Inside the Helmet: Hard Knocks, Pulling Together, and Triumph as a Sunday Afternoon Warrior

by Michael Strahan

  Of course we have the same distraction most guys have with the women. Pretty much every game I’ll hear from another player something along the lines of “Oh, man, look at the third one from the right, ten rows up.”

  If you’re losing the game, you don’t pay attention at all. But if you’re winning, you start wondering. We’ll all be huddled up and somebody will say something like “Check out the girls two sections down, eight rows up, two of them.” At the same time, we’ll all turn and stare.

  Some guys will actually get the equipment guys to go and give a girl in the stands or a cheerleader a phone number or ask for her number. However, I’ve got to say, I’ve never seen a guy meet a girl in the stands and actually start a relationship.

  The cheerleaders are a huge, huge distraction. They aren’t there just to distract the fans, they’re used as a weapon against us, too. We stare at cheerleaders sometimes. It’s against the rules for a cheerleader to date a player, but it happens all the time. I’ll tell you the best girls in the league, by far, are not the famous Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders or the famed Raiderettes. It’s not even close, folks. The Washington Redskins get the prize in my book. Every single one of those girls is stunning.

  It’s tough when we’re standing on these sidelines trying to pay attention to the position coach, but you can’t take your eyes off the second girl in the third row. You find yourself trying to pay attention to adjustments, but instead you focus on the figures, if you know what I mean. Philly isn’t that far behind, but nothing beats the Redskins cheerleaders. Now, combine this with the fact that I’ve suddenly realized I forgot to leave my friends tickets to the game. How in the world am I expected to try to blast the man who I pestered all evening for another set of tickets?

  Still, I’ve got to clear my mind, people. It’s game day, and it’s been seven days since Peyton Manning made me hate my life. Today is about vindication! On to the Battle of Philly!

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Communicating on the Field

  Eli dropped back and the Eagles brought the house. They brought their house, their town, their city. They brought the hopes of every last city-of-brotherly-love neighbor longing for yet another sack on our quarterback. It would have been the ninth time that Eli hit the ground behind our line of scrimmage with the ball still in his hands. Think about that for a minute…that’s ridiculous. Eight sacks so far? Utterly ridiculous.

  For three quarters of this game, we played like it was the first day any of us had ever met. It was almost like we spoke different languages for the first two-plus hours of this clash.

  But on this play, every single person on our offense communicated perfectly. Everyone who was supposed to be at a certain spot, everyone who was supposed to perform a certain assignment—was perfect. Eli dropped back, planted ever so slightly before fading back again and he just let it fly. One week after losing to his brother, Eli was going for broke, baby. The pass was one of those all-your-chips-all-in kind of passes.

  When the ball was released, I literally stopped breathing. I was afraid to exhale, fearing my breath would push the ball off its course. I know the entire play only took three seconds, but when we’re standing on that sideline, it’s so slow, you feel like you could run to the kitchen for a sandwich, stop off in the bathroom, read a magazine and still have enough time to watch the end of the play. Time…stands…completely…still!

  Plaxico Burress did what he does best. He launched himself into the air high above Philly’s corner Sheldon Brown, grabbed that little baby and yet again, there was that dead, eerie kind of silence. The only difference was, this silence was caused by sound waves suffocated inside the lungs and throats of about 70,000 stunned Eagles fans, all sitting with their jaws dropped in shock.

  Touchdown Giants! We win 30–24.

  I started jumping up and down like a little schoolgirl. Just minutes earlier, I was exhausted. But this feeling is why I’ve played for fourteen years. Feeling so much joy, feeling like I’m looking to hand out forgiveness slips to anybody who has ever wronged me, these are the times players cut through all the business and money aspects of football, remembering that underneath it all, it’s still a game.

  This feeling, the chances of winning each week, provides us with the closest opportunity we’ll get to relive the excitement of that first innocent touchdown in Pop Warner. This feeling is as close as we’ll get to riding on the shoulders as a hero during the purity of high school football. These moments, it’s not about the money, who makes more than who and who doesn’t think he’s making enough. It’s not about anything but a few minutes of that pure joy of victory.

