by Rex Ryan
The place is like some gleaming office structure for some hightech company. Not only is the team there, but so is the entire front office and the business department; everybody who works for the team is in the 130,000-square-foot building. Heck, the weight room alone is around 11,000 square feet. If I ever lose my house, I could probably move my entire family there for a few months and nobody would find us. (Just kidding, honey.) We’ve got beautiful outdoor fields, a field house for indoor practice, an enormous locker room—every bell and whistle. The other thing is that Mr. Johnson did this after decades of the team training full-time (in-season, off-season, and training camp) up on Long Island, way out in Hempstead on the Hofstra University campus. The Jets were an institution out there. Johnson took a big chance to spend money on the team and break tradition.
So along I come, and the first thing I say to him is, “I want to do something different.” That’s basically like saying, “Yeah, boss, those company cars you just got for all the execs—they’re not quite good enough. We’re going to need individual limos.” To my credit, I’d never been there to see what it was like. Plus, I really do believe that getting away is important to team building. Still, that was my first idea, and it was going to cost him even more money.
What did Mr. Johnson do? He said okay. He understood what I was trying to do. He listened to my ideas about team building and how important I think it is for a team to get away. That was my first clue that he was a guy who cared about letting people do their jobs as they saw fit, not insisting on having his own way.
Then came the next idea. Fast-forward to training camp, when we were actually up at State University of New York in Cortland. It’s way out in the middle of the state, about 35 miles south of Syracuse. Already, everybody was pissed at me for bringing the team there—and I mean everybody: the media, the fans, and even people on the team. Nobody had ever done that in the history of the Jets, so why did I—a first-year head coach—have to, yada, yada, yada. I heard all the complaints, but I had a plan. Of course, the first thing I noticed was something that was going to cost us even more money. We had two practice fields built specifically for our team. Not even the Cortland team was supposed to use them before we got up there; they had their own practice field. Mr. Johnson spent hundreds of thousands of dollars just so those two fields were ready for us, and to most people, they’d be great. But I looked at them and nearly had a heart attack, because the turf was not level. Instead, it was full of little dips and hills. So I said, “We are not putting our team on that field. It’s too dangerous. I don’t want a player to get hurt. We’re all about player safety.” I mentioned it to Mr. Johnson and he was pissed that the fields were screwed up. They went in and tore up the whole thing, and we started anew, getting all the sod in. We had helicopters hovering all night trying to dry the field off before we could finally start using it.
While we were dealing with that, it was also our first week of camp and we were getting ready for our green-and-white scrimmage, the first real kind of action that the guys would have. There wasn’t quite going to be full hitting, but it would get pretty close. It was a time to let the players show something more, and it was going to be competitive. Just as important, we were going to have a ton of fans coming up for the day to see the scrimmage—which would be held in the stadium at SUNY Cortland. My problem was that the stadium had Astroturf or some other synthetic surface, and I was not going to have our guys practice on it, regardless if we were doing full hitting or not. We were not going to risk the injuries, even if we didn’t have a place for the fans to watch. All we had were some little portable bleachers, and the rest of the fans would have to surround the field. I told Mr. Johnson, and he immediately answered, “No problem. Player safety comes first.” I was telling a guy who has just built a new training facility and was in the process of building a $1.6 billion stadium with the New York Giants that I was not going to make the fans comfortable—and he was okay with it. Maybe he wasn’t happy, I don’t know, but he agreed and he let me do what I thought was most important.
Trust me when I say that coaches in the NFL will tell you that the most important guy on your team is the owner. You can have Tom Brady or Peyton Manning at quarterback. You can have Ray Lewis leading your defense. It doesn’t matter one bit if you don’t have an owner to make it work. Without that, you’re not going anywhere. I’m not going to start naming names, but trust me. You look at teams that consistently win and it starts at the top. Everybody talks about Bill Walsh in San Francisco, but you don’t get Bill Walsh unless you have Eddie DeBartolo. You look at all the championships that Pittsburgh has won and you better understand how important the Rooney family is to making that work. Bob Kraft and his family up in New England have made that operation pretty amazing, building that stadium and everything they’ve done, along with three titles. Heck, look at the New York Yankees, arguably the greatest team in baseball. Do you think they began their climb back to greatness in the mid-1970s without the late George Steinbrenner pushing the buttons?
In this game, there are some owners who care just about the bottom line. I’ve been lucky. For example, when I first joined the Ravens, they had Art Modell running the show and he was great to my family and me. Modell loved the players and wanted to do anything he could to win. Then Steve Bisciotti came in and he was great to me, too, and to the entire organization. Bisciotti didn’t want a whole lot of attention, but he wanted to make sure that everything was done right. In fact, he went to bat for me to get the head coaching job with the Jets. However, as I’ll get back to in a minute, Bisciotti could have done a lot to hurt my chances for the Jets job if he had wanted to save some money. Fortunately for me, he didn’t.
