I felt for Schottenheimer. He was a man who lived to plot and scheme residing in a moment that checked the imagination. Schotty had a young quarterback who was regressing right in front of him. He had three temperamental playmaking veteran receivers who wanted the ball—a good thing, except that if Schotty played them all, as Ryan had asked him to, that meant fewer running plays and also no extra lineman. His injured line was a broken fence, meaning you couldn’t throw deep, and if the defense knew that there was no risk of verticals, they cheated on short-route coverage. So now the receivers were feeling spiteful. Ryan was outraged. And what was the answer to every one of the Jets’ problems? Tom Brady! Whose Patriots happened to be the next Jets opponent.
After the team meeting came the Monday defensive meeting where BT’s seat was empty. “It’s crazy,” said Calvin Pace, missing him. Several of the DBs had their sweatshirt hoods on. Pettine told the room they’d played a magnificent game and urged them not to worry about things they had no control over. He was just as guilty of that as anyone, he said. It was natural. But the only thing they could do to help the offense was “be as tough on them as we can. We can’t allow frustration to affect what we do.” Then he offered them the time-honored way to redeem themselves after a defeat. “We have a great challenge,” he said. “A great opponent. We built this room to defend New England. We’ll have a great plan. It’ll be radically different from anything we’ve done.” Then he saluted the absent BT: “We lost a true Jet.”
Two mornings later, everyone was still sorting through what had happened in Baltimore. The team meeting began with Brandon Moore rising to his feet at his seat near the front of the auditorium, facing his teammates in their terraced rows of cineplex-style seats, and telling them that recrimination did nobody any good. Moore had a big, round, expressive face with high eyebrows that when he tilted his head back looked stoical and appraising—the old guard. He said that all he could think about these days was his inability to make the running game better. Letting LaDainian Tomlinson and Shonn Greene down by not creating clear paths for them—“It pains my stomach,” Moore said. So he implored them all, while gazing at Holmes, to support the team, not to run anybody down in the press or anywhere else. Later, the receiver Patrick Turner would explain that Moore was speaking to “a code of conduct within football. Your team’s all you have. Respect everybody to the fullest. That’s more important than money. That’s from growing up.”
Ryan stepped briskly up to his podium. He first read a series of sneering headlines from the local press, and then at the end revealed that all of them had been written after Jets losses at similar low points last year. Next he spoke to the players about the next game, first critiquing the Patriots, describing with nonchalant precision all the ways that various New England players might be vulnerable. Then suddenly he was analyzing his own players, telling the Jets it didn’t matter about the opponent, that all that really mattered was them, telling his players to be no more than who they already were, telling them they’d be fine, telling them to “lift up your teammates and you’ll be fine,” his cadences calm and soothing in their repetition, the conviction in his voice so peacefully reassuring that you could feel a complex shifting of emotions. Even I, who hadn’t lost anything, who was just supposed to be watching, had the experience of feeling different, feeling in better spirits, feeling ready for new things, and as I made this discovery of what Ryan had just done, Sutton, who was beside me, leaned over, touched my arm, and said, “Nick, you can’t go to school for that.”
In 2010 the Jets had defeated the Patriots twice by “wearing the dog out of them,” as Sutton put it. Receivers near the line were “affected” by corners and linebackers as they set off on routes. The assumption was that what had worked before, including a game plan that invited the peerless passer Brady to hand the ball off for runs, wouldn’t work again. The NFL, Pettine liked to say, “is a copycat league,” and NFL coaching was all about “adjustments.”
The new defensive game plan assumed that Brady succeeded because of his ability to decipher the weaknesses in any given defensive formation. If he saw the same look with frequency, he’d recognize it and exploit it. The Patriots created an extensive offensive call sheet for every game, dense with provisional sections, which they’d use or ignore depending on what they saw from the defense. New England could do this because Brady could handle so much call volume. Sutton’s typed summary of his thoughts on Patriots’ screen passes alone was a full page long. The way to beat Brady was to offer Brady so many defensive looks he couldn’t trust what he was seeing. Thus the Jets would play an assortment of personnel packages, with the responsibilities within each look assigned in ways Brady couldn’t predict. Eric Smith, for instance, would play five different defensive positions. “Don’t show stuff too early” was Pettine’s plan. “Be a great actor. Get him thinking, rattled, moving around.” In a sense, this was again a version of Brady’s offense, which featured a core group of plays he’d run countless times but that never felt predictable to defenses because Brady ran them out of many personnel groups and formations.
