by Rex Ryan
Finally, there’s Westhoff and he’s a beauty. Everybody should get a chance to know a coach like Westhoff. The man is hilarious—really sarcastic, has great one-liners in practice and, really, all the time. He’ll come up to a guy who is screwing up and say something like, “My man, a doctor told me how to cure your problem. Walk up a flight of steps, jump down, and land hard on both feet. Your head will fall right out of your ass.”
More important, Westhoff is all in. You talk to Westhoff and you know that football is his life’s work. For him, it isn’t just about money, or winning, or glory. It’s about ideas; it’s about finding different ways to do things. It’s about teaching guys how to think, not just how to run plays. It’s all that higher-level stuff that you can do in the NFL because everybody can be so focused on just doing football.
It’s also the reason we get results. Since Westhoff came to the Jets in 2001, through my first year as coach in 2009, we had 13 kickoff or punt returns for touchdowns. That’s the most in the league. Our coverage units always have ranked right at the top of the league. In today’s NFL, where everything is so tight and one or two plays can make your season, special-teams play is critical.
Westhoff has been coaching in pro football since 1982, with all but one year in the NFL (he went to the USFL for a year back in the 1980s). He spent 15 years in Miami, working for three different coaches (Don Shula, Jimmy Johnson, and Dave Wannstedt). Now, it should tell you a lot when an assistant coach spends 15 years in one place. I thought I was doing pretty good at 10 years in Baltimore.
See, we’re just scratching the surface with Westhoff. In 1988, he was diagnosed with cancer in the femur of his left leg, the section that runs from your hip to your knee. The first time he had surgery he almost died because the doctor thought it was a back problem. Not only was it misdiagnosed, the doctor accidentally cut through one of Westhoff’s arteries. After they finally found out what was wrong, Westhoff had 10 surgeries on the leg, removing cancer, removing bone, replacing it with pins and screws, grafts, and more hardware than you find at Home Depot or Lowe’s. It’s crazy when he starts to tell you this stuff.
The best part is, he never quit. Westhoff used to hobble around on a cane or drive around practice in a golf cart. He said one time that he looked like a pretzel after a while because of all the surgeries. Along the way, this one doctor told him that he was going to end up in a wheelchair one day. Still, he never flinches and never quits. Think about all the chances this guy had to feel sorry for himself, to say enough is enough with all the pain and just take the benefits and go. But he never did it. Finally, a great orthopedic surgeon, Dr. John Healey of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, suggested a procedure for Westhoff. Healey specially designed a titanium rod to go in the leg and replace the femur. That was in the winter of 2008, and Westhoff had to go through some serious rehab. That was the one time he really had to quit working with the team, right after the 2007 season ended. He wasn’t going to be able to do anything for months.
This wasn’t just some three-hour routine surgery—it was 12 hours. It was so long that they had to have two different X-ray technicians. First, Healey had to take out all the screws and previous stuff. At one point, Westhoff said that the only thing keeping his leg attached to his body was the soft tissue. Brutal. Then Healey put in the rod, which Westhoff said looks like something you would jack your car up with. (On a side note, you should know that Healey has done this surgery only once before, because this is a totally unique case. You don’t get this kind of cancer situation very often.) So everything finished and Westhoff did the rehab he needed to do. Slowly, he started getting stronger and stronger so that by training camp of 2008, before I took over, he was in good enough shape to be walking and the Jets realized that they had some problems on special teams. They begged him to come back, but he still had so much healing to do so he said no. They waited awhile and asked again, and because he’s just that kind of an intense guy, he came back.
Now you watch him and, aside from a little limp, you’d never know he’s been through anything. You don’t see the scar that runs from his ribs to his left knee. The guy is amazing, and the bottom line is that I want guys like that on my side. You don’t hear him complaining about his life, and that’s an inspiration to all of us.
