After practice, while the defensive coaches were watching the film, Sanchez stopped by the meeting to inform Pettine that he should call me Worm. Then, with an evil glint in his eye, the quarterback said joyously, “The nickname spreads!” and scampered off.
Pettine crossed everyone up at the Saturday-morning defensive meeting by putting up on the screen a photograph of a baby that was not Mike DeVito. Nobody, not even Garrett McIntyre, recognized who it was, which was amusing since it was little Garrett McIntyre. Then there were two pictures of DeVito after all, one of him flexing tiny arms and another of him sitting in a wicker chair gazing out at the distant future. The existential DeVito just killed them. Pettine smiled. “Never gets old.”
During the walk-through in the field house after the meeting, Revis used his hands on the receivers he covered, a Saturday walk-through first. Rev didn’t even want you walking your pattern against him.
Marquice Cole, who wore his hair in many braids, recalled his days at Northwestern, which he’d considered too much of a “country club.” When the school recruited him to play football, he had the braids, as he did right up until the first college game, when he was suddenly ordered to cut them. He didn’t want to. “They didn’t take kindly to me,” he said in his unusually deep voice. “And I didn’t take kindly to them. They knew what they were getting.” Cole was, Leonhard thought, “very complex. He knows how talented he is, but with all that talent and your role not increasing—it’s not a good sign. Worst thing you can be as an NFL player is getting comfortable. He’s got comfortable. Possibly a bigger role makes him nervous.”
News about Penn State football coach Joe Paterno’s role in concealing the sexual abuse of children by one of his assistants, Jerry Sandusky, was beginning to circulate, and a number of players and coaches were talking about how troubling they found it all. Maybin, a former Penn State player, said there’d always been something odd about Sandusky, but no players he’d known could ever quite identify what it was. For Pettine, a loyal son of Pennsylvania, the present situation was not ambiguous: “You blew it, Joe,” he said. “I used to have so much respect for him. Not no mo’. He enabled a monster.”
Samson Brown, an offensive assistant, had a glow about him at the walk-through. Brown lived in Manhattan, where his wife was a medical resident. Given that, and given that Schotty kept his assistants on sixteen-to eighteen-hour call with work, something amazing had happened the night before. The couple had shared dinner together at their apartment. “Staying home is going out for us,” Brown said. “We order in. We haven’t had a home-cooked meal in five months.” Not that Brown was complaining. He knew that most men in America spent their workdays counting down the hours, talking about all the many things in life they wished they had. Brown worked at an office where all anybody wanted to discuss was what he did for a living. Brown felt lucky. Lucky, and tired.
That night at the hotel, in the 7:45 quarterbacks’ meeting, Sanchez was reading from the big and colorful call sheet like someone happily perusing a bistro menu when Schotty asked him if a particular call confused him. A similar call, the coordinator said, had given the quarterback problems against Miami. Suddenly Sanchez looked like he’d eaten a bad snail as he frowned and reflexively told Schotty, “I messed that up.”
“Worked out great, dude,” Schotty told him. “Tone double move gets a PI [pass interference]. You decided, ‘Hell with this short stuff, Schotty, we’re opening it up!’ ” Sanchez looked at me. “Put that in the book,” he said. I thought again about how challenging it was for a coach to bring along an emotional young person in such a public and pressured job and felt that Schottenheimer was making progress.
The receivers arrived, and Schotty told everyone, “Sooner or later they’ll get tired of giving up those eight- or nine-yard routes and then you can go deep.” As he spoke, Sanchez made a succession of funny faces and finally said, “Unnhh!” When the others gazed at him curiously, he said, “Just getting excited!” This seemed to be his way of demonstrating DT’s postulate that everyone handles football pressure in his own way.
Before the game, Dave Szott and I were talking. “The great thing about football is you have to face your fear,” he said. “Any player that ever played this game has felt fear and if they say no, they’re lying.”
