hearing ‘I’m sorry.’ ”
In the locker room at the stadium for the Eagles game, we all put on khaki pants and matching green a
nd white Jets polo shirts and caps. I slipped my folded call sheet into my pocket. Then I removed and unfolded it several times to make notes, reminding myself of things. Golf carts drove us through the stadium tunnels to the elevator, which then delivered us to the coaching box at press level. There weren’t enough chairs in the box so I stood behind the coaches, as I’d done each week. In that little glassed-in room, even though there were spectators right there in adjoining boxes or in seats below, you felt removed from the enormous crowd around you, felt you were sealed off in a capsule that was its own little mind space. In the second quarter, McElroy, following through on a throw, slammed his hand down on a lineman’s helmet, breaking his thumb. He thought it was dislocated and tried to pop it back in and keep playing—he would have done anything to keep playing—but then Schottenheimer called another pass, and McElroy discovered he could not grip the ball to throw it.
Up in the booth, coach after coach had his turn calling defensive plays, passing them down to DT who sent them out to the Mike linebacker. At the very end of the third quarter, with the Jets losing a desultory game, 21–7, Pettine looked at me. My heart shifted. “Nicky, you ready?” he said in that even voice of his. Jim O’Neil was going to call the first- and second-down plays of the drive; the third downs were mine. O’Neil, excited, said something about “Let’s do this, buddy.”
I took the seat beside O’Neil and retrieved my call sheet. covered now with so many notations that some calls were illegible. I put on the headphones, thick and warm as earmuffs. On the open defensive channel I could hear Ryan and DT talking down on the sideline. Ben Kotwica, who’d flown night missions in those Apache helicopters, had told me what to expect from the headphones: “We’ve got six people on five radios and it’s just like Baghdad—that headset chirps as much as any radio frequency I was ever on when I was flying. Rex talks to Pet, DT tries to call in the defense, Sutt doesn’t usually say shit, O’Neil a little bit, but mostly Rex, Pet, and DT.” Kotwica believed that “if you packaged it right, it’s the number-one show on TV. It’s comedy. Should we challenge a call or not? Trying to get eleven guys onto the field. That fog of battle. Everybody’s got a game plan, but things happen and the enemy’s got a vote.”
Pettine showed me which button to push to speak. Behind me, Scott Cohen was calling out the personnel groupings. What looked orderly and matter-of-fact when Pettine did it now felt as though it were happening very, very fast. I looked at my sheet, trying to follow as O’Neil made his calls, doing a nice job of backing up the Eagles to third and fourteen. “All yours, Nicky,” he said, his voice thrilling with accomplishment. I had no idea what to call. I blurted, “Nickel Dog,” a five-man pressure. I liked dogs! Then I watched my nice Nickel Dog leave me, trot smoothly through the wires, stop to get a pat and a command from DT, and then dash out onto the field, where the Eagles second-year quarterback Mike Kafka—smart!, Northwestern!—showed my nickel dog a trick, completing a twenty-yard throw for a first down. My face was scarlet. How can I explain? There was the feeling that Pettine had loaned me something rightfully his, something valuable, something I had no business touching. It was a borrowed sports car I’d wanted to return without scratches and already it had a big dent.
The Eagles drive continued. Again O’Neil got to third down—third and two. Again he said, “All yours, Nicky,” his voice a bit less enthusiastic this time. I’d always liked the sound of Dime Spike 1 (Vegas). The call meant that the dime, or sixth defensive back, should blitz. As the dime sprinted toward the line, the defensive tackle would spike, or suddenly switch from the B gap between the guard and tackle on the line to the A gap between the guard and center, leaving the B gap free for the dime to pass through. Meanwhile, another one of the defensive linemen—in this case, Marcus Dixon—would bluff a rush and then make a Vegas drop into short area pass coverage. Quarterbacks didn’t expect a lineman to be prowling around back there, and, if the call worked, they wouldn’t see Dixon. Dixon was a large figure, but quarterbacks were like most people: under pressure, they surmised, noticing only what they had seen before.
Pettine was right. All the sounds around me fell away and it was intoxicating to be in control of these fast, powerful men, to make what was about to happen on a field far below take place. I felt a little like a puppet master: I spoke, they moved. I called for the blitz, garnishing it with the Vegas drop. And then something amazing happened. Kafka, under pressure, threw over the middle, right where Marcus Dixon’s long left arm could reach. Dixon tipped the ball, enabling the defensive back Ellis Lankster to intercept the pass and return it sixty-seven yards for a touchdown. In the box, as Lankster zoomed toward the end zone, everyone was yelling except me. I was incredulous and now felt like a kingpin who’d been sampling some of his own product. In the aftermath, I was struck by how purely happy the coaches were. The play had worked to perfection, just as its designers had imagined it. Dime Spike 1 (Vegas) was such a beautifully conceived football idea that rookies and free agents could succeed with it—I could succeed with it. I thought that even as I was completely dumbfounded by the utter luck of it all.