Here’s another interesting story about Westhoff that applies to this situation with me coming in after he didn’t get the job: He went through exactly this same kind of situation earlier in his career. Back in 2000, right after the Dolphins lost a horrible playoff game to Jacksonville 62-7 and Jimmy Johnson quit, the team hired Dave Wannstedt. Most everybody knew that the job was going to Wannstedt, because Jimmy Johnson brought him in that year after the Bears fired Wannstedt. Wannstedt and Jimmy went way back to the start of their coaching careers, basically as best friends. Wannstedt was the first defensive coordinator of those great Dallas teams that won three titles in the 1990s before the Bears hired him away. Wannstedt did a great job running Jimmy’s defense.
After Jimmy officially quit, Westhoff asked to interview for the head coach job the same way he did with the Jets. He sat down with then–Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga, but the team ended up hiring Wannstedt. Okay, that happens. Westhoff came back with the staff and Wannstedt started to believe that Westhoff was bad-mouthing him and fired him. Now, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound like the Westhoff I know to talk negative about anybody.
To me, Westhoff is the kind of guy you really want to keep around. Not only that, you give him all the responsibility he can handle. Guys like Westhoff love it. The more you give them, the more they want. Before I ever got here, Westhoff would do our scouting report on officials before every game. I wanted him to keep doing that. He would bring in officials each week and tell them how to call certain stuff to give us a better look for Sunday. I wanted him to keep doing that, too. This is on top of having a great special-teams unit. Oh yeah—did he mind if I kept him doing that?
You know what happened with Westhoff? It didn’t take long before we were completely on the same page. He told a reporter one time—before we had ever played a game in 2009: “I like Rex, I really do. And you know me, I don’t like anybody.”
Like I said, he’s a funny man.
Guys like that, like Westhoff, Callahan, and Schottenheimer, you want them around. You can’t be afraid of guys who might want your job. If you are, then you’re going to end up hiring bad people who are not motivated to do more, who aren’t going to work as hard as you need them to work, and who aren’t going to challenge you with new ideas. How are you going to get better if you don’t have good people around? The thing you do with good people is you help them out. You don’t stifle them and you don’t control them. You make sure that they know you’re doing everything you can to help them, because then they’ll fight for you. Someday, I would love to have five or six guys from this staff become head coaches in the league. It would be awesome to sit back and say, “Wow, these are guys that worked with me, and look at them now!” That would be great. I’ll find some other great coaches and we’ll be okay; but if you had that kind of success, the guys you hired after them would do anything for you because they’d know how much it helped those other guys. You want that type of culture.
It’s funny. After our first year, when we made the AFC Championship Game, Schottenheimer was invited to interview for the Buffalo job. He declined the interview. Really, that was surprising. Again, there’s only 32 of these jobs and you don’t always get a chance, but if that’s what he wanted to do, I’m happy. I want that guy on my sideline for as long as he wants to be there.
The funny part is that Woody Johnson ran into Schottenheimer down at the Super Bowl in Miami after all that. He said to Schottie, “Those jobs don’t come around often—what made you decide to stay?” Schottenheimer told Johnson: “To be honest about it, I’ve been in this business for a long time and this is the first time I’ve ever had any fun. My wife is having fun and I’m having fun.
I just don’t want it to end. It’s not worth leaving.”
That makes me proud—that I’m creating an environment where people want to work, where they want to stay. That’s important. At the same time, it takes work and it takes tough decisions sometimes. It’s not like we’re just sitting around eating Oreos all day and telling jokes. For me, I faced a tough call to fire one of the guys I brought in during my first year. It just wasn’t working and I had to fix it. The one thing you can’t do in this job is sit around denying that you made a mistake. You have to take care of things.
I had to do that halfway through my first year. I had hired Kerry Locklin, a guy I knew from my college days, to be our defensive line coach. The problem was that the guy was a negative thinker, and when our situation started to go south for a stretch, it just got worse and worse. Eventually, it got to the point that I couldn’t take it anymore. I never want to see negative things associated with us, talking negatively about a teammate or any of that junk. The day I got to the Jets’ HQ, I talked with our general manager, Mike Tannenbaum, and he gave me the pulse of the type of people we had. Anybody who was considered a negative guy—players, coaches, anybody—I said we were going to get rid of. I didn’t care whether they could help us or not—they were not going to be leading my team. No way in hell. I don’t want anybody negative around me. I can’t stand negative people, and that includes coaches.
