“Rookie mistake,” said Calvin Pace.
That afternoon, the defensive coaches were visited by Plaxico Burress, who helped them review his former team’s pass routes, cadences, signal checks, and snap counts. Football teams are in such constant personnel flux that coaches don’t usually change such things from season to season, the reasoning being that most players are too busy learning their new playbooks to summon up the old. Burress, however, had superior recall. “I watched the Dallas game,” he told the coaches. “They hadn’t changed a thing.”
After Burress left, DT said, “Coaches are arrogant. They think, ‘He was in jail for two years. He won’t remember anything.’ They give him no credit.”
In the defensive-backs’ meeting, DT asked the younger players how long they’d studied their Giants playbook. “Scrappy?”
Trufant told him, “Forty-five minutes!”
“Posey?”
“One hour twenty minutes!”
“Brodney?”
“Long time!”
“How long a long time?”
“Two hours!”
“Where do you play on Fifty-One Hole?”
(Sounds of uncertainty.)
DT was incredulous. “Do you just float through life? We’re getting ready to play the most important game of the season because we fucked up some other ones. We have to communicate. We have to study. Communication makes you confident. Get your own defense down. Tomorrow we’ll be going to the board, gentlemen.”
“Can I be first?” asked Cromartie.
The meeting ended and, as he left the room, Posey burst into song: “Ain’t too proud to beg!”
“What are you doing to the Temptations?” cried DT, who loved Motown the way Jim O’Neil loved Tom Petty.
“I was in the church choir!” Posey told him.
“They must not have had good choirs in Ohio,” DT said with a huff, trying, and failing, not to laugh.
Revis didn’t smile. I asked how he was. “Frustrated, man,” he said. We watched some film of the Giants against Redskins. “Oh, pick!” Revis cried. Interceptions always made Rev happy.
The defensive backs met on Thursday to cast their Pro Bowl ballots. Voting value was divided evenly among the choices made by the fans (online), the coaches, and the players, who did not vote for teammates. There was some freedom within each NFL team to decide how votes would be cast. Schottenheimer and the offensive coaches, for instance, voted only for defensive players they’d opposed in games, making their choices collectively, in a unit meeting. The Jets players’ part of the system limited each position group to voting for the opponent position group whose play they knew best. Hence the Jets defensive backs voted for quarterbacks and receivers, and vice versa. The DBs’ first two picks were unanimous, Brady and Welker. For the second-team quarterback, Matt Schaub being injured, Revis proposed Tebow. Around the room a superstorm of oratorio began:
“You sellin’?”
“You’re haters!”
“It’s his team, not him!”
“You a Christian?”
“More than five hundred yards rushing.”
Eventually they agreed on Andy Dalton of the Bengals.
Pettine was so weary, he looked years older than he had at the start of training camp, but he was still at it, playing cartographer, mapping Eli Manning’s most frequent paths of pass-rush-pressure avoidance. Manning, he found, preferred to move forward and slide right. So Pettine designed a call making Isaiah Trufant a 165-pound defensive end. From that spot near scrimmage, Tru’d run to the accustomed Manning slide spot. Trufant fascinated Pettine with his ability to change direction in confined spaces at high speed. “Look at that!” said Pettine. “How many people on the planet can do that? I’d be getting my hip flexor surgically reattached.”
By now the fog of loss had lifted, car windows were defrosted, the sun was up, clear December skies. The linebackers were exchanging their Secret Santa gifts. Pace gave McIntyre large sunglasses. “Tryin’ to put him in the game,” said Pace. There followed large watches, cunning little cameras, Italian wallets, various non-Nano iItems, and soft cashmere. Bob Sutton, who had spent his off-season missing Bart Scott, took the opportunity to show the player how he felt about him. He handed Scott three packages and instructed him to “open them in order.” The first contained a toy helicopter. The second was a book of aerial photographs of New York City. The third was a gift certificate for a seat on a helicopter tour of New York. Scott was overwhelmed. “Let it out, Bart! Let it out!” cried the others. Scott picked up the book. With feeling, he promised, “I’m gonna put this in my gallery.” Westerman looked at McIntyre, who was modeling his shades. “You can go to a black club now,” he told him.
