Now it was going to get much worse for the Jets. Ryan would spend his days behind closed doors and drawn curtains with Tannenbaum. For them, there was no full stop. Life was enjambment with one season immediately becoming the next, the day-to-day a relentless unfolding of events. Personnel decisions would be made. Delicate phrases such as “will not return” and “won’t be back” would be used, and Pettine would tell me, “This is the cruel part of the business. It’s very strange here. Some guys who are secure in their jobs are just sitting in their offices, and others, guys you’ve worked with for years, are getting called into Rex’s office for a talk with the shades down. They come out and begin packing their offices up.” Then they’d look in on Pettine and tell him, “Hey, I just wanted to say good-bye.”
Henry Ellard would become the New Orleans Saints receivers coach. From Texas, where he had gone to become the Dallas offensive coordinator and line coach, Bill Callahan would tell me, “You just jump in. I haven’t thought about New York. When you take a new NFL job, you don’t ever look back.”
At the facility Ryan would look back. He was optimistic for himself and those he cared about and in that way suffered when the world did not conform. Warding off the wistful winds was one of the reasons Ryan kept so many people so close. For him, forgetting was a hard art to master. Of the NFL teams that had interviewed him and then failed to hire him as their coach, he would say, “Of course you never get over it. You remember everything and you let it drive you.” November’s loss to Denver—“We beat the fuck out of them… you never get a game like that back”—and the unbalanced pass/run ratio in the Giants game would likewise refuse to recede. As a result, Schottenheimer would move on to St. Louis, hired by the Rams as their offensive coordinator. (He would bring along with him Wayne Hunter and Matt Mulligan.) In St. Louis Schotty would work with twenty-four-year-old Sam Bradford, a former number-one draft choice at quarterback with dark features and bright eyes that, from a distance, made him resemble Mark Sanchez. When I would say to Ryan, “But Rex, you were the boss! These guys weren’t open rebels. Why didn’t you simply tell him to do it your way?” the coach would explain, as he had many times before, “I wanted to treat Schotty with the same respect they treated me in Baltimore.” And after talking again about “freedom and trust,” he would admit, “I did a poor job of saying, ‘Listen, you motherfucker, run the football.’ ”
Schottenheimer was still not yet forty, though his many big life experiences made him seem older. During the off-season, when we spoke, he said that of course the defense’s caustic attitude had penetrated: “I’d be lying if I said it didn’t piss us off. But we used it as motivation.” Then he would assess his own strengths and weaknesses, all but eliding the strengths and going straight to the weaknesses, concluding: “At times I overdid things, overthought things. It’s a game. It needs to go on instincts.” He added, “I could have given each coach more individual time with his players by ending meetings sooner. I had a good staff.” He was the good soldier who also wanted to be true to himself—a man with qualities. It’s rare to come upon someone, especially someone so young, who is capable of accurate self-criticism. If anybody could come through this bruising part of the profession well, I suspected, it was him.
Back in the narrow office beside the more spacious one where Schotty had spent so many nights, and where a new offensive coordinator, Tony Sparano, now sat, Cavanaugh would sigh and say he was sorry good men lost their jobs because Sanchez was slower to develop than the times required.
Mark Carrier had been given complete freedom and trust to coach a position new to him. Now it was decided he hadn’t done well enough. Carrier learned indirectly that he would not be returning to the Jets; he and Ryan never spoke of the decision. Even in such a devastating moment, Carrier was not vindictive. His players often remarked on what personal probity the Hammer had. “I don’t know what happened,” Carrier would say from Ohio, where he moved after being hired as the Cincinnati Bengals defensive-backs coach. “Honestly, I don’t. I didn’t see it coming. It’s never a smooth, clean break. Sometimes this is the way it happens. It was an odd situation, but it’s part of the business and we all accept it.” One advantage, he said, was that “my wife’s closer to her family in Chicago.” Ryan, Carrier said, had recommended him to the Bengals, and between them, “It’s all good.”
And then Ryan would brace himself, walk into Jeff Weeks’s office, and tell him, “Look, man, I can’t bring you back.” Weeks, Ryan would say, “was pissed. He wanted to beat the shit out of Pettine. I was like, ‘No, I have to do it.’ ” In the moment, Ryan would be angry and defended, oscillating with blame. As soon as they all were gone, their offices empty, the head coach became distraught, telling people, “I just fired my best friend of thirty years.” He hoped it would be a good thing for Weeks, that it would allow him to better order his life. But he would mourn his absent friend. Speaking also of Carrier, he would say, “It’s the worst. It’s like I failed. I talk to my wife. To Tannenbaum. It’s brutal. I failed. They’re all good people.”