So that meant that Locklin had to go. We were in the middle of a bad run, having just lost five of six after opening the season 3-0. We were 4-5 at the time and I made the move. The media thought I did it to get the blame off me, but that wasn’t it at all. I took the blame. I hired the guy, after all. I had known Locklin for almost 20 years and this was his first season in the NFL. Unfortunately, his mind-set didn’t fit with us. He never respected his players. That pissed me off, and I kept telling him, “You have a job here; they’re putting food on your table.” Yet he didn’t have the time for them and wouldn’t respect them. He wouldn’t listen to them; he’d talk down to them and take a negative tone. So I said, “Fine, you’re gone.” That was it. I’m not going to have that on my coaching staff. I’m not going to have it in the locker room. We may not win every game, but I know one thing: I’m not having any form of disrespect. I want to surround myself with positive people and guys who think the glass is half full.
Players feed off the energy of the coaches. That’s just how it is. You would think that players are motivated by themselves to be great, and a lot of them are. There are plenty of guys out there who you don’t have to say two words to and they’ll get going. It’s like going to church. At church, you have all of sorts of people who want to be inspired. If the preacher gets up there and has no energy or no strength, you see people fidgeting, dozing off, and not paying attention. Coaches are the same way. They get the mood going. They turn on the engine for those players.
It’s like how I’ve been dealing with Vernon Gholston, a guy the Jets drafted No. 6 overall in the 2008 draft. That was before I got here and people were thinking it would be easy for me to just get rid of him. Truth be told, I didn’t like the kid coming out of college. He’s a good athlete and a smart guy, but I thought he was a phony. We had him come to Baltimore, and I just didn’t believe in him. I even told Mangini not to draft him. Well, suddenly he was on my team and I was going to have to work with him. I was not just going to give up on him—that’s too easy. I thought, “He’s one of my guys now, and I’ll be damned if he’s going to feel like that. He’s going to know that I’m in his corner and I’m trying like hell to get him to play better.” I want him to see everything I’m about, so all those pictures I painted of him back in 2008—you know what I’m going to do?
The same thing I did with the paint over the window in my office. I’m taking it down.
11. Mark Sanchez
Coming into my first year as head coach with the Jets, we knew there was a pretty good chance that Brett Favre was planning to leave. If we were going to be successful, the most important person that we had to draft was someone who could lead. It had to be someone who could take control of this franchise. For a quarterback, we set our sights on Mark Sanchez.
For the record, let me clarify that previous statement. Mike Tannenbaum and I set our sights on Mark Sanchez. Mike and I were determined to draft Sanchez. Of course, now that he’s become the first quarterback in NFL history to win four playoff games in his first two seasons, everyone in our organization says they wanted Mark!
Who wouldn’t want to be responsible for making Mark a Jet? There isn’t a single person in this franchise who doesn’t respect him as a person and as a player. Honestly, the kid is unbelievable. He’s not just a guy with GQ good looks and a good arm. He’s the real deal. He has all the intangibles: talent, charisma, intellect, and leadership abilities. I believe Mark’s going to be extraordinary in the NFL. I have believed that since I first met him. I refer to him as “my baby.” I know that may not be the most masculine way to put it, but it’s the truth, he is absolutely my baby. He wasn’t just my first draft pick as an NFL head coach; he was the first of many important decisions I was going to make for this franchise. He’s my guy, and I’m damn proud of it! I still have his draft card at home, tucked away in a drawer. I plan to get it framed one day.
Statistics say that if you are a rookie head coach and you use a first-round draft pick on a quarterback, you will not make it more than four years in that head coaching job. Those are the numbers. Frankly, I think that’s BS. You have to have a franchise quarterback. Look around—you can’t win in this league without one. So when the time came, the last thing I was going to do was let a few facts and figures keep me from going after Mark.