Now I have Woody Johnson, an owner who wants to do nothing but win. Part of him is still figuring it out, because he didn’t buy the team until 2000, from the estate of the late Leon Hess, one of the owners my dad worked for when he was with the Jets. Hess was a good man, kind of a silent owner. Back in 1963, he bought the team with Sonny Werblin and Phil Iselin. Those guys really understood what it took to win. They hired Weeb Ewbank, who eventually hired my dad, and together they brought in Joe Namath. They understood how to get a great coach and a great quarterback, two guys who were very different but who could handle the whole New York atmosphere. Weeb was the grinder and Namath was the good-looking, talented face of the team. Namath was “Broadway Joe” with the mink coat, and had all the personality and flash. Meanwhile, Weeb was getting the team ready to play. It was a perfect marriage, and that’s how they took the league by storm so fast; it’s just too bad Namath’s knees didn’t last. The key in all of that, though, was a group of owners who understood what it took. They had a plan and they carried it out.
Hess bought out Werblin and Iselin in the 1970s and ran the team from afar after that. Bless his heart, he’d put some guy from his company in charge of looking over the team, but he just wasn’t involved in the daily business. That’s kind of a problem, when you really think about it. You can’t have some middleman in charge, because he’s always going to think he has to prove himself to the owner. Either he has some impact on winning or losing, or he’s keeping the costs under control, or he’s making sure that the players and coaches don’t do something stupid in public. Whatever it is, that middleman is always thinking he has to justify his job, and most of the time, he really doesn’t know that much about football. That’s starting to change around our league. You see Bill Parcells and Mike Holmgren getting these “advisor” jobs. Those are football guys, former coaches who are hired by owners to oversee the operation. Those guys are really part of the program. In Miami, Parcells had a big say over who the players were going to be. In Cleveland, Holmgren has a big influence over how the future of that team is going to be set up. So even in those situations, you have football guys who are involved with the team and with the coach. They have to prove that they’re worth something to the owner. It’s just human nature. If you hire me and pay me a lot of money, I have to do someth
ing, right? Heck, I remember when the Dolphins hired Dan Marino to be a kind of football advisor back in 2004. He started showing up at the Senior Bowl and doing a number of other appearances, but he lasted only about three weeks. I think he realized very quickly just how much work it was going to be to do that job for real. It probably takes 80 to 100 hours a week. No joke.
That’s why I think it’s so important for the owner to have direct contact with the people who are making decisions. An owner can be out in front or behind the scenes, but he has to be there. That’s how Woody Johnson is. He’s there. Look, he could spend his time doing a lot of other things, making a lot more money than he makes day-to-day with the football team, but he wants to be there with us. He wants to help in whatever way he can, just like when he went down with me to Fort Lauderdale before the 2010 season to talk to our gifted cornerback Darrelle Revis. When Mr. Johnson went down there, he didn’t talk to Revis about unemotional details like money or the contract. He was talking about the big picture, about being one of the greatest Jets of all time, about being a Hall of Famer. That was huge, because I think it made Revis understand that this wasn’t only a business deal about a certain number of dollars on a page. Mr. Johnson was looking at Revis and saying: “I want you to be great. I want you to be a Jet for life.” That’s a whole different level of commitment.
When Mr. Johnson took over the team in 2000, he had that kind of structure in place with Parcells. Parcells had just retired as the head coach but was going to stay on as the general manager, the guy in charge but not talking. That’s when they had the whole weird thing with Bill Belichick, who was supposed to be the next head coach but who abruptly resigned with some strange handwritten statement. Whatever it was he wrote, it didn’t go over so hot. Then they got Al Groh to take the job, and he did okay, going 9-7 in 2000, but his heart just wasn’t in it. He wanted to coach at the college level and ended up eventually taking off for Virginia. After that, Parcells quit as the GM, which they knew was going to happen. Still, in the space of less than a year after Mr. Johnson bought the team, Parcells retired as coach, Belichick left, Groh left, and then Parcells left as the GM. Okay, I’ve never run a real day-to-day business like Johnson & Johnson or even a coffee shop, but I don’t think it’s easy to have your top managers leave every other day.
The Jets hired Herm Edwards after that, and Herm did a good job. Again, some people would say, “What are you talking about? He had a losing record in five years.” True, Edwards was 39-41 in five years. That’s a winning percentage of .488, which most people would say is kind of lousy. Hey, if I did that, I’d probably be disappointed in myself. You have to put it in perspective, though. In the history of the Jets before I got here, there had been 16 head coaches. Edwards has the fourth-best record of all of them. Seriously. He went to the playoffs three times. That’s more than any coach in the history of the team, Parcells and Ewbank included. I kid you not. What that says is that winning with the Jets has been tough.
As things were winding down with Herm, Johnson was trying to figure the whole thing out and he did exactly what so many of us do: He hired somebody from a team that was doing good. He hired Eric Mangini away from New England. Now, trust me, Eric is a good coach. My brother worked for him in Cleveland before going to Dallas, and he also worked with him in New England under Belichick. Mangini is smart as a whip and really knows how to teach, particularly defensive backs. I have nothing bad to say about Mangini. He just does his deal differently, and I’ll explain that a little later in the book. And I totally understand why he got hired. You weren’t going to find anybody more successful than the Patriots. Everybody wanted a piece of that team, which is why guys like Romeo Crennel, Charlie Weis, and Josh McDaniels also got head coaching jobs coming out of there. Mangini also had a really great first year, going 10-6 and making the playoffs. The second year was down, and then they were having a great third season in 2008 until it came apart. They were 8-3, the best record in the league at that point; Brett Favre was playing great (give Mr. Johnson a lot of credit for going out and getting that trade done)—and then they lost four of their last five games and missed the playoffs. The bad part of all of that was that they kept swinging from one extreme to the next. That’s hard for the fans to deal with. You get way up there and then you fall. It’s rough.