Brady was an easy man for an opponent to dislike. He seemed to have it all: talent, success, good looks, a supermodel wife, and those big eyes rolling petulantly skyward whenever things didn’t go precisely his way. So pretty and so good—how could you not want to knock him around? But that was really hard to do. The Jets coaches admired how prepared Brady was, right down to his personal fitness. Since his Combine, the slow, gangly Michigan grad had made the most of himself as a pro and succeeded to such an extent that “you wouldn’t think it’s him, that’s how much his body has changed,” as one Jets defensive coach put it. Peering across the line, Brady was a defense analyst; his release was rapid and sure, making even mediocre NFL offensive linemen seem staunch, and his arm was strong and accurate. The coaches all looked forward to the challenge of trying to beat Brady as well as his coach.
Bill Belichick was the only NFL coach who won consistently, year after year, even though, just like everyone else, he was restricted by a salary cap that meant he was always losing good players when their success made them too expensive to keep. And while it was true that Belichick had won mostly in the company of what the Jets coaches considered the finest quarterback of his generation, all NFL seasons were the triumph of experience over hope. Teams found out across the season how good they were. In Charlotte, Joe Gibbs had told Ryan and Pettine that coming out of training camp, he could never tell if his team had enough to win the Super Bowl: “What makes a Super Bowl team special is a process, an evolution during the season,” he’d said, adding that what he most remembered about his three championship seasons with the Redskins was not the winning but the getting there.
Belichick’s ability to reimagine his team’s approach with new players and new assistant coaches every year was what made him the modern apotheosis of the profession. Around the league, people talked about him as the Ur-coach, the impossible model. Belichick’s secretive ways contributed to that reputation. Was there any leader who stood in public more and revealed less? At the press podium and along the sideline, he was at remove, a man whose present distance allowed others to discuss him in the way artists spoke of their own quarter-lit masters—the way jazz musicians thought about Buddy Bolden, actors about Stanley Kubrick. To the Jets coaches, Belichick was a relentless white whale up there in New England for them to pursue. People had faulted Ryan for the brash statement about Belichick he’d made when he arrived to lead the Jets, but Ryan doubted Belichick saw it for anything other than what it was, a compliment. To Ryan, Belichick was “the best,” and the Jets hadn’t won a championship in decades; Ryan believed you changed a moribund culture by lifting its ambitions.
Bill Parcells, who coached with Belichick for a dozen years, had teased Belichick, called him Doom and Gloom for his perpetual dissatisfaction, and that visible discontent was exactly what Ryan most admired in Belichick, because it meant “he’s true to himself.” The former Belichick ass
istants who received promotions elsewhere typically weren’t successful with their new teams. Ryan wondered if perhaps each one tried too hard to be another Belichick. Sutton thought the same: “One of Bill Belichick’s greatest strengths is that as much as he learned from Bill Parcells, he didn’t become Bill Parcells.” Belichick’s pursuit of football perfection was cold and unsentimental, but it also made him less wary of eccentricity than most football men were. One imaginative hire was a longhaired vegan shredder who got around the hippie town he lived in by bicycle. That was Thomas Dimitroff, who eventually became Belichick’s college scouting director and then, in 2008, the Atlanta GM, where twice in his first three years Dimitroff was named the NFL executive of the year by the Sporting News. Players believed that Belichick’s confident intelligence would help them improve and win. Coaches appreciated the clairvoyent beauty of his game plans and passed around stories of his occasional private displays of warmth. For instance, shortly after losing his head-coaching job with the Raiders, Callahan had received a surprise call from Belichick during which the Patriots coach told him not to lose faith, he was good at what he did.