  What truly makes this win even sweeter is knowing that all those Philly fans screaming and cursing at us for the last three hours had to walk out of that stadium completely shocked and sick to their stomachs. Awesome, baby!

  What made it better still was that we fought back from the most futile and effortless performance I’d been associated with in a long time. For two and a half hours that Sunday afternoon I felt like I was in the ring against a fighter who I knew I should annihilate, but every time I threw a punch, he bobbed, weaved and hit me back with a sharp jab. Every time I threw a shot, he was nowhere near where he was supposed to be. There’s no way we should have been taking this kind of a beating.

  My head was spinning because everything Donovan McNabb and the rest of the Eagles offense wanted to do, they had their way. If Donovan wanted to go deep, he connected at will. If their head coach, Andy Reid, felt like keeping it on the ground with Brian Westbrook, they had their way with ease. Every snap they guessed right while we guessed wrong. Man, we were on the ropes.

  Frustration grew by the play. But in the NFL there’s never a point where you can throw your arms up and quit. No matter how bad the beating, the commissioner wasn’t going to suddenly call up the Giants and Eagles owners and say, “You know, I’ve seen enough, let’s make a mercy ruling and give this one to Philly.”

  We felt snakebitten, like the whole team had a bad case of the flu. We needed a quick break to gather ourselves, lick our wounds and figure out if there was indeed an answer. The Eagles had taken a 17–7 lead into halftime and moved to 24–7 in the third quarter, yet the score was nowhere near indicative of the beating we were taking. Games like this cause a player to feel nearly as useless as the times he’s forced to stand on the sidelines on crutches. It was awful. Everything we did, we screwed up.

  Less than an hour before becoming our hero that afternoon, Burress had had an argument with the offensive linemen. That doesn’t go over well with all the big boys up front. Guys were apologizing to Eli because he was under pressure every single time he dropped back. He’d been sacked a bordering-on-the-bizarre eight times. Defensively, everything we put into plan, we failed to execute. It seemed hopeless.

  The funny thing about professional sports is that every once in a while, you just have a bad day. It happens. Days when everything you do is wrong. When Murphy and his stupid law decides to stop by for a visit, you can’t give up. You can’t cancel the game. You’ve got to spend every lull, every break in play figuring out where it’s all gone terribly wrong and how to, hopefully, make it right.

  That first half our problem was lack of communication. Every form of communication that we used in a game seemed to be off-line. As much as the world sees us pounding away at each other, communication is just as important out there as the physical part of our game. The mental part and how much we all need to adjust together, see things together. That’s all done through a carefully crafted network of communication tools used during every game. There are a handful of communication channels that come to life within the three hours of a Sunday battle and they’re all just as important as how big we are, how much we weigh and how fast we run.

  Everything is communicated, whether verbally or nonverbally, and the faster we pick it all up and understand what’s being relayed, the faster we can mesh and enjoy success. The fans see the hits on every play but they may not know how
much of that play was a success or failure due to the crossed lines of communication. When we don’t communicate, when we lack that same-page precision, that’s when we get our butts handed to us like we were earlier that afternoon.

  It’s imperative that we recognize the formations and what we think the play will be, and then communicate to each other what call we’re running. You’ve heard coaches proclaim in press conferences, “We really weren’t on the same page.” How well we communicate through the different avenues and networks throughout a game is what makes up that so-called same page.

  During a game, we communicate through so many different lines that we all need to mesh at some point. It’s not just coach-player speak. We use a series of photographs and even telephones on the sidelines between each series.

  But trash talk, the in-your-face, I’m-gonna-kick-your-ass kind, is also a great form of communication that we use on the other team. You want to get a response from your opponent? Lay traps and dupe a guy into moving in a certain direction in order to create a space to get your work done.

  When an offense is in full swing, like the Eagles were that day, their communication puts them all on the same page and leaves us all scratching our heads. Every adjustment McNabb and his offensive weapons made seemed to be the right ones. Every time one of their coaches saw something, they successfully communicated it to Donovan and friends. Every time we thought we saw something, we all failed miserably in picking it up together.