I’ll tell you this, though: We weren’t the only ones who were after Sanchez. Other teams liked him, too, and we sat relatively low—too low to draft Sanchez—with the 17th pick in the 2009 NFL Draft. Needless to say, finding a way to make that pick happen wasn’t easy. Mark’s coach at USC, Pete Carroll, wasn’t used to his quarterbacks leaving school early. Heisman Trophy winners Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart and John David Booty stayed for their senior seasons at USC. Carroll made it clear he thought Sanchez should do the same.
A fourth-year junior, Mark waited until the last day that players could announce their intention to enter the NFL Draft early to make his plans known. At the press conference called for him to make his announcement Sanchez and Carroll sat together at a table, and Carroll looked as if that was the last place he wanted to be. Carroll knew Sanchez intended to leave, and he wasn’t happy with the decision. He believed that Mark, who had only started 16 games at USC, could benefit by another year in college. Carroll actually left the news conference before Sanchez could take questions. It appeared awkward, but both downplayed Carroll’s exit, and I know for a fact that the two are still good friends.
While NFL personnel may have been concerned by Sanchez’s lack of experience, Sanchez believed all four years of his time at USC—not just the 16 games he started—actually helped his preparation. He cited the team’s talent—many of his teammates had gone on to the NFL—and the opportunity to play in the Trojans’ pro-style offense.
When Sanchez declared for the draft, he was considered a first-round prospect, but his stock climbed during the months leading up to the draft to the point that no one would have been surprised if he was picked in the top five. Sanchez was described as a player who could be groomed to become a leading man in the NFL. He was exactly what we needed in this franchise.
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I was part of a group of Jets officials that included Woody Johnson, Mike Tannenbaum, Brian Schottenheimer, and Matt Cavanaugh that met with Sanchez in March 2009. We sneaked him through a back door at the California hotel where the NFL meetings were being held. We gave him an X’s and O’s quiz that he aced, no problem. All of us were so impressed by him.
The next day we watched him throw in a private workout at his alma mater, Mission Viejo High School. I couldn’t be
lieve it. Schottenheimer put Mark through every workout known to man and he passed every one of them with flying colors. We knew, I think right then, that this was the guy we really wanted. Still, it wasn’t just because of his arm that I wanted Mark. It went deeper.
We had gone to Kansas State earlier to meet and watch Josh Freeman. He was a great quarterback prospect, big, strong, and talented. You want to like Freeman the best, and, of course, he’s now a starter in the NFL with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Yet just two receivers showed for Freeman’s workout when we visited. Two. We worked out Sanchez and the guy had 24 receivers there. Twenty-four! That’s more than enough players to field two football teams. They had come as volunteers because they wanted to help Mark as he was auditioning for us. I have to tell you, in all my years, I’ve never seen 24 guys show up to another guy’s workout.
That’s not all. When we arrived at Sanchez’s high school, a field hockey game was scheduled for the field. The two teams, with no questions asked or complaints, delayed the game so Mark could get his private workout in for us. The teams had absolutely no problem with it whatsoever. Why? Because they LOVE Mark Sanchez and both teams and their coaches respected him that much. The kids sat and watched Mark’s entire workout. The coaches actually asked Mark if he needed more time. Everyone pulled for this kid. To me, that spoke volumes about Mark Sanchez. My mind was made up; he had to be a Jet.
This is also a young man who lived an hour away from Southern Cal; yet he’d bring his receivers to his home in the off-season for workouts. They’d eat, train, go to a local theme park—and Mark still found the time to wash and fold everyone’s laundry. I don’t know what it is, but it is amazing, that charisma. I can’t think of anybody who doesn’t like Mark Sanchez. Anybody.
Naturally, the NFL scouts liked Sanchez, too. He made all the throws—in the pocket and on the run. He was a leader. He was confident and poised. Sanchez handled the pressure of playing for a national championship contender at USC and of playing in a large news media market like Los Angeles. I knew he could handle New York. I didn’t believe Mark was afraid of the big stage at all.