I feel good about.
Should feel good about it.
Just watched the film.
I think they’re cute.
Cute is what I think they are.
Hit ’em right in the face.
Bam!
On it went, and on, seamlessly, until it was time for the offensive and defensive meetings.
The defense came together in a small, airless room with the players in sweats and their chairs jammed so close together that the linebackers and linemen had to adjust their flanks to squeeze in. A Jets banner no bigger than the kind that might decorate the bedroom of a sixth-grader hung on one wall, and a few photographs of the players had been tacked up as well. It was a long way from the spacious, modern lecture halls of the facility. The stripped-down rec-center closeness was a reminder that the players had nobody but one another. In the back, I sat next to Tannenbaum, who bit his nails. Fridays through Sundays were the worst for him. There was nothing left for him to do. Pettine, at the front with his laser pointer, said he didn’t want to get “the room too lathered up.” The way to control yourself out on the field on such a big night was to take the meeting room to the field, everyone in place, everyone communicating. He talked of possible Dallas gadget plays, screens, long vertical passes, told them there’d be no surprise looks from Dallas—“We’ve seen them all.” He told them they were the best defense he’d ever stood in front of. He showed them a photograph of a championship ring. “Yes!” breathed Sione Po’uha, unaware that any of us could hear him.
Then the defense repaired to the team meeting room. It was a bigger conference space, though again stuffy, and short of chairs, forcing some of us to lean against walls, turning our torsos at angles to fit everyone in. Ryan, in blue dress sweats, believed in the Napoleonic battle theory that held you should never ever praise your opponent because it hurt the morale of your own side. Accordingly, Ryan told the Jets they had more team character than Dallas. He related a recent conversation he’d had with the star Cowboys pass rusher DeMarcus Ware, who’d told Ryan he was going to lead the league in sacks if Ware’s coordinator, Rob Ryan, gave him enough opportunities. That, said Ryan, was putting yourself ahead of your team and it was a losing way to think. The Jets would win because, unlike the Cowboys, they were there for each other.
Then it was downstairs to the dining area for the same array of food stations, from pasta to stir-fry to Mexican, that were there every week, right down to the bags of popcorn and the bottomless bowl of gummy bears by the door. Ryan and I were among the last to leave. As we did, I told him what Pettine had said to the defense about how good they were. Ryan said that the best defense that he had ever coached was the 2000 Ravens, who were “the best defense in history!” He looked at me and asked, “You think they bought that conversation with DeMarcus Ware?” Then he winked.
Up in his room, Revis did what he did the night before every game. He watched a movie, chatted on the telephone, and then went to bed. The next morning, he opened the hotel-room blinds and said, “It’s a great day for football!” Before the pregame meal, he would take a hot shower, put on a custom Astor & Black suit, and then, “I’m ready to go!” That night he would run out onto the field between flaming torches. “Football,” he believed, was “like the old times, like the gladiators. Fans chant for their favorite team or person and if you’re not their favorite, they want you dead. Kill him! Crush him!” He couldn’t wait. But because he had to, in the interim, he put on a So Fly T-shirt and sweats and went to breakfast and then to a defensive walk-through Pettine held in a ballroom normally used for wedding receptions and the like. Revis was taking pictures of people in the room and laughing. Around him, they were all in T-shirts and sweats, all of them laughing, each player seeming as he always seemed, right down to Marquice Cole, who had the hood of his sweatshirt on because, he explained, “that’s just the way Quice is. Quice keeps it close and covered!” Looking on, Nick Bellore said that the difference between college players and his Jets teammates was that “in college everybody was so anxious. The coaches were freaking out. Here, they’re so relaxed.”
When Devlin had played college and pro ball, on game days he’d been the farthest thing from relaxed. He described himself as a player who had to give more to keep up with the others. He arrived at the stadium before everyone else, got his ankles taped, taped his fingers, and put on his shoulder pads, everything at the exact same time in the exact same order every week, and “by the end I was in such a frenzy, I was crying.” When he joined the Bills, who were in the midst of a run of four consecutive Super Bowl appearances, in the Buffalo game-day locker room he saw “guys watching TV, guys reading Playboy, guys discussing Playboy! What stood out to me was when Marv Levy [the head coach] walked in and shut off the TV, the room went completely silent. They flipped a switch and got ready for war. I’d never had that switch.” Instead, Devlin became unable to talk with his wife from Thursday night until the game was over.