Ryan saw beyond football, thought about the happiness of those who played and coached for him. Of Weeks he would say, “If I was gonna get a head-coaching job, Weeks was gonna be on my staff. We were gonna have fun. I want to get back to being me. I want to get back to having fun. That was actually the purpose he served. I never realized how it would bother people. Pet was my twin in Baltimore. I need that twin. ‘How can you go to lunch without me?’ That all wasn’t fair to Weeks. Pet can’t be the twin because he’s coordinator.”
I would find all these partings dramatic and unsettling and would think about what a man who severed professional ties with his ultimate comrade, his ultimate wingman, might take from such an event. Weeks was irresponsible in the sense that he scorned the grind, was not committed to the hard-drive details of modern professional football. And yet he was filled with spontaneity and always freer than anybody else. Now he could be truly free.
As for Ryan, his job was to enthrall others, draw them to him and to his cause, and nobody in the NFL could do it better. And yet for Ryan, perhaps this moment signaled the end of his apprenticeship and would make him realize that a great leader can’t please everyone. A leader has to be a little ruthless. As Bart Scott put it, “The game’s always evolving. You have to evolve with it or else you’re a dinosaur. You adapt or you die.” When Bill Belichick was a young head coach with the Cleveland Browns, he was a difficult, driven man with a 36 and 44 record. Given another chance by the Patriots, although he remained disdainful to the world, Belichick, according to people who knew him, became more open to those he worked with.
Ryan would spend the winter consulting “my sensei,” an executive counselor whom Tannenbaum hired. Ryan would describe him: “Chinese guy. Old dude. He’s helpful. I’m an extrovert. Now I’ve realized I pull away from introverts. I’m learning to be more inclusive.” Ryan would also talk with Steve Young, a former 49ers quarterback, about the difference between offensive and defensive players. Among his findings: “Defensive players like to be told they’re gonna kick your ass. Offensive players don’t like it. The defensive attitude doesn’t necessarily work for the whole team.”
Ryan would also eliminate “Rexican” meals in which he ate as many as twelve tacos at a sitting. Now he’d call for a single plate of nachos and finish only four. (To help, DT would remand his desktop stash of See’s peanut brittle and lollipops to his car trunk.) By the end of summer Ryan would have lost 106 pounds and cast off last season’s weight of another sort, confessing he’d been “down almost the whole year. It was a brutal year. Especially at the end.” He said he’d felt “pulled in so many ways. Now I’m doing nothing but football. I got away from it a little bit. I love coaching. I love teaching. I wasn’t doing enough of it.”
Wanting an offense that would stand up to the defense, the team hired Tony Sparano, who’d recently been the Dolphins head coach, to be its offensive coordinator. Sparano grew up in the Hill, the toughe
st neighborhood in New Haven. His father poured steel at a foundry and drove a liquor truck, a combination that seemed to describe Ryan’s preferred style of offense. And with the coaching situation resolved, Ryan and Tannenbaum would turn their attention to improving their quarterback.
Out in Denver, the Hall of Fame Broncos quarterback John Elway, who now ran the team, was unsentimental when it came to his position, and in a passing age, Tim Tebow’s throws brought to mind shells wobbling over the trenches at Passchendaele. The Broncos would sign Peyton Manning to replace Tebow. The Jets, meanwhile, would give Sanchez a contract extension that, if he did become a fine pro, would represent a relative bargain for the team. Yet even as they were betting on Sanchez, Tannenbaum and Ryan would reflect on the memory of Tebow on the run, shedding exhausted Jets defenders, and Tebow would join those he’d vanquished. The Tebow trade would leave Santonio Holmes, like most of America, bewildered. Immediately Holmes would telephone Sanchez and find him “lost for words. Didn’t understand it. I encouraged him. Tebow’s only a teammate.” Out in Missouri, Schottenheimer would root for Sanchez, hoping the presence of Tebow would motivate him to grow up as a quarterback. Sanchez, he thought, “has all the ability. Tebow might be the best thing in the world for him.” The Jets had hoped that Tebow would add depth and nuance to the narrative. In profile, however, Tebow was a leading man. It was testament to the hermetic nature of football teams that the Jets had not foreseen that bringing such a celebrated presence to a New York team might prey on the team’s energy.
