I was cold at the walk-through, so I wore a green ski hat. “Nicky!” said Ryan. “That hat! That’s the kind of hat we used to wear to play pond hockey in Toronto.” I was instructed to lose the hat and “put a hood on!” Ryan told the team he wanted passion, but the most passionate Jet, Bart Scott, was looking morose. Since his role in the defense had been reduced, he’d worn a snug hood in meetings, and during the New England game, he’d sat on the bench, woebegone. Ryan warned the defense not to be taken in if Tebow pumped a throw and then ran, which the coach called “the ole dog-and-tennis-ball trick.”
On the bus to the stadium, there was a faint odor of anxiety. Well before we reached it, the stadium was visible in the distance, a big shimmering new-world building. Out on the field before the game, Tebow soared errant practice throws so far and high I kept noticing the downtown skyline.
Callahan’s young, bearded son Brian was a Denver offensive coach. When he came over to say hello, his father introduced him around to the young Jets coaches. They asked him what it had been like to work for Josh McDaniels, the former Belichick assistant who’d been the Broncos head coach the year before. Brian said McDaniels was a relentless taskmaster; at night there was always the feeling you shouldn’t go home. But it had been a terrific “apprenticeship.” This was exactly the way these Jets coaches talked of their own former-Belichick-assistant-turned-head-coach Eric Mangini. Just then Brian was called away for a photograph with a Broncos cheerleader. Could this be his girlfriend? The young Jets coaches who had had nobody but Schotty in their datebooks stared as the young coach and the young beauty posed together. Brian came back to say good-bye.
“That your girlfriend?” he was asked.
“Yeah,” he said. The Jets coaches shook their heads. He even said “yeah” the way they would want to say it.
Up in the coaching booth, before the game, Pettine sat silent with his multitude of pens and markers, then he fist-knocked with Devlin, O’Neil, and the other Motorola-headset-clad coaches before kickoff. Prophett was there with a pair of binoculars so he could call out Broncos personnel groups. Early on, Pettine kept careful track of the positioning of the edges and his deep safety. “I can’t stress it enough, edge guys, don’t chase until you see the QB give up the ball,” he said into his microphone.
The game involved much punting. The Jets defense often was left to work from poor field position; five Broncos possessions started from the Jets side of the fifty. On these possessions, the Jets held Denver to only three points. The Denver backs were having no success, Tebow wasn’t running much, and Cro had been right; the quarterback’s big windup brought to mind a gantry crane boom as he swiveled before he threw. Pettine was on his game. “Watch the screen,” he’d call and it would be a bubble screen. Schotty and Sanchez were having less success. “Unbelievable,” said Pettine after every drive-killing offensive penalty or run for a loss. The offensive coaches seated to Pettine’s left were very quiet. When Sanchez imprudently burned a time-out, one of them muttered, “Schotty might kill him.” The Jets got the defensive formation they wanted for a 38 Special—reborn!—direct snap to Joe McKnight, but the ball rocketed way over Little Joe’s head. “Un-fucking-believable,” said Pettine.
Suddenly, in the third quarter, the offense was at the Denver one-yard line. Pettine was begging, “Please don’t fuck this up.” Bilal Powell fumbled into the end zone, and lineman Matt Slauson recovered for the touchdown. “Un-fucking-believable.” Pettine sighed. “Line drive in the box score,” said Devlin, eyes front. The Jets led 10–3.
Pettine played personnel chess with the Broncos, sending one group out a few steps and then withdrawing them: “I want to go big sub—not yet!” Denver changed to a running set. “We’ve got big people in. We’re okay.” Tebow heaved a pass that appeared bound for a snowdrift outside Aspen. “Oh!” cried the coaching box in wonder. But it was Sanchez who made the crucial mistake. On a third and six, instead of saying uncle, he threw an interception that was returned for a game-tying touchdown. “Fuck me!” roared Pettine. “And he’s got Joe McKnight one-on-one with the linebacker.”
