Play Like You Mean It

by Rex Ryan

  If my plan works—and I honestly believe it will—I’ll join Bill Parcells as the only first-time NFL coaches in New York to rely on a kick-ass defense and a ground-and-pound running game to win a Super Bowl. And here’s the thing about Parcells: He really had to struggle to get there in 1986. That was his fourth year in the league and he almost got fired when he went 3-12-1 in 1983.

  You always have that one goal, but it’s so hard to win that Super Bowl. Like they say, it doesn’t take just one or two great players. You have to have 11 good players on defense or you are not going to win. If you only have 10 good ones, they are going to exploit the other guy. So you better have 11 good ones on defense and you better be ready to chase the quarterback in the fourth quarter. On offense, you don’t have to have 11 great ones, but you have to have enough that you can put the ball where you want to and you have to be able to run it and control the line of scrimmage.

  In 2009, I decided to take a more active role in the offense. Sanchez was struggling and I was being criticized for not coaching the entire team. It’s no secret that I believe in defense first, last, and always. Our entire team is built on that brashness and aggressiveness. I guess I am considered a throwback with my offensive philosophy. I’ve been called conservative. I’ve been criticized. I can handle it.

  And I won’t abandon my formula. It works.

  14. Taking Risks on Players (and Making My Own Mistakes)

  I know what a lot of people are going to say after reading my chapter on getting guys like Bart Scott, Jim Leonhard, Marques Douglas, and all those other lunch-pail attitude guys: “Sure, Rex, all that stuff about building your team is great, but what about the risks you took on other guys? How about Santonio Holmes, Antonio Cromartie, and Braylon Edwards? They were all troublemakers on their previous teams, but you couldn’t say no to their talent. What about LaDainian Tomlinson and Jason Taylor? They both looked like they were done, but you rolled the dice that they had something left.”

  No question, we brought in some interesting guys, players that other people didn’t feel like they wanted anymore. Hey, it’s just like in Baltimore when we brought in defensive tackle Sam Adams, or tight end Shannon Sharpe, who was 32 when the Ravens got him from Denver. Sharpe ended up being our biggest weapon in the passing game in the playoffs. Both Adams and Sharpe were crucial for the Ravens.

  The key is, they weren’t the first guys in the door. When you’re building your team, you had better have your foundation right. It’s just like building a house. You screw up the foundation, that house is not going to stand. Well, we had foundation guys. We had Scott, Leonhard, and Douglas to be the grinders that I need, the guys who set the tone. We had some great veterans, too, like Shaun Ellis and Brandon Moore. We had some young, up-and-coming stars like Darrelle Revis, Dustin Keller, Nick Mangold, David Harris, and D’Brickashaw Ferguson—guys who were there before me. All of those guys, every one of them, is a good character guy, the kind of guy who is going to do all the work, every last thing you need. You’re going to win a lot of games. Then we added our quarterback with Mark Sanchez, so we had a guy who was young but was going to put in the work.

  Now, you can take some chances. You can get some guys who have had some issues here and there because you have a foundation of players in your locker room who are going to do a couple of things for you. First, they’re setting the tone more than those new guys. The new guys have to fit in, because everybody else has already established how the team is going to be run. Second, those guys who have already set the tone for your team, they police it for you. If somebody gets out of line, they take care of it or they let the coach know what’s going on. Even then, what chances are you really taking on some of those guys? Yeah, Tomlinson and Taylor are getting up there in age, but you can’t buy that kind of character, that work ethic, and (most important) that little extra desire both those guys have. But I’ll get back to that in a minute.

  With guys like Holmes, Cromartie, and Edwards, I still don’t see it as taking a chance. If you look at all of them, they have all been great players. They’ve done it on the field and they’ve done it pretty consistently. Maybe not as consistently as they wanted to, but still pretty consistently. You’re talking about a Super Bowl hero and two Pro Bowlers. These aren’t lazy guys just out of college, who have all the ability but aren’t willing to work now that they think they’ve “made it.” These guys have all put in time. All I have to do is channel their ability and make them want to play for me.