The only person who didn’t receive a gift was Mike Smith. Maybin had forgotten it. When Pettine heard about this, he told Smitty, “Should have put it on the wristband.” (Maybin later gave Smitty a Louis Vuitton briefcase that, like so many of the gifts chosen by the players, cost many times the spending maximum.)
The defensive players never watched film of opposing defenses, but the Giants defensive line was putting a lot of pressure on quarterbacks, and, out of curiosity, the outside linebackers pulled up some Giants film. Concluded Calvin Pace, “You know, one common theme of these guys getting sacks is that there’re four people who just go—no other responsibilities. We’re so conditioned to doing other jobs.”
At practice in this chillier time of year, the coaches favored gray sweat suits that were a size or three too large, and since they were bulky men to begin with, in these billowy swaths of gray, they resembled armored cars going through battle exercises. Westhoff was an anticipating armored car. He thought that so far as regular-season games went, “they don’t get much bigger.” Players were now playing in significant pain. Joe McKnight was hiding behind a barrier so nobody outside the team could see the agony he was in trying to get a shirt over his shoulder pads. Ropati Pitoitua’s finger had been jammed straight back so violently he had a spiral fracture. For him to play, the trainers had to fashion the lineman a protective club of tape, but any contact still hurt him. “They’ll numb it up,” he said, meaning for the game. “Be all right.”
On the tackle-eligible play, which allowed a designated lineman to become a receiver, MTV, subbing in with the white shirts, shambled briskly across the field, and made a nice catch. All these months later it was still remarkable to me what nimble athletic maneuvers men well over three hundred pounds were capable of. MTV’s green-shirted defensive brothers didn’t see it this way. They gave him the silent treatment for having too much fun with the offense.
Along the sideline Revis was doing his Tom Brady imitation, scanning the defensive set and then changing the call based on what he’d deciphered. “It’s very frustrating when Tom Brady gives you the Look,” Rev explained. The Look meant, said Rev, “Oh! Okay! I got it.” Then he imitated Peyton Manning peering out at the defense and noticing a weak man-coverage defender like Lito Sheppard on the field. “Peyton, he’s up there, sees Lito, says, ‘Okay!’ ” Revis might play off to himself, but he loved the banter, the groupness of football. This was not the first time he’d done his Brady. The Look, like any other skill for Revis, had to be practiced.
Sutton, who kept track of everything, noted that when DeVito led the Jets pregame prayer, the team didn’t win, whereas Mully was 3 and 0, so, he said, “I told DeVito, ‘Mully’s doing the prayer. He’s 3 and 0, and the Lord’s not taking your calls.’ ”
Over on the offensive side, the coaches watched practice in upright, alert, hopeful stances, as if they were the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk wondering, Will it fly?
The defense received a postsurgery visit from Jim Leonhard on Friday. “I finally got two hours of sleep,” he said. Not only had his leg been operated on, but Leonhard’s wife had given birth to their first child.
Ryan, due to call third downs, spent more time speaking in the defensive meeting than he had all year. He’d created an eight-man blitz
look, except that this wasn’t the 46, and not everybody blitzed. “Pet and I wouldn’t have put this in unless we thought we’d kick their asses with it,” he said, and then off he went to see the offense.
Walk-throughs the day before the game were uninteresting to most players, but not to Cromartie, who could never spend enough time on a football field. Cro had recently submitted to a vasectomy—“I got snipped,” as he told me. Eric Smith surveyed the jubilant, excised cornerback and said fondly, “I wish it had calmed him down!” Afterward, all the players scattered except Sanchez. A terminally ill little girl was there to meet him through the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Long after every other player and coach was gone, the quarterback was still talking with the child.
At the hotel Friday night, Schotty instructed Sanchez, “Early in the game I don’t want you standing up there taking a lot of time with kills. So whatever it is, go with your gut and we’ll make it happen, and if something isn’t right, we’ll live with it.”
Pettine told the defense that losing should make them “physically ill.” He said he’d thrown up after losses. Then he chided himself for being “negative” about the offense in the heat of headset passion and advised them that the way to think about the offense’s three and outs was “More TV time for us!”