They had contained Tebow so far, but as the third quarter ended, Pettine asked Ryan, “Want to heat him up, Rex? Just asking.” Instead they went with extra coverage. Devlin, meanwhile, took it to heart every time Sanchez didn’t see open receivers in his progression, especially when the open man was a tight end. A nifty one-handed catch by Joe McKnight led to a Jets field goal, making the score 13–10 in the Jets’ favor with nine minutes and fourteen seconds left. Then Harris stuffed the Broncos on third and two. “Let’s go up two scores,” said Pettine hopefully. But the problem all year, Brandon Moore would say after the season, was a lack of offensive “energy.” What he meant was they were professionals, fine professionals, but like a band, they needed hits, calls that in the crucial moments, on a big stage, they could fall back on because they always worked.
The offense punted all the way to the Bronco five. To this point, eight of the eleven Broncos possessions had lasted three plays. On their third downs the Broncos were one for eleven. Tebow had run twice for eleven yards. Passing, he was six for fifteen. It was difficult to imagine any team playing better defense on short rest than the Jets were. There was five minutes and fifty-four seconds left. On first down, a Tebow pass in the right flat to Denver’s Eddie Royal found Leonhard with a clear goal-line shot at the receiver. Royal juked a hip and Leonhard missed him. “All we got to do is keep the edge,” said Pettine. They couldn’t. Tebow began dropping back and either completing passes or working the dog-and-tennis-ball. “Tell these guys to stop flying by the quarterback,” Pettine cried. “Our guys are gassed,” O’Neil told him. Tebow had become a football Sherman, leading an inexorable march. Into Jets territory he went, the crowd chanting his name.
With the Broncos across the Jet thirty, again Pettine considered the blitz, which he had yet to call. “At some point we got to come after him. Is now the time?” At third and four at the twenty, with three Bronco wideouts in formation and nothing else showing signs of stopping the Broncos, Pettine asked Ryan, “Want to come after him, Rex?” Ryan did. The call was Comcast, meaning Eric Smith was to blitz. The safety charged, Tebow eluded him, and with the edge now uncontained, the Colorado plains opened up vast and unpopulated. In the end zone Cro lingered behind Bronco receivers as Tebow heavy-hoofed toward the goal line for the lead.
The game ended at 17–13, Broncos. Tebow sank to a knee as up in the booth Pettine said, “Oh, this is a kick in the nuts, boys.” In the locker room Schotty was slumped, speechless. “Job’s not for the faint of heart,” he told me later. Ryan looked at his players, who had just lost twice in four days, and spoke them a threnody: “It stings. It hurts. I believe in this team. Am I the only guy who believes in this team?”
Twelve
REVIS ISLAND
We were a very small group and it was as though I was directing Rashomon every minute of the day and night. At times like this, you can talk everything over and get very close indeed.
—Akira Kurosawa on living with the cast and crew while making his film Rashomon
After the regretful flight home from Colorado—If Jimmy could’ve made that tackle, Ryan kept thinking—the only true comfort to be had was the familiar paregoric: to go straight to the facility and look back at what had happened. And so Ryan sat in front of the film screen in Pettine’s office, the two old colleagues accompanied by a few of their assistants, watching the well fires burn. Every so often, one of them would say, “How did we lose this game?”
The defense had been magnificent. On the film, the coaches found clinic moments for so many defenders: Wilkerson, Po’uha, Kyle Wilson, Kenrick Ellis—“The big boy was rolling!” Ryan raved. Of Tebow, Ryan said, “Kid’s a fucking winner.” Then he said, “This guy can’t throw a lick against us and they beat us!” When the film showed Cromartie failing to leave the end zone as Tebow made his game-winning run, the entire room was mortified. Ryan always wanted to think the
best of people, and so he reminded himself that Cro had a damaged sternum, that it was not for one man to judge another’s pain.
At nine that morning, the defensive coaches sat down together in their meeting room. “Our guys played their asses off,” Pettine said. “Handled a very difficult set of circumstances: a unique offense, a unique scheme, unique travel. I don’t understand how they can rise up and others can’t. That’s what frustrates us all, I think.”
“Yes,” Sutton said. And nobody else had anything to add.
All the coaches met with Ryan. Schotty was feeling completely exasperated. At one point in the game, Sanchez had completed eleven consecutive passes. He could do it! Then, on the crucial pick-six, he had failed to notice what Pettine had seen, Joe McKnight alone in space against the much slower linebacker, had read his progression poorly, and had thrown late to Burress. How could a coach help a player overcome such patience-exploding inconsistency? “Just sloppy, the whole performance,” Schotty said, which was as close to Pettine-like ire as he got. He knew that Sanchez was frustrated and also, as Sanchez himself had said, “embarrassed.” What Sanchez would never say, and what Holmes had earlier in the season tried to say for him, was that it was difficult to make your reads when you were under withering attack in the pocket.