In Tannenbaum’s box, I sat to Terry Bradway’s right, again shamelessly using that congenial man as a GM shield. Tannenbaum was immediately upset at the way the Jets receivers came out of huddle, their body language betraying run (they’d seem disinterested) or pass (there’d be a bounce in their step). “It’s obvious to me!” Given the many injuries in the Patriots secondary and the low number of Jets completions, one could almost understand the receivers’ frustration.
The defense’s plans for matchup substitutions were being thwarted by the Patriots shift to a no-huddle, hurry-up offense in which Brady lined his offense up again at scrimmage right after the tackle and shouted out his coded instructions from under center. He ran play after play so quickly the crowd couldn’t even organize a roar to drown out his voice. “Look at the pressure no-huddle puts on opponents,” said Tannenbaum. “Shouldn’t we do that to them?” Still, despite the Jets offense’s latest slow start, the Jets were in excellent position because the defense had given up only two field goals and then harassed Brady into a safety. Near the end of the half, Sanchez led a touchdown drive. Unfortunately, he had called a time-out right before the score, stopping the clock and leaving Brady and the Patriots eighty seconds—enough time for them to traverse the entire field and retaliate. With nine seconds left in the half, New England regained the lead, 13–9. Tannenbaum didn’t even have to say it. “The little things,” everyone thought.
It was the job of those in the box to be responsible for the irresponsibility of others. When Cromartie fled north as his man went south and west for a huge play, it was ultimately on them. Nobody on the Jets could cover the hulking New England end Rob Gronkowski, and that redounded to them as well. There were several other people in the box besides Bradway, Tannenbaum, and me, and at halftime, a couple of them shook their heads and quietly seemed to doubt that the team could win games like this with Sanchez. The Patriots had second- and third-stringers, including a receiver, playing defensive back. How could Sanchez not be taking advantage? Of course, the Jets had won a playoff game with Sanchez on the road in New England. But that was long, long ago in football time—ten full months.
The Jets defense played well for a while in the second half, but gradually they tired and the score became 23–9. When the offense scored to make it close, the Patriots then took it “eighty-four yards right down our throat,” as Tannenbaum said. After Sanchez threw a denouement interception to Ninkovich, which his Russian friend returned for six more points to make the final score 37–16, Tannenbaum, thinking about defensive rosters, asked, “How can they be out there with thirty-seven points with the players we have and we have sixteen points and the players they have? Can anybody explain this?” One answer seemed to be Belichick’s decision to emphasize offense, a practical assessment of the times and also perhaps an indication that the Patriots coach, a defensive specialist, was disciplined enough to build his team around Brady even though offense was not the part of the game he himself was most drawn to. Another explanation was the no-huddle. “No-huddle is the hardest thing,” Leonhard would say later. “Everything speeds up. For us, we try to do so many different things, it makes the game simpler, and for us, we try not to simplify.”
The morning after any loss, the facility was a desolate place. The wide hallways were like downtown streets in a Rust Belt city, the loss pervading in such a strong way that I half expected to confront fallen trees, broken windows, overturned garbage cans, wrack-strewn puddles. Steve Yarnell, whose job was to observe everything that went on at the facility, said simply, “Monday here after a loss fucking sucks. It’s like death.” Football was just athletics, and only a game had died, but nonetheless, men were pouring their whole lives into somet
hing, and they were hard hit. For Westhoff, a win lasted an hour; losses kept him up all night. After this week’s loss, Callahan experienced the near inability to speak. “I’m gutted,” he said. “Gutted. Just devastated.”
The way they moved past the great pain was by seeking a formal understanding. All around the building, they gathered in groups to watch the film, to ask themselves if Sanchez could learn to read the coverages more astutely, to ask if he could get through his progressions faster. “After a game,” said Bradway, “everybody identifies what didn’t go well and you can correct it. But then you can lose what you did do well.” Figuring into all this was the knowledge that there was a difference between moving on and forgetting.