In the NFL, all men are optimists. Schottenheimer believed his Rams, who’d finished 2 and 14 in 2011, “can win the whole thing.” In 2012, Ryan thought the same of the Jets, of course, but post-sensei, discretion was an art of war. It was wise restraint. In their first 2012 game, the Jets would score forty-eight points and Sanchez would throw three touchdowns in a defeat of the Buffalo Bills. Among the defensive standouts on the field that day were Wilkerson, the number-one draft choice who was now among the best linemen in the sport, and Cromartie, who at year’s end would be selected to the Pro Bowl. About the rest of the season, probably the less said the better. In the third 2012 Jets game, against Miami, Revis, who’d never had surgery of any kind, sprinted in open-field pursuit and fell untouched to the ground, his left knee ligaments sheared, his season over. The next week, all the sharp cuts seemed to catch up with Holmes, when he, likewise, fell to the ground untouched with a season-ending foot injury. BT, his Achilles still troubling him, played again, only to tear a tendon in his shoulder. “He wasn’t,” said Pettine, “the same guy.” The horror of the body-annihilating game was that its most valuable resources were so ephemeral.
It would get worse. On Thanksgiving, during a loss to the Patriots, one of the Patriots touchdowns would involve the year’s most ignominious play: Sanchez, after a backfield miscommunication, ran toward the pit, collided with Brandon Moore’s posterior, fumbled on impact, and then pawed the ground as the ball was returned for a touchdown. This demoralizing episode became known as the butt-fumble, and the flummoxed, scatological ineptitude of one man whanging into another like a dairy farmer colliding with the hindquarters of his milk cow would become a cultural meme, the avatar for the team’s rapid declension from unexpected glories to absurdity.
The cruel nature of things in the ultimate team game was that a disproportionate amount of blame would fall upon the quarterback. Sanchez was plainly affected by the presence of Tebow, even though Tebow, curiously, was as negligible a change-of-pace quarterback in the Jets scheme as Brad Smith had been the previous year for the Bills. Sanchez played even more poorly than he had in 2011, staring down receivers and throwing off his back foot on the way to leading the league in the most crucial statistic of them all—turnovers. Turnovers inspire the opposition and deflate your own team. Each game, supporters watched Sanchez with unease, waiting for the next one. Said a member of an opposing team, “Everybody knows Sanchez throws money to the defense.” Sanchez lacked the presence in the pocket that allows quarterbacks to sense the onrush of the basilisks; he still did not seem a prescient decoder of the defense’s intentions; he didn’t move through his progression of receiver pass routes quickly enough; he made capricious decisions. Worst of all, he did not improve the play of others. Football was a difficult game. Sanchez made it look too hard.
They would finish at 6 and 10, apparently back where they’d started before Ryan’s arrival, a doomed enterprise, the fated street corner on which store after store has a grand opening that quickly ends in shutters. Ryan’s bravura approach had, from the first, earned the Jets plenty of detractors. That enmity was fine when the team was winning. Now that they were at a loss, the Jets were again the loathed football team, a victim of sporting schadenfreude that I would find painful because it canted so far from the resolute and inspiring professionalism I’d experienced, that I knew still existed in Florham Park, as it did across the NFL, a strange multibillion-dollar world where men gave their lives to make a violent, dangerous sport beautiful to watch. To talk in 2012 with Tannenbaum, Ryan, DT, Sutton, A-Lynn, Bradway, Smitty, and the rest was to hear the times trying their hardworking souls. “How’s life outside football?” I’d ask Pettine, to change the subject, and the reply would come: “What’s that?”
Tannenbaum, after sixteen years with the Jets and many short nights spent sleeping beside a fish tank, would lose his job. That long a stay with one NFL organization was rare, and leaving it would be “really tough” for Tannenbaum—“It was sixteen years. Those feelings can’t leave overnight. It meant a lot to me. ” For a while every piece of Jets news hit him hard, the feeling each time like seeing the new owner’s car in the driveway of your foreclosed dream house. Out in the world he would resolve to speak only grace notes about the team, taking all responsibility and leaving things at that. Changing careers, he became a sports agent; coaches and broadcasters would now benefit from his fastidious attention to their details, and so would his family. Some hiring people in the NFL had reached out to him, but right now he wanted to stay in the same town with his wife and kids.