Callahan wanted to take the blame for the line’s sagging play, but Ryan pointed out that Moore’s and Mangold’s spirits were willing, but their bodies were listing.
“I’ll take the bullet for the call at the end,” Pettine said. “We put Eric in a tough spot. I tried to force Tebow into a mistake. We hadn’t done it the whole game. I’ll take the bullet. It’s a shame. Guys played their hearts out.”
“I want to throw the fuck up,” said Westhoff. “Monday I’ll be different.”
Ryan nodded. “Monday, as a coaching staff, we got to be so enthusiastic.”
Back in Pettine’s office, with a free weekend ahead and my family away, Smitty and I were considering going to see a movie. We didn’t know anything about any of the current features. Crazy, Stupid, Love—that sounded intriguing. Pettine had never heard of it either, but he said if we went to something called Crazy, Stupid, Love, we couldn’t ever come back into his office.
As the defensive coaches left the building, they could see Schotty in his office with his assistants, having another meeting. Was it the line? Was it Sanchez? Was it them? The offensive coaches would have given anything to make things better. Sutton was the same way. Over the weekend, he reread As a Man Thinketh, James Allen’s short tract on self-improvement.
How consuming was football? “All my real-world knowledge has been replaced by football,” Leonhard said. When you put that much into something only to be disappointed, maintaining your spirits was difficult no matter how well you were paid. Mindful of this, Sutton sent a text message to BT. For some time, Sutt had been urging the injured linebacker to come sit in on the defensive meetings, telling BT his presence in the room helped the other players, telling BT the team needed him. On Monday, BT appeared. “BT! You been away too long,” Pettine told him.
Pettine began by apologizing to the defense for the blitz he’d called at the end. Then Pettine showed them the Broncos-game film. At the end, when Cro remained rooted in the end zone, Pettine said something anodyne about the need to play like a Jet. “That last play was bad,” BT whispered to Pace. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Pace replied. Smitty gathered the outside linebackers and told them about his experiences being on a Ravens team with a bad offense. He warned them, “You can’t get frustrated. Just do your job.”
Afterward, BT visited Pettine’s office. He was upset about Cro. Why hadn’t Pettine said anything to the room? Pettine told him he didn’t want to humiliate Cro. BT was unconvinced. Pettine shrugged. He didn’t think, at this point, it would do any good. BT argued that you had to try.
At practice, under low November sunlight, Revis covered Patrick Turner close as a pocket sewn onto a shirt. “I love that,” Sutton said. “It’s my favorite thing in life. What would make me think I could do it in a game if I can’t do it in practice?” Cro too was all over the field. Sutton shook his head. He sighed. “It’s hard to erase that image.”
Burress wasn’t at practice and Jeremy Kerley had been hurt, so the offense might need bodies at receiver for the home rematch against the Bills. Schotty told the quarterbacks Cro had volunteered to help the offense. The plan for him as a pass catcher, Schotty said wryly, was very complex: Cro would “run by the guy!” What number was Cro? Sanchez asked. “Thirty-one,” said McElroy.
In the defensive-backs’ meeting, DT told Cromartie, “Cro, I see you working at your job and you’re getting better.”
Cro was not the only defender to cross the line of scrimmage. During practice Ryan stood with the offense, receiving many jeers from the green-shirted defense. But among the white shirts, the mood lightened, as it did among the defenders when Po’uha intercepted a pass and ran with it for several yards, during which the earth vibrated, before pitching it to Revis.
Pettine had been without sleep so long he suddenly grew ill, spiking a high fever. After spending a couple of hours curled up on the floor under his desk, he’d gone home to sleep it off for the rest of the day. During the coaches’ film session after practice, DT sat in Pettine’s chair and decreed that no music could be played “because we’ve been getting our ass kicked.” Later, in the secondary meeting, Julian Posey brought in his dessert from lunch, a slice of pie, and DT took it away from him. Then DT put up some film from the first Bills game and told Cro that “the new Cro” would destroy the Bills receivers by pressing them. “Are you the new Cro?”