  Whenever Donovan would adjust and one of us on defense would try to recognize it, we’d not only see the wrong checks, we wouldn’t physically respond, either. For example, it was up to Antonio Pierce to read Donovan and make certain adjustments, but each time he made a call, Donovan responded as if he was in Antonio’s mind. I know in my case I was playing like a piece of garbage. I felt like I had been hit with a bug of some sort because every time Antonio made a call that called for me to make a certain adjustment, I literally got tired coming out of my stance, never mind hitting my new assignment.

  In that game we didn’t hear anything and we saw nothing. Every time we’d come to the sidelines and the coaches would point out certain calls the Eagles were using, we simply couldn’t get it.

  No matter how hard we listened, we were deaf that Sunday. The coaches kept going to a series of photographs of the Eagles’ formations, and we still we couldn’t see it.

  You’ve seen us on television looking at photographs, but you may not know how crucial they are. These aren’t snapshots from the what-we-did-on-our-summer-vacation scrapbook. These come from cameras perched at a couple of spots around the stadium. They’ll show us a team’s formation, players’ stances and then where each man moves after his first step.

  We were looking for any tip against the Eagles, anything at all that would help us better understand why they were whipping us play after play. For example, we’ll look to see if a guy is leaning a certain direction on a certain play. That gives us a tip that next time he leans that way, they’ll be running that same direction. The quicker we can recognize that and get on the same page, the faster we can exploit it. Then we’ve got to get each other to immediately communicate what one person sees, hoping that everyone else recognizes it as well. The more players see it, the less chance there is to get caught by their offense. But this afternoon, we failed to recognize those tips. Never saw them. Add that to the fact that we were physically getting whipped and that didn’t provide a good combination for us.

  In the week leading up to that game, we had already dissected the Eagles’ entire offense to the point where, on just about any play, judging by their formation, we could narrow down what we thought their call was going to be. But when I’m out there, if I think I see them lined up in a certain formation and I’m wrong, I’ll anticipate a different play from the one they actually run. I was wrong a lot that day.

  The photographs are meant to cure misconceptions for us, provided we can process them in time to make the right adjustments. I know the television broadcasts show us once or twice a game looking at these photos, but they’re actually waiting for us after every single series, faxed to a couple of machines that usually sit against the wall of the stands right behind our bench. Then they’re ripped from the fax and run over immediately.

  Especially in the case of this Eagles game, we relied on those photos constantly to give us answers. They used the no-huddle offense a lot more than we anticipated, so the photos should have been huge in helping us adjust on the fly. So why was nothing we were doing working? Why were we messing up every little thing in that game? What were we missing? Obviously, McNabb and his crew saw little tips in their photos and we didn’t see a damn thing in ours. When we did, we failed to get enough guys on the same page.

  What truly, truly saved us in this game was halftime. If there was ever a time we needed to sit on our stools and gather our senses, this was the game!

  That’s when halftime is great. It’s a quick break we use to ratchet up the physical breakdowns. But more so, it provides us with a breath of fresh air to step back, take in what we’re missing. It’s the only time in a game when we can honestly buy some time to find the leak in our communication pipes and fix them.

  Walking into that halftime locker room was like getting sent to the executioner’s chambers. We all knew Coach Coughlin was about to rip our heads off.

  We’re fifteen minutes from field to field, from the moment we come off to the moment we have to go back out there. In those fifteen minutes, we’ve got to review what the hell just happened, find a cure for our woes and then make sure everyone gets on the same page with adjustments.

  When you walk through the halftime tunnel, you hear everything. It’s completely the opposite from when you’re on the field. In the moments before I put my fingers in the dirt bracing to race out of my stance and disrupt somebody’s day, I hear the crowd roar like I’m stuck inside a loudspeaker.