Clyde Simmons thought of a team in its locker room before a game as an orchestra assembling in the pit: “It’s a building up to a beginning. Building… building… building… into the moment.” The mood in the spacious Jets accommodation—thick rug, wooden lockers—was purposeful. Most players wore headphones. There were few smiles and no long conversations. Pure quiet was best, thought Nick Mangold; it got you “in the mind-set.” Plaxico Burress circled the room, touching every teammate’s helmet. Pettine also made a circuit, leaning in to whisper something private to each of his players. DT was back in the coaches’ dressing area, reviewing the game plan. When he’d played, he’d laugh a lot before games. “You’re getting ready to get involved in physical combat. It’s gonna be intense. So cracking jokes was a way of relaxing for me. There’s no right or wrong way.” Ryan gathered the team, they prayed together, and then Ryan told them, “Our city. Our game,” and into the tunnel they went. There were American flags everywhere in the crowd, so much emotion.
After all that, the first half passed as quickly as Kotwica had said it would. I watched for a while in a team box with injured receiver Logan Payne. He thought first games were difficult because you had no current film and thus no idea of your opponent’s tendencies, so you couldn’t channel your expectations. This game was apparently not difficult for Tony Romo. The Cowboys quarterback was having success against the Jets secondary, while Sanchez, as Callahan told the linemen at halftime, endured “too much fucking heat.” The Cowboys led 10 to 7 at the half. The more senior coaches gathered briefly around Ryan. He wanted to make wholesale changes, bring up the free safety in a zone look to “take away” Jason Witten, but Pettine reminded him that the defense couldn’t “change into what we haven’t prepared.”
The Cowboys increased their lead to 24–10 early in the fourth quarter; the Cowboy receivers were having a wonderful game, primarily at Cromartie’s and Scott’s expense. And then came a series of miraculous occurrences. After a touchdown pass to Burress, a goal-line stand notable for the playmaking of Scott and Mike DeVito culminated in a Romo third-down fumble on the Jets three. Then Joe McKnight blocked a punt just as Westhoff had scripted it, and the ball was returned for a game-tying touchdown by the recently arrived Trufant. On the next Dallas possession, Scott again stuffed them on third down and short. After punts by each team, with less than a minute left, the Cowboys had the ball with the game still tied, and Pettine finally called Jet Mike Mix. Here was that rare moment when all men did their jobs exactly as the play diagram indicated, and the opposition responded just as the defensive play caller wished them to. Safety Brodney Pool showed low pressure and then dropped deep. At the same time Revis appeared to be retreating to cover for the blitzing Pool but then stayed shallow, and Romo never saw Revis lurking. Revis intercepted Romo’s pass near the sideline and returned the ball to the Dallas thirty-four, close enough for Nick Folk, three plays later, to kick the fifty-yard field goal that would win the game for the Jets. By then I’d gone to the locker room, where I watched the end of the ga
me on the equipment-room TV with the equipment-room staff and Tannenbaum, down early from his box so that he could greet the players as they returned to the locker room—which he always did, win or lose. At present, the GM was running around in happy little circles, hoarse from saying “Trufant!”
Afterward, there was brown-bag food for everyone, a gathering outside in the players’ and coaches’ parking lot, and then, for Smitty and Pettine, a trip back to the facility, where a case of Bula had been left in the coaches’ kitchen. Bula was the new kava-root health drink Sione Po’uha was marketing. It was supposed to have ancient-Polynesian tension-reducing effects. Pettine and Smitty each cracked one open—it tasted like grape soda—and watched the game tape deep into the night, and when they got to the blocked punt, Pettine smiled and said, “Westy! That crazy bastard!”