An unforgiving spotlight can shine on an NFL coach. We all get that. Trust me. This job is not built for people who can’t ride the wave. You might wonder if I feel bad about taking the job from a guy I know pretty well and who’s a friend of my brother. Not really. I wasn’t cheering against Mangini. I didn’t want to see anybody fail, especially someone who is close to my family like Mangini is with Rob. We all know how it works, though. It’s not personal at that point; it’s just how this business operates.
That’s where I also have to give Mr. Johnson credit. He made his decision to change direction, and this time I think he really looked deep into the overall picture. Look, there’s no manual for being an NFL owner. There’s no manual for how to be a coach, either. There are certain things you learn along the way. From what I can see, when the Jets searched for a new coach and hired me, it was deeply researched. They wanted to find out everything they could about everybody they interviewed. One of the ideas they had for doing that came from Bruce Speight, our senior director of media relations. Speight has been around the NFL for a long time. He was with Carolina before he joined the Jets, and he really understands how the whole league works. From what I’m told, the Jets were talking about how to really find out about the candidates; Speight suggested that everybody on the team who ran a department should call their counterparts from the teams that the candidates work for. This way, they could find out what their peers thought about the guy, and whether the candidate knew what was going on with the different departments on his own team.
From there, the Jets compiled all the information and analyzed it. Trust me, this was tough, because they also had three great candidates from inside their own building: special-teams coach Mike Westhoff, offensive line coach Bill Callahan, and offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer. Those are sharp guys, all of them. There’s a reason I kept them on staff when a lot of new coaches might have gotten rid of a guy who was trying to get the job. I’ll talk about that some more later, but you have to understand how thorough the Jets were in really looking at all the information and not just letting one interview or some appearance lead them to making a decision.
While we’re talking about appearance, let me address that head-on: I know I’m overweight. I’m not living in denial. I’ve tried all these crazy diets over the years, losing a bunch of weight, then just putting it right back on and then some. This is who I am. It’s my problem. That’s why I finally had the lap-band surgery, because I knew I couldn’t do it the way everybody else did. It just wasn’t going to work. Still, here I am, all 300-something pounds of me, or whatever I am, and I can see how people react to me. I can see it in their eyes, and I know what people say about fat guys. If you’re fat, you’re lazy. Look around the NFL at the head coaches. You don’t see a lot of heavyset guys, do you? Andy Reid in Philadelphia is one. Mike Holmgren—you could see he battled it, and he wasn’t even that big. There simply are not many guys like that. I remember when Charlie Weis was up in New England and talked about how hard it was for him to get a head coaching job and he thought it had a lot to do with being overweight.
Let me tell you something: Just because I’m a fat guy doesn’t mean you’re going to outwork me. That crap about being lazy? I’ll take on anyone. Don’t worry, I’ll be there to put you to bed every night when you need to get tucked in. Back in 2008, I can’t help but think that was the reason I didn’t get a job. I interviewed with Parcells down in Miami, but that wasn’t going to work because he already had his guy with Tony Sparano. I also interviewed with Atlanta, and that one really frustrated me because that was a job where I really felt like I fit. That made a lot of sense to me, and I think I would have been great there. They
hired Mike Smith, who, as I said, I think is a good guy. But in the back of my mind I was thinking that maybe it was my appearance, that maybe I wasn’t exactly what they were looking for from the outside, and that was really tough to take.
Finally, I interviewed with Baltimore after they cleared out the staff, but it just wasn’t going to work. As much as I wanted to be the head coach of the Ravens, I could feel that the interview wasn’t going my way. You see, I knew I had to be honest with Bisciotti about what had gone wrong. By that time, Brian Billick had lost the team. I knew it. It had been 10 years. It wasn’t necessarily Billick’s fault. Heck, even he had said in the past that a great coach has a shelf life of about 10 years. Unless you are clever, after that long you’ve given every speech you can give. You’ve tweaked every ego in every way you can. Heck, that’s why it’s so hard to last even three years in this business. When you’re on a roller coaster the way we were those last couple of years, it’s hard. You go from the AFC Championship Game to 5-11, back into the playoffs, then down again. It’s just like with fans, where you build up expectation and then it comes crashing down really fast. You run the risk that when people get down from that big adrenaline rush, you can lose them. It’s hard to keep them on board that way, and Billick did it for a long time. It’s like the old saying from some coaches about how some owners and some coaches don’t mind going somewhere between 7-9 and 10-6 every year in the NFL. You’re just good enough to keep selling the fans and the players on hope, but you’re really not making any big strides. To me, you’re not doing anything; you’re just playing around.