In a late-Monday-afternoon team meeting, Ryan said he couldn’t lie to the Jets. They probably wouldn’t win their division. There was much else to play for, the coach said, and then he placed a chip of wood on their shoulders and knocked it off. Had they heard what Belichick had done after the game? Walking off the field, the Patriots coach had turned to his son and said, “Thirty-seven points on the best defense in football, suck my dick.” In his meeting-room seat, Revis was horrified. “I think that’s a jerk,” he said to me later. “Maybe some people think he’s a good, collected guy off the field, but then why say such things? It’s degrading. Suck my what? Say it to my face. That’s not great character.”
The fact remained that the Jets had lost, so what could Revis do except look to the next opponent, another difficult game. They’d play against Denver and Tim Tebow, the former college phenomenon who was now a portent of NFL things to come, a starting quarterback who won games by running. To Pettine, the Broncos represented about as abrupt a stylistic shift from the Patriots as he could imagine. He compared moving from Brady to Tebow to transitioning from a Ferrari to a truck.
Part of the challenge was scheduling. NFL teams hate playing Sunday-night games. Football men are up-in-the-morning people, and here you had to wait all day, and then, even if you were the home team, you didn’t get to bed before two. If you were on the road, it was a missed night of sleep. Thursday-night games were loathed even more than Sunday-night ones. There was insufficient time for physical recovery from the beatings of the previous game and insufficient planning time for the next one. To play on Thursday night after playing Sunday night, with, moreover, the second game on the road, and at altitude, was tearing out the sutures before the wound was healed.
Given the brief interval at the facility between games, not quite three days because of the long flight to Colorado, triage would be in order. Opposing Tebow required extra rehearsal, meaning there would be no two-minute practice for the defense, and that would prove costly.
Don Martindale had been right back in the summer. After beginning the season on the bench as Denver went 1 and 4, Tim Tebow had led the team to three wins in their last four games, two of them miraculous comebacks even by secular standards. To the nation, the quarterback was becoming a flesh-and-blood kouros, with his conspicuous practice of sinking to one knee and placing his head to his fist in prayer after a notable moment—Tebowing. That he was willing to remove his shirt to advertise underwear but was saving himself for marriage only increased his fundamental fascination.
Professional football players prepare so obsessively for each game they often don’t know the names of the players on a future opponent’s team until the week before the game. As Maybin once said to Smitty about a running back, “He’s just a number. Who gives a fuck who they are as long as we do what we’re supposed to do.” Because Tebow had been, until recently, a reserve NFL player famous for his college career and his religious good works, he was a football specter to most Jets. They were aware of him but they hadn’t gone ahead and seen him.
Greg McElroy had opposed Tebow in college. Talking on Monday afternoon, he recalled the Alabama defensive game plan against Florida. The Alabama coaches didn’t think Tebow read defenses well, McElroy said, so they showed Tebow complex looks and created a pass rush that emphasized containment rather than their usual high-pressure dashes toward the quarterback. That was because Tebow’s most devastating skill was his ability to circumvent blitzers, creating drive-bys, pass rushers veering past as he went thundering downfield.
Later, Pettine was in his office studying Tebow. Because Tebow had played so seldom in his Broncos career, there wasn’t much NFL game tape on him. Thinking of what McElroy had said, I asked if Pettine had ever reviewed a player’s college tape as he prepared a professional game plan. No, Pettine said. The two levels of play and scheme were sufficiently different that it wouldn’t be helpful.
Tuesday was usually the players’ day off, but in this short week they had a full day of classroom work and practice. At the morning defensive meeting, Pettine further introduced Tebow to a roomful of yawning men clutching coffee cups and spit bottles for tobacco. Tebow, Pettine said, was erratic, and streaky, and a winner. As a passer, he threw three in the dirt and then, the coordinator said, he threw “a laser beam on the money.” When he ran, he broke many tackles, was deceptively fast. The idea was to force him to make quick decisions. “He can make you miss,” Pettine warned. “Bit of a Houdini.”
Everyone seemed still exhausted from the Patriots game as they headed out to practice. “This field’s a prison!” yelled Dustin Keller. After leaving the stadium following the New England game, Smitty had worked on the Denver game plan until three in the morning and last night he’d been back at it until three a.m. again. “I’m light-headed,” he said to Sutton. “It’s just an attitude,” said Sutton. “Now I’m better,” said Smitty.