In Florham Park, they all respected Belichick—with one reservation. Belichick had been the Jets defensive coordinator for three years before being named the Jets head coach, a job he then quit at his first-day press conference with a scrawled note that read in full: “I resign as HC of the NYJ.” Revis was one of many who’d noticed that Belichick never spoke of his Jets years and had gone so far as to expunge any mention of them from his official Patriots biography. What led a successful man to behave like that? When Eric Mangini, a former Belichick protégé, had been the Jets coach, the Patriots had illegally videotaped the Jets signals. Nobody could explain why Belichick would behave so badly. They all wanted to win, but perhaps, some thought, his darkness was that he wanted to win too much.
In responding to consecutive losses, Ryan believed, “You can’t flinch.” As for Mason, who’d yelled at his coordinator during games, Ryan said that in Baltimore, he and the defensive lineman Sam Adams “used to go at it all the time. It happens all the time. You got to be combative. That’s part of coaching.” Others, however, considered Mason to be over the top, and Ryan did take measures. His office was briefly a woodshed after Mason was invited in. Then, at practice, Mason played with the backups on the scout team, running Wes Welker’s routes for Revis from the cards O’Neil had drawn up. Meanwhile, when Brandon Moore arrived at his locker to dress for practice, he discovered a fresh captain’s C sewn on his shirt. For Sanchez, the coaches had a new air horn, which they were ready to sound at practice whenever Sanchez was too slow to release the ball on a play.
Four weeks into the season, there were many Jets players not practicing because of injuries, and so Carrier asked me to help fill out the huddle as the defense walked through Patriots running plays from the cards. This lasted roughly two plays. Even just walking through, I was too slow. Carrier himself relieved me, saying, “Nick, we love you. Get out.”
Pettine’s daughter, Megan, had been absorbing a hard time from Ravens fans at school in Maryland, so he employed paternal license, stretching the truth by telling her that David Harris’s pick-six against the Ravens was on “her” call. That was Pettine, who fired hard from the hip and then, always in passing, revealed a soft heart.
As usual during the Wednesday-afternoon walk-through, Revis and Cro were excused for their private film session in the linebackers’ meeting room. Today they studied Wes Welker’s routes. Welker was the best slot receiver in the sport, and although he wasn’t notably fast, he seemed it because he could maintain full speed through a series of sudden directional changes. It interested the cornerbacks that the Patriots were throwing more downfield routes to Welker than they had in the past. Most quarterback-receiver combinations created and betrayed expectations in the course of a game. Welker and Brady were working two careers’ worth of information. They also had such understanding, Cromartie said, that Welker could make his cut to the opposite of whatever side the cornerback leveraged his own body, knowing that Brady was seeing the same thing.
After a while, as was his habit, Revis left the facility to go watch more Patriots film at home by himself, “in the crib.” Of his weekly preparation, Revis said, “I follow the same routine since I’ve been a rookie. I’m very mental about the game. What I do when I watch with Cro and when I look on the TV in my living room at home is I see the same thing over and over. To remember, I have to keep replaying it in my head. I watch the [receivers’] body language and the routes. Then, when you’re in the game, the crazy thing is you see it and the light comes on. Ding! Crazy! I just saw it all week. I can make a play on this one.”
Copies of a completely new Patriots game plan were distributed at the Thursday defensive meeting, and the two-day-old ones were collected and shredded. Ryan and Pettine were growing more concerned about defending against an empty backfield and the resulting twin platoons of bunched New England receivers. Pettine then put up on the screen a photograph of Mike DeVito as a boy dressed up for a party in a three-piece suit and fedora. The players loved it. “Where that tommy gun at, Mike?” somebody yelled as DeVito blushed. “You’re not mad at me, Mikey?” Pettine asked him afterward. “No, no, no!” DeVito said. Pettine looked almost disappointed. Later Carrier told him, “Mike, I want that guy this week, the guy in the suit and hat!”