Around the NFL, the Giants had a reputation as a family organization that treated and paid people well. Ryan said he was tired of hearing how classy the Giants were. No Giant ever said nice things about the Jets. He began talking about how the Giants seemed to believe they were not only “better players” but also “better people.” Now he was weeping. Every week, it was Ryan’s job to inspire his team by turning the opponent into the enemy. Most of Ryan’s players had heard a lot of pregame speeches. I’d seen Ryan give nearly twenty of them, and every week, in the moment, I was convinced he meant what he said. Whatever the team’s problems, they did not include resolve. The Jets gave Ryan what they had. He really was a masterful motivator.
Game-day morning, Ryan and Pettine reviewed their calls. “We’re all in this together,” Ryan told his coaches. “Let’s go kick some ass.” Were they all together? The game began and Ryan and Pettine were sharing the game-calling and bickering per usual. Said Pettine, “Rex! You’re asking me my opinion. You like it, call it. I don’t like it.” Then Sanchez threw to Josh Baker for a five-yard touchdown and I imagined the elation of Baker’s discoverer Terry Bradway up in Tannenbaum’s box.
The Jets defense was more intense than ever. When Eli Manning, as predicted, stepped up and to his right, David Harris was waiting there and sacked him, leaving the coaches making visceral noises of pleasure. They vowed to soon get Trufant involved. After several three and outs, the Giants reached the Jet two, and then the Jets held. A Giants field goal cut the Jets lead to 7–3.
Ryan and Pettine had experienced some further early static—“Rex! We never repped it out of that grouping!” (When Ryan chose plays that weren’t in the game plan, that hadn’t been repped in practice, O’Neil sat there and felt “panic” surge through him.) Pettine was a paragon of preparation, whereas Ryan’s nature hewed more toward the Napoleon dictum on s’engage et puis on voit. (You enter the fray and then you see what to do.) The combination invited discord, yet when Ryan and Pettine were clicking together, you could see that calls would work before the snap. “This is gonna be good,” O’Neil would say, and indeed it was. “He threw it so quick, the routes didn’t develop,” approved Brian Smith. Something had to have worked really well for B-Smitty to say something.
What was holding down the offense right now were penalties, and the score remained 7–3. With the first half nearly over, the Jets punted to the Giants’ one. Pettine got Ryan to third and ten with passes defended by Revis and then Cro, and then he turned the call over, saying, “You got it, Rexer!” Ryan chose that tempting character actor Max Blow. A short Manning throw went to the receiver Victor Cruz. Revis, on the other side of the field, was thinking, We’re about to get a safety. But it was Denver redux, only worse. First Kyle Wilson and then Cromartie missed tackles. Eric Smith had an angle, but he could no longer run at full speed. Brodney Pool was nowhere to be found. And just like that, Cruz sprinted for the thirteenth ninety-nine-yard touchdown in NFL history. It would be, along with the late Tebow drive, one of the two signal moments of the Jets’ season. Sutton had been watching Smith. “I saw Eric on the bench and I thought, by the look of pain in his eyes, there is no way he can get through this. I am awed by what people like Dave Harris and Eric put themselves through.” As had happened frequently this season, the defense had dominated the Giants. The Giants had six yards rushing. Manning had completed seven passes. And yet the Jets were losing 10–7 at the half. “We’re kicking this team’s ass,” Pettine told them. “We just can’t give up the explosive.”
In the second half, against what was perhaps the NFL’s best pass rush, Sanchez threw and threw. He had open receivers, the booth could see them: “There’s Mully!”; “Was anybody on LT in the flat? Nope.” But Sanchez wasn’t finding them. He seemed befogged out there. The defensive coaches, in turn, were baffled: “Why don’t they run the ball?” Where was the run? Brandon Moore was so upset after a three and out on three straight passes that the guard lost his temper and screamed at Schotty to run. By the end, Sanchez had dropped back to pass more than sixty times, an exceptionally high total. Even the offensive coaches later would say, “That was weird.”
In the big game, Revis was all over the field. The one reception made against the cornerback, Pettine would describe as the perfect NFL throw and catch. Slowly the game withdrew from the Jets’ control. A Sanchez interception led to a field goal and a 20–7 Giants lead. The coaches thought he was just not reading coverages. As they spoke these criticisms, Tom Moore sat silent. He’d known the young Terry Bradshaw, about whom worse had been said. Quarterbacks—you could never tell.