It was a cool New Jersey fall day with a high slate-blue sky and soft breezes, yet somehow it seemed overcast, with so many people walking around dog-faced and hurt. Revis, his knee sore and braced, was glum. It was at times like this that Ryan shone. During his first season with the Jets, the team had at one point lost six out of seven games. The Jets players expected retribution. Instead, one afternoon Ryan promenaded through the locker room wearing only a black vest. Here he was everywhere, telling jokes, relating anecdotes to lighten the mood, bucking people up. Devlin, too, was full of cheer, calling, “Nice rack, fellas. Nice tempo,” as the starting offense came off the field after a series of plays. When Burress made like a tollbooth gate, raising his long arm improbably high to snag a pass, everyone yelled, “Whooooaaa!” Last week at this time it had seemed reasonable to talk about the Super Bowl. Now one loss had thrown all into doubt.
After practice, Revis and Cro watched film of Tebow, observing with incredulity the length of time it took him to wind up and release his passes and the frequent inaccuracy of those throws. “Man, I don’t understand it, man!” Cro said. On the screen, balls were geysering everywhere. “What in the hell!” Cro said. “That’s crazy.”
The Jets planned to run and run and expected the Broncos to do the same. Runs didn’t stop the clock the way incomplete passes did, leading Sanchez to say on Wednesday morning in the quarterbacks’ meeting, “Men, this game’s gonna take like twenty minutes.” For the rest of the meeting the quarterback continued to employ stock Schottyisms. Everyone was addressed as “Men,” and many things were prefaced with “the ole,” which was, in fact, a Rexism appropriated by Schotty. Schotty, in turn, was referring to Sanchez as Coach. Looking at me, Schotty said, “Nick, we’re dealing with maturity issues this side of the room!” It was the only time all year he voiced aloud something I was sure often ran through his mind. As for McElroy, Schotty said, “Greg, you know he’s thinking, I go from winning a national championship to dealing with this shit!”
“Gonna be one of those days,” McElroy said.
“Every day is one of those days,” Schotty told him. But in fact, Sanchez was on top of the playbook today, dialed in. As Kevin O’Connell once told me, every week was a new series of problems, and the secret to football was trying to identify them and solve them. The big one they’d just quietly overcome in the meeting was the heartbreak of the loss to New England.
In the Wednesday team meeting, Ryan told the players, “Be comfortable on the plane. No suits unless that’s you!” Most chose to fly in sweat wear, some in sweat suits of Baskin-Robbins colors.
To his defense Pettine stressed that in a short week, nobody knew what the other team would allocate time to prepare for and that all football teams felt vulnerable when they believed they were underprepared. It would be good to worry the Broncos in that way early. “Give them conflicting looks,” Pettine said. “Move around. Make them think.”
In Colorado that evening, at the quarterbacks’ meeting, the players discussed Tebow’s propensity to sail balls toward the stands and nose-cone them into the firmament. Like Cro, they’d never seen anything like it in an NFL starter. Brunell kept receiving texts. His youngest child had recently been given her first cell phone and was treating her father to the convert’s inevitable initial flurry—the rare sign of the outside world infiltrating the web of the game. Sanchez, wearing a Chi-Com gray fur hat, was looking exhausted, and Schotty treated him with particular solicitude, telling him, “You’re doing a really good job with a lot of stuff.” The coordinator urged Sanchez, “Say uncle! Protect the ball and move on with your life.” It was not a game in which to try anything rash, Schotty said. “Just get points. They’re at a premium because I don’t think they score on our defense.”
The next morning the quarterbacks met again at 9:45. Their room was just down the hotel hallway from the team dining area. Nick Mangold stuck his head in. “Guys,” the center said in his usual even tone, “it’s that awkward time when there’s about a minute left on your waffle and you’re not sure whether to stare at the guy making it or…” He offered an enigmatic smile and vanished.
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