After a loss, it seemed to take until Thursday before the team had purged the bad experience. At practice, the defense was rollicking; you could see why Callahan had thought to describe them as pirates. Po’uha did a Samoan dance after all but uprooting a runner. When Revis defended passes, he yelled, “I don’t think so!” Sanchez was feeling harassed. Every few plays, the new air horn blared at his indecision. Afterward, I walked to the facility with Brunell. In his two-decade-long NFL career, Bru said, this was the best quarterbacks’ room he’d ever been a part of, everyone so supportive of Sanchez, Sanchez himself such an unusual and appealing person. As for the disaffected receivers, he pointed out that receivers and quarterbacks tended to bond in the off-season, but because of the lockout, Sanchez and his new teammates were still strangers. Of the defense, he said, “This is the most creative, aggressive, complicated defense I’ve ever gone against. You do well here, you can do well against any defense.” Except that the Jets offense wasn’t doing well here. It was surprising, this wonderful defense that might have been raising the offensive level of play and yet somehow wasn’t. It occurred to me later that nobody on the defense ever said such supportive things about the offense.
At the Friday quarterbacks’ meeting, Schotty had so many plays drawn, the whiteboard looked like something you’d see in a physics lecture at the Institute for Advanced Study, a few towns south. That’s how I thought of this facility: it was the Institute for the Advanced Study of Football. One of the theories among his critics on the defense was that Schotty’s solution to any problem was invariably more calls. So much of something more meant that the unit was in constant redefinition rather than confidently asserting an identity. There was probably only some truth to the theory.
Schotty had much to overcome. He was taking on the NFL’s best teams with an injured line and an erratic young quarterback. During the two-minute end-of-game drill that day in practice, on third down Sanchez would at last cry uncle and throw a ball away under pressure, except that against the lethal Patriots, the cry-uncle rule had to change. You never wanted to stop the clock at the end of a close game, which would give Brady time for another possession. He could take his team down the field in seconds.
It was a Friday, but that didn’t mean Aaron Maybin, whose license plate read “Mayhem,” was going to be any different than usual on the practice field. Maybin didn’t wear a mouth guard because, he said, of how hard he breathed—“I’m a frantic!” He’d bit through his lip and deep into his gum before. As for the way he moved on a football field, the coaches referred to Maybin now as Baby Colt. “He looks like a turnstile,” s
aid DT with a smile.
I asked Brunell about the defense’s complaints about the overdetermined offense, and he praised Schotty for creating this week a crisp, concise plan relying on quick-developing plays. As we were talking, O’Neil walked by. “Hey, Mark, how’s the game plan?” he called.
“I’ll tell you Monday,” Bru replied. The veteran quarterback knew Belichick would see a team with a weakened line and a faltering passer, and the Patriots coach wouldn’t prepare for a wide-open attack.
One of Ryan’s personal complexities was that he wanted to give his subordinates the autonomy he’d enjoyed in Baltimore but felt betrayed when things subsequently didn’t go well. It was in his nature to believe that what he wanted to happen was going to happen, and he believed with such conviction that he made others believe as well. This was a compelling quality in such a competitive, emotional business, where a team’s confidence was often the difference between victory and defeat. Yet when there was the inevitable disconnect between what Ryan declared would happen and what actually happened, he could be outraged. Ryan was a loving man and not confrontational, with the result that he stewed a lot. What people really wanted in those moments was more of his confident yeoman’s presence. And yet there again, he was reluctant to impose. The quarterbacks still didn’t know that the idea for the air horn at practice had been his.
Now, with his offense in crisis, Ryan began on Friday afternoons to meet with Schottenheimer and Sanchez to review the offensive game plan. These sessions were called Like It—Love It, and only the plays all three loved would be used. Such formal interventions were really not Ryan’s style. His football brilliance was intuitive—he just saw things others didn’t see. He preferred to work off the cuff, ad-lib, on the fly. Similarly, his gift for camaraderie was best expressed in the flow of life. Every young head coach discovered challenges of a sort he couldn’t have imagined before taking the position. Bill Belichick had failed at his first job in Cleveland, one of his former players thought, because he had been so introverted, he failed to engage with and motivate his players. For Ryan, it wasn’t always going to be easy to use his spontaneous personality to lead such a rigorously scheduled activity, but all over the organization right now, there were people hoping he’d find a way to do it.
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