Schotty began the Wednesday-morning meeting by telling the quarterbacks, “Words! Enough words!” And then as they gloomily watched the Bills defense play the Raiders offense, Schotty suddenly became expansive after all: “There’s Denarius Moore! Loved him for the draft coming out of Tennessee. One of the best rookies in the league. But I’ll take my man JK! Might get my favorite slot receiver back today. Men, where’s he want to spend Thanksgiving? With his favorite coordinator!” Some clips from the Broncos game against the Bills came next. The Broncos slot receiver was Brandon Stokley. “Who knows Brandon Stokley’s nickname?” Schotty asked. “Come on, men! This is essential. Slot Machine! But I’ll take my man JK!” Then he showed the quarterbacks a fake reverse to Santonio Holmes and told them the fake would set up the real reverse because “they’re not even looking at him!” And then: “The ole sprint option, men!”
“Yes!” cried Brunell, who’d made his name in the league running the ball fifteen years back.
“Easy!” said Schotty, settling Bru down with the flick of a syllable. “You and Cav go have a dip somewhere, maybe in the shitter, and talk about Bill Walsh!” Now the coordinator ran a cut-up of the Bills playing Cincinnati. “Hey, nice catch, Jermaine Gresham! Who is from—Kev?”
“Oklahoma!” shouted O’Connell.
“Ahhh! Football Almanac.”
And finally another Raiders cut-up: “Hey! Great catch there by my guy Denarius Moore. Read my report on him!”
On the TV monitors around the facility, Ryan had posted a message: “Don’t Let Anyone Rob Us of Our Dreams.” HBO’s Real Sports had filmed a segment about Marcus Dixon’s teenage travails in and out of prison in Georgia. Pettine had seen it and been so moved that he’d wept. He asked Dixon if he could tell the room about it, and Dixon thought that would be fine. So in the defensive meeting, Pettine said that if they wanted “to know what kind of man and teammate” was among them, they should watch. Dixon’s reaction to that was “I was proud. Some people might be ashamed. To me, on and off the football field, I’m a great guy, and for him to mention that in a meeting, I was proud.” After football, Dixon planned to return to his Georgia hometown. “I didn’t do anything wrong. My hometown is where I’m born and raised. I won’t let anything run me out of my home.”
BT began prodding Westerman to dream big, live large, go get him
self a pick-six against the Bills. Maybin, who’d seen Westerman dance, told Westerman if he did make one, he’d “get fined for excessive gyrations!” Westerman was indignant: “I don’t gyrate, man. I wiggle.”
At Wednesday’s practice, the day before Thanksgiving, the offensive scout team was so depleted that Posey was needed at wide receiver. At the end, as the Jets came together around him at midfield, Ryan asked Bart Scott to break down the team by saying a few words pre-holiday, and the linebacker struck an evanescent tone. “Be thankful,” he said. “It doesn’t last forever.”
Posey’s younger brother DeVier was a well-regarded Ohio State receiver. In the defensive-backs’ meeting, DT reviewed Posey’s performance at the position that day against the defense. “Nice route you ran on Revis, Posey,” DT said. “You remind me of your brother.”
“You mean he reminds you of me!” Posey sparked back. “Where you think he got it from?”
“From your parents! You got robbed!” Before he dismissed them for Thanksgiving, DT said, “You watch this game long enough, you’ll see all kind of shit.”
In the Friday quarterbacks’ meeting Schotty was all business. He had stopped shaving, ostensibly because he didn’t want to take the trouble, though maybe also because at times like these, it was good to have extra protection. The newspapers had been rough with him lately, and even if he didn’t see them, they still sometimes found their way under a football man’s skin. “Don’t read the newspaper” was DT’s advice. “You got enough people picking you apart.” Eric Smith, too, had been receiving sports-page censure for losing containment along the edge when he blitzed Tebow at the end of the game, and so, at his weekly press conference, Pettine made a point of explaining that his own call was at fault, not the player.
Absorbing criticism was such a big part of being a football professional that learning how to take it was a valuable skill. What the coaches told the players in meetings could sound blunt, but, Ryan said, “It is never, ever personal. You just want to fix the problem. What’s personal is the problem. These are rare dudes. They’re mighty men. It’s easier to win a lottery than to play in the NFL. You’ll be criticized. The old gladiators. Thumbs up. Thumbs down.”
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