  But the moment I get set at that line, I fall deaf. My hearing focuses in between the tackles. The only thing I hear are the linebackers and quarterback. I don’t hear the crowd. I don’t hear the cheers. I don’t hear the boos. I don’t even hear my coaches. The moment the play ends, that silence is shattered as the noise floods back in. Suddenly, the amplifier cranks all the way back up. Again we break the huddle. I dig my hand into that dirt and again that silence returns.

  But walking into that tunnel, as depressed as I was, I heard every F-bomb and insult those Eagles fans threw at us. They’re burned indelibly into my brain. They singed my last nerve.

  Once we burst through those halftime doors, everything is abbreviated and hurried. Guys immediately run to the bathroom while others line the trainer’s room to get taped, retaped or something looked at. Some guys will even get an IV of saline solution to prevent dehydration. All this is done within four to five minutes. The first thing I do is grab three oranges for a little energy, just like I did at halftime as a kid at those tiny tots Pop Warner games.

  Then the team splits in half, with the offense taking one side of the room and the defense occupying the other for a quick adjustment period from the coordinators. In this particular game, tempers flared and we started to bicker and get defensive. In our profession, stakes are high and tempers run loose, but it’s rare that there will be an actual blowup in the locker room. We’re all professionals and if we’re losing, we’re losing as a team.

  But during this particular game, our defensive coordinator, Tim Lewis, gathered the defense and immediately began to tear into us.

  “What do you want me to call?” Lewis asked. “What adjustments can I make? Everything I call, you’re not running it. What do you want me to do, because you’re not doing shit!”

  Usually, guys will just sit there and take it. Ashamed. Embarrassed by what we showed on the field. But that wasn’t the case this afternoon. We had too much talent to be playing this lousy. Something was off. We were too smart to be communicating so poorly.

  One of our veteran cornerbacks, R.
W. McQuarters, stepped up and barked, “Put us in man to man like we need to do and just let us play ball!”

  I think Tim was stunned. I know I was. We were all stunned, but when games get this frustrating, a guy’s gotta step up.

  Tim actually said, “Fine, you got it. We’ll do that.”

  Still, I was getting a little concerned that there could be more backlash, so I blurted out, “It shouldn’t matter what he calls because if you run it the way it’s supposed to be run, it’ll work. No more excuses, no more bitching and moaning about who’s running what. No more complaining about the calls in the huddle. Run the defense the way it’s called!”

  I may address the guys every halftime, but I never call guys out. I don’t want to demoralize a guy we’ll need for the next ninety minutes. If one unit isn’t pulling its weight, I’ll challenge those guys: “DBs, give us some coverage back there and we’ll get to the damn quarterback up front. Just give us some time!” Or if our line is crapping out, I’ll blurt out, “DBs, we’ll step it up for you out there, so we’ll make him get it out quicker.”

  But that afternoon, even though we were getting our asses kicked, I never lost it on the guys. I never looked like I was out of control. This week was all about encouragement, all about sticking together.

  But this game, Tom wasn’t so nice. He came into that Week Two halftime locker room and he completely ripped the crap out of us. Tom was utterly disgusted because of how we played in the first half at Philly.

  “Two weeks in a row you come out in a game of this magnitude and play like this?” Coughlin screamed at the top of his lungs. “I don’t understand it! You’ve got to be shitting me!”

  The man was pissed, but not so bad because we only got the “You’ve got to be shitting me” motif. When Tom gets furious, he doesn’t really MoFo you a lot, but instead he comes at you more with disbelief. He tries to make us feel ashamed of ourselves. When he gets really mad, he sways back and forth during his tirades. During the Philly game, he must have had some hope, because he wasn’t swaying so badly. He didn’t keep screaming at us, didn’t lay into us like he would the next week. The next week against Seattle would be the closest both Coach Coughlin and I got to losing our minds. When he came into the locker room at half against Seattle, he felt obligated to add a few more expletives to his speech. Then adding that “every time Seattle touches the damn ball, they’re scoring on us. If we keep going this way, they’re going to put up seventy points on that scoreboard. Are we going to get embarrassed or are we going to fight back?” I think everyone in the room was on alert after that, including me.