Carrier said that on Saturday afternoon he’d arrived home, ready to spend his first free afternoon all week with his wife and children, only to discover that nobody was around. He didn’t know where they were. “So I just chilled alone.” As he did, he realized, not for the first time, that his family’s lives were going along without him. O’Neil liked to say that coaches’ wives were “single mothers for six months a year.” It was most difficult, he said, when a coach took a new job in a new town. “When we first arrived in Ypsilanti, Michigan…” He shook his head at how hard those first months had been for Stacy.
I now knew a little of how they felt. To my own family, my existence seemed to consist mostly of unsatisfying transitions, all arrivals and departures. It was easier for them to have no expectations of me. When, for the first afternoon in weeks, I had time for a walk around my neighborhood, I felt out of season. Over the course of the year, while I always knew what day of the week it was, I often had no idea of the date; on the third, I might notice that the month had changed. I was amazed that a person could lose a sense of familiar moorings that quickly. Then it occurred to me that if I’d really been a Jet, it would have been imperative by now for me to feel a belonging with them. Inside the nest of the game, there was no time for the real world; that came only after football was done.
With the variedness of the days, so many people and tasks competing for attention, and always that need to forestall football’s creeping sense of impermanence, a to-the-minute week’s schedule was a crucial necessity. For the next sixteen weeks, the team would follow the in-season daily calendar that all NFL teams adhered to, with only modest variations.
On Mondays after games, the facility training room resembled a busy auto-body shop. Only two or three players made it through a year without some injury, and that didn’t, of course, count turf burns, cuts, bumps, and bruises. Mondays for the coaches, meanwhile, meant coming into the facility early to watch and grade the game film. The game was so fast live that much of what the coaches now saw was a surprise to them. Often players they’d supposed had played well had actually been “tuurrible,” as DT liked to say, and vice versa. The players were just as uncertain about what had gone on. To them, the tape was their professional standing around the league, and as they soaked out the soreness by switching between the big communal tubs of very hot and very cold water, they wondered how it all looked between the frames. (To take their minds off this anxiety, some of them competed to see how long they could remain submerged in the cold water. It felt like the ocean off the coast of Maine and, within seconds, staying in there became excruciating.) By late Monday morning the coaches would assemble in their two staff groups and watch and discuss the tape together. There would be a team meeting during which Ryan addressed the just-played game by narrating a series of play-like-a-Jet highlights. Then in offensive and defensive meetings, the coaches reviewed the film with the players and afterward walked through any significant corrections with them. In football, all the corrections were done in front of the entire unit so everyone could benefit from them and to emphasize that everything was about the team, not the individual, that linebackers were accountable to nose tackles and safeties as well as other linebackers.
In the late afternoon and evening on Mondays, the focus shifted to the next opponent. The coaches all watched film, everybody scrutinizing at least four of the opponent’s prior games, trying “to unearth things,” as Pettine put it. All had assigned weekly research tasks: the opponent’s down-and-distance tendencies (O’Neil), the preferred plays used with various personnel groups (Sutton), favored running concepts (Carrier), favored passing concepts (Thurman), and any precedent for gadget plays (Sutton). “Concepts” meant a family of run or pass routes. Levels, for instance, are routes in which crossing receivers converge from both sides of the ball and must run along parallel paths so as not to collide. Some players studied every page of this intelligence. For others, said Sutton, “It doesn’t fire their imagination.” Revis wanted all of it. “The information is key,” he said. “Sometimes you hear Rex and them during a game yelling, ‘It’s third and eight and you know what’s coming!’ and it’s a cool feeling.” Weeks filed no reports. His task was to make some of the cards, the drawings of preferred opponent plays, for the scout team to use in practice. Somehow, Ryan eventually ended up doing them for him, to the annoyance of the offensive and defensive coordinators alike.