There were more chances; it was the NFL, there were always chances. The Giants knew they’d won only late in the fourth quarter as Ahmad Bradshaw ran over Brodney Pool, making it 29–14. “Ford over rooster” as the defensive coaches called it.
In the locker room Ryan looked at his team and told the offense, “Pretty simple, guys. Too many turnovers. Four of twenty-one on third down ain’t gonna get it done. And the D can’t give up the big plays. It’ll be on my shoulders. Let’s go kick the fuck out of this team next week.” What had Bradway been thinking in the box? “I’m worried about us” is what he had been thinking.
Part of the problem this season, as I saw it, was that Ryan wanted what he wanted—which was fair; he was the boss. But he didn’t like forcing what he wanted on reluctant people, didn’t even like cajoling them, and so he created friction, and then, with his aversion to professional confrontation, he fled from it instead of reaffirming his demands. He was a young head coach, and it seemed to me, going forward, that he would need more directive clarity, had to tell people what his wishes were and then hold them to them, and himself, to it. He had so much self-confidence, so much confidence in others. And all that was fine, until what he promised didn’t come to pass and he acted betrayed—as he had recently with both Schotty and Pettine. Ryan was such an endearing and seductive man; people would do a lot for him—especially if he was more present, right there with them all the way through.
Some of the coaches, like Pettine and O’Neil, made quick out-of-state trips to spend Christmas Day with relatives. Schottenheimer hosted a gathering for both sides of his family to which he also invited young coaches and players who had nowhere else to go. Others dined at Ryan’s home. All of them were brooding, spoke later of spending the holiday lost in the same football moment.
On December 26, the coaches were back in their offices reliving that nadir on film, watching Cruz’s ninety-nine-yard play many times. When the coaches met, Pettine told them, “Guys, we gave up nine completions and got blown out. We had fifty plays for ninety-one yards, and five for two hundred and forty-one. It’ll make you sick.” The system de
pended on unblocked linebackers making tackles. Scott had missed some big ones. On the ninety-nine-yard play, why had Brodney Pool frozen? “Wow,” said Pettine as the film ended. “ ‘Bleak’ ain’t the word.” DeVito, Carrier said, had a plus grade on every play until the final touchdown, when his injured knees betrayed him. “I feel so bad for him,” the coach said. So many players were hurt that Pettine went to see Ryan about canceling the day’s practice.
In the team meeting, Ryan spent most of his address criticizing the play of the defense. This enraged some of the defensive players, though not Maybin, who later visited Ryan’s office “bawling like a child,” said Ryan, “because he felt he let us down by not doing enough.”
When Pettine met the defense, he told them that the season’s last game in Miami would be an audition for those who wanted to remain Jets. That he and Ryan “weren’t always on the same page” and created play-calling confusion, he apologized for. To Pool he said, his effort was “a head-scratcher, Brodney. That’s unacceptable.” Pool would sign with Dallas as a free agent in the off-season.
To the defensive backs, DT spoke with passion: “What you put on that tape is who you are. I want you guys to have long careers in this league. Don’t take it personal. I want to help you make a lot of money and play in the league a long time. I’m coaching for perfection. I may never get it, but I’ll never stop trying.” He asked if anybody had anything to say. Nobody did. As DT left the room, Cole, who didn’t play against the Giants because of his sore knee, yelled, “I have something to say. I played a lot of years in this league.”
Cole would remember the year as incredibly trying because he’d lost the brother with whom, as a child, he’d “gone through all the many same troubles with together.” Bart Scott had been right. In the days after the murder, just as training camp was beginning, much had fallen on Cole out in Illinois with his family. Although Cole said, “I was able to handle it and keep going,” the year had completely drained him. He was grateful to Ryan, who’d stayed in touch and consoled him when he was away from the team during training camp, who’d made the Jets feel like “a second family.” For some people, Cole said, “it’s a first family. I know people who played football instead of joining gangs.” Cole would sign a free-agent contract with New England after the season.
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