After the kickoff, Pettine told me, “You call a pick-six, you get to keep going.” Everyone was joking about my “hot hand,” about my getting them “another quick score to tie it up,” about the Jets having finally found an offense in me. Instead, I efficiently drove the Eagles down the field for a game-sealing field goal. When my calls failed, I could hear the coaches on the wires lamenting the missed assignments of linebackers, and now a small part of me wanted to agree with them.
The next day, I began what would be my routine for the season, attending the daily 8:00 a.m. quarterback meeting in Schottenheimer’s office and then rejoining the defense for the rest of the day. I was one minute late to my first film session back with the defensive coaches. I’d never been late before. As I took my old chair between DT and Sutton, DT said, “He spends a week with the offense and look what happens.” Then Pettine said, “Guy calls a pick-six and thinks he can make his own rules.” The walls of the meeting room were covered with the numbers and initials of players who might be cut from the roster. On the bubble were names like MTV and Posey and Lankster and, also, Maybin, who’d twice sacked the Eagles quarterback.
All afternoon, there was the smell of gunpowder in the air. A succession of players with gloomy faces trudged upstairs with their playbooks to visit Brendan Prophett. They were young men at the pinnacle of their abilities, and already what they most wanted to do in life was over for them. Some told Prophett they’d been expecting to hear from him; others had no idea, were floored. One linebacker walked into the office before Prophett could send for him and, said Prophett, “cut himself.” Prophett thought that most were “melancholy, forlorn.” They all asked Prophett why. A few, including Scotty McKnight, promised to prove the Jets wrong. It was rare, Prophett said, that anyone did.
Lankster was cut. Two days later, Aaron Maybin was cut. He sobbed, completely devastated. Davon Morgan, the Virginia Tech safety whose cousin had been killed, said he “expected the best and prepared for the worst.” He was in the cafeteria when he was summoned to the office of JoJo Wooden, a senior personnel executive who was sympathetic, knew what this day felt like. After playing linebacker at Syracuse, Wooden had been to training camp with the Arizona Cardinals only to be cut, while his brother, Terry, had had a long NFL career. Wooden told Morgan, “We wish we could keep you, but there’s not enough room.”
“If you really liked me you’d make room,” Morgan told him. Then, “I gritted my teeth and got out of there.” The lockout, Morgan believed, had kept him from gaining the sort of familiarity with the playbook and other members of the secondary, which would have allowed him to show the coaches what a smart, decisive player he was. Back at home in Richmond, he said, “At first I was in the slums, confused and hurt. I was lost. I never had nothing. I worked for this all my life.” But Morgan also felt that “it’s easier to hold on to remorse, to hold on to pain,” and he decided that such
would not happen to him. “Nothing could take the taste out of my mouth for football,” he said. “That’s what I love.” He found a job but worked out every day—“I’m prayin’ on a shot.”
Posey and MTV and Josh Baker were among those assigned to the practice squad—a group of up to eight young players who practiced with the Jets but did not dress for games and whose presence with the team did not count as part of the fifty-three-man roster. Meanwhile, defensive back Dwight Lowery was traded to Jacksonville. D-Lo had wonderful skills, but the coaches felt that he hadn’t progressed beyond the player he was when he joined the Jets in 2008. In the NFL, if you weren’t going forward, you were left behind.
McElroy, despite the cast on his hand, was chipper. He would stay with the team and learn the pro game—he was already calling this “my NFL red-shirt year.” He had plans to study and improve his arm strength with dedicated exercise and also read biographies of Ronald Reagan. After football, he was thinking he might be interested in Alabama politics, making him the first player I’d heard discuss professional plans for life beyond football. McElroy liked Alabama, he said, but as a person who spent most of his life around black football players, he recognized the state still had old failings. In a group of white men who’d taken him hunting were people who told him they celebrated Martin Luther King Day as James Earl Ray Day. Shaking his head, McElroy said, “They have no idea it’s 2011.”
With McElroy hurt and Brunell suffering from a calf injury, there was no backup quarterback to lead the so-called scout team of reserves who simulated the opponent of the week’s offense every day in practice for the Jets defense. Someone suggested Cavanaugh do it. “I don’t want to depress the defense,” Cav said. Then he admitted that his fourteen NFL years had left him with constant knee pain. “How bad is it?” Sanchez wanted to know. So bad, Cavanaugh said, that he planned to have knee-replacement surgery after the season. He’d no longer be able to run, but he would sleep again. During years past, there had been times in the spring when Devlin and Dave Szott were pressed into practice duty. “Don’t tell my wife,” each would say and they’d suit up. Schotty recalled that Pettine had Matt Kroul “so revved” for his day of opposing Devlin, his fellow Iowa alum, that “snot was pouring out of his nose.” Sanchez, a rookie then, said he’d watched Devlin take “a horrible beating. I was thinking, This is the NFL?”
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