Tuesday was the players’ day off and the longest day for the coaches, who had no time off during the entire week except for the Saturday afternoons before home games. For most of Tuesday morning and afternoon, Pettine and Schotty continued to “slow-cook” their game plans, as Pettine put it. The War and Peace advance scouting reports were presented by Scott Cohen, Brendan Prophett, or someone else who came downstairs from pro-personnel. The pro-personnel men labored over their reports like students writing term papers, and they seldom received much feedback from the coaches. What did the coaches think? they wondered. Everybody wanted to contribute. Pettine welcomed suggestions from his subordinates, just as Ryan had in his Ravens years, and all day they were received. Once in a while a player submitted an idea. At night, as Schotty worked alone, O’Neil and Smitty faced each other across the conference table in Pettine’s office, drawing the plays on their laptops as Pettine supplied them. Most extant calls received weekly modifications. Pettine did not believe in all-nighters, but the endless possibilities of combination and countercombination were tempting enough for him that it was O’Neil’s job to hurry Pettine along so the job was finished, just as it had once been Pettine’s job to do that for Ryan.
Eventually, Pettine would signal that he was ready to print the rough draft, called the ruff. There was around the league a lot of mystique about NFL game plans, but Ryan and Pettine didn’t respect coaches who valued them over what intuitive players could do out on the field. You could win with a bad game plan if you had superior talent, Pettine believed. Or, as DT put it, “Playmakers will do things that schematically cannot be accounted for.” On Tuesdays, Ryan was typically gone by eleven. Pettine slept on the mattress in Ryan’s office closet. O’Neil would be on the camping mattress he set up in the defensive meeting room. The O’Neil bed was in evidence during the Wednesday-morning meetings, his red pillow and the blue-and-green blankets still retaining the shape of O’Neil’s form, as if, after his three hours of sleep, O’Neil had startled awake and left so quickly that the blankets hadn’t realized he was gone.
On Wednesdays, the quarterbacks met with Schotty at 8:00. During the team meeting at 8:50, Ryan previewed the next game’s opponent, and then there were offensive and defensive game-plan-installation meetings. (The actual defensive game plan had different sectors of calls for different personnel groups, all squared off in primary-colored boxes. New calls were rendered in bright red. Football design inevitably seemed to recall the great abstract modernists.) A long “man’s day,” as Ryan liked to say, followed the installation meetings. Thursdays were similar to Wednesdays, and on Fridays, the pace slackened. If the team had won the previous week, Ryan awarded game balls at the Friday team meeting, sailing them out to each recipient as he encouraged Sanchez to notice h
is deep-ball accuracy. Then came the lighter practice. Saturday mornings the team did the walk-through, which was followed by either road-game travel or a few hours of family time and then the drive to the hotel. No downtime for the younger coaches. They’d spend Saturday afternoon looking ahead to the next opponent, breaking down four more weeks of game film and drawing their practice cards. At the entry level, the workload was crushing.
Going forward, I would experience all of it not as individual days but as a long car trip in which days were absorbed by days and everything happened at an accelerated clip. There were a series of destinations along the way (the games), and getting to each one involved the punctuated routines of the journey: buying gas, stopping for coffee, seeing an interesting billboard, hearing something good on the radio, encountering heavy traffic or heavy weather or a speed trap or a good road turned to swale, all the days blending because they never stopped, went constantly forward—every day many dozens of small occurrences and interactions whose cumulative import I would be able to discover only at the end, looking back. In the moment, to those immersed in the work, every last thing seemed urgent.
The day after the Dallas game was a victory Monday. For the coaches, there were victory magic bars baked by Michelle Tannenbaum, and victory chorizo-and-egg tacos made by Kotwica’s Mexican American wife, Christina—touches that seemed in homely contrast to how public and extravagant the spectacle of the games was. Christina had been married to a fellow helicopter pilot of Kotwica’s, a man named Jason, who was murdered by a gang of teenage burglars at his home near the Fort Hood, Texas, base. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Kotwica and Christina got to know each other, and eventually they married. Now her children called Kotwica Dad, and he and Christina had two children of their own. It wasn’t, Kotwica thought, anything a man could have predicted for his life. Early on, Kotwica had made a point of treating Jason’s children the same way he treated his own, but such effort wasn’t necessary. His good heart was smitten with all of them.
Collision Low Crossers Page 28