And Ryan, who a winter ago had promised to deliver Super Bowls, a thrill of a presentiment he said he regretted, now would suffer. Disconsolate as he was, in defeat he would meet his other, quieter ambition. In January, when the For Sale signs appeared outside the houses of NFL coaches, in the suburban New Jersey towns around Florham Park some of those properties were empty because the occupants had been offered better jobs elsewhere and Ryan had not stood in their way.
Pettine would move on to Buffalo to become the defensive coordinator of the Bills. For Pettine, the Bills were his opportunity to become his own coaching man, to show he could run a first-rate defense without Ryan. And to help him do it, Ryan allowed Pettine to take with him O’Neil, now to have his own “room” as the Bills linebackers coach. And to coach the Bills defensive line, Ryan also let him have Anthony Weaver, the former Ravens player who’d been a promising assistant Jets coach in 2012. Smitty could have gone to Buffalo as well, but he got married and returned instead to Lubbock to be the co–defensive coordinator at his alma mater, Texas Tech. There he would be in a better position to help his ailing father, and he and his wife would live close to their families. A football coach’s wife, Smitty knew, needed a supportive community nearby when she began to have children. Sutton would be hired by Kansas City to become the defensive coordinator of the Chiefs, and joining him there, on the defensive line, would be Mike DeVito. DT would rise to become the Jets defensive coordinator, Ryan pledging to help him build the plans and call the games. From Ryan’s 2011 staff, including Schottenheimer and Callahan, there would now be six offensive and defensive coordinators working in football. Ryan’s other guarantee had been to create a “coaching tree,” with his former assistants running their own teams, and the pinecones had been scattered.
At the facility, Westhoff would retire and Kotwica would be promoted to replace him. Brian Smith would receive O’Neil’s former job. Some of the
offensive coaches were offered more senior positions by other teams; Ryan asked them to fulfill their contracts with him. A-Lynn would become the Jets assistant head coach as well as the running-backs coach, making the experience of sitting in a windowless office while teaching men to run to daylight a little brighter. Devlin would become the Jets offensive-line coach. Tony Sparano would not be asked back and would move on to Oakland to be the Raiders line coach. In the facility hallways there, he would pass Joey Clinkscales, beginning his second year as the Raiders director of player personnel. In professional football, for a proven coach, if the circumstances were no longer amenable at one branch office, there was usually a job waiting at another—which was how Matt Cavanaugh ended up in Chicago, presiding over the Bears quarterbacks. And eventually, if you were fortunate and could stand an itinerant life where you were always on the verge of exile, a proven coach might win the Super Bowl—as Don “Wink” Martindale had in 2012 with the Ravens, who’d hired him to coach their linebackers.
Thin at many positions and building for the future, in the depths of the winter of 2013, the Jets’ prospects for a flourishing fall did not seem likely. Everyone in Florham Park talked about the new GM, John Idzik, as a deliberate, disciplined person. One of Idzik’s obstacles was all that extra salary now tied up in Sanchez. Two of his early decisions were to cut Tebow and trade Revis to Tampa Bay for the draft choices and salary relief he would use to begin the latest reconstitution of the Jets. (Among the team’s new defensive backs was the former Temple safety Jaiquawn Jarrett, signed off the street after an unsatisfactory professional debut with the Eagles.) True, the breaks of the ultimate team game had lately been against the Jets, and such was the random element in pro football that there might be triumph in the offing. But only a spectacular optimist would have thought so. A spectacular optimist (and loyalist) Ryan yet remained. He rehired Jeff Weeks. With so many of the others leaving, he needed his friend, and, anyway, the first two years with Weeks they’d won. “He’s kicking ass,” Ryan told me happily in the spring. “His life is dramatically changed.” Ryan was aware that Weeks hadn’t performed well in 2011, but the coach said, “Everybody deserves another opportunity. He needed help. He went and got it. He’s a different guy.” Another old Ryan comrade and football lifer, Sam Pittman, who would gladly travel halfway across the country if Ryan needed assistance building a fort for his kids, who had known Weeks and Ryan for many years, thought, “He just loves Weeks. Sometimes with Rex it’s blind love, but that’s who he is. Part of it makes him great, part of it gives him flaws.”
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