  When it comes to getting guys interested in coming to the Jets, right now, I think I’m on a roll! If you don’t believe me, check out what the players say. Sports Illustrated did a big poll of players this past season. They had 279 players respond this year, and yours truly came out No. 1 among coaches when players were asked, “For which other coach would you like to play?” I got 21 percent of the vote. Mike Tomlin of Pittsburgh was second at 12 percent.

  I think the reason is that I focus on how to deal with guys individually. I’m going to find some way to connect with them, make them know that I’m on their side and to get them on my side.

  Let’s take Santonio Holmes, for example. The first thing I did with Holmes, right after we traded for him, is I called NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell; I’m lucky, because he’s right up the road in New York. I called him and said, “Roger, I need your help. Can you come down and spend an afternoon here?” He asked what I needed, so I told him that once we got Holmes I wanted Goodell to come down and talk with Santonio after one of our minicamps. Then I said, “I’d like for you to try to bring him closer to me.” Goodell said okay, but he wanted to know what I had in mind. I said, “When the three of us sit down, I want you to take the first 10 minutes of our conversation to rip my ass in front of Santonio—about what I’ve done off the field, how I’ve embarrassed the league.” That’s all true about me. This is a couple of months after the Super Bowl, when I got fined $50,000 by the team for flipping off that fan in Miami.

  But for this visit on this day, I asked the commissioner to rip me good right there in front of Santonio. Then I asked if he would turn and give both barrels to Holmes. I wanted the commissioner to let Santonio know that he hadn’t done what he should either in being a good employee in the NFL.

  My goal was that at the end of that conversation, Goodell would leave … and Santonio and I would be left in the same boat. I wanted him to know that we needed to be better, not just for the league, but for each other.

  Anyway, Goodell made that trip to my office and he chewed us out, and I think it actually brought Holmes and me closer. There he was, not just out there alone feeling like he did something wrong, which had led Pittsburgh to trade him for an embarrassingly low fifth-round pick, but instead he’s hearing about how I’ve done something stupid, too, and how the league doesn’t like it. All of a sudden, I have a bond going with Holmes. Maybe I played it up a little, but it was all true. I’ve made mistakes in my life. I don’t want these guys thinking that I’m some saint. I want them to know I’m human just like they are. I wanted Holmes to understand I’m going to be in there fighting for him and I need him fighting for me. You should see it now; we’re as close as I’ve ever been with a guy after this much. He’ll come over during practice and we’ll put an arm around each other. It worked.

  The other thing I did with Holmes is I went out to California at one point to see him. He was working out on his own, and since he was a new player in our organization I wanted to check in on him. Now, one thing you have to realize about this guy is that he’s as stubborn as a mule. If you try to force him to do something, he’ll go kicking and screaming. As I’ve said many times, until they know how much you care, they don’t care how much you know. I’m serious about that.

  Some coaches think they can come out and bark orders and expect that players will just jump. Some will, but you’re not really forming a bond. If you really want somebody to do something, to really put their whole heart into it, you have to show you care about them, that yo
u trust them. So I started thinking about how I could show that kid that I trusted him. Well, what’s the number-one thing that I have in my life, the thing most important to me? It’s my family, of course. So I brought my younger son Seth, who is a receiver on his football team, with me to see Holmes in California, and the favor I asked of Holmes was “Can you teach Seth about getting off press coverage?” Then I just walked away. I left the two of them to just be together on that practice field. For an hour and a half, I left them together and Holmes was working and working. I mean, he was really into it. I don’t think he was just trying to please me; you don’t do something that long just to please the coach. I think he really felt good that I would leave my son with him, that I trusted him to take care of my kid. They just worked and worked and worked. And after that, I couldn’t get Seth away from Holmes if I tried. Holmes was phenomenal with Seth.

  As a football player, Holmes is one talented guy. My last year in Baltimore, Holmes was playing for Pittsburgh and was a complete nightmare for me to deal with. The Steelers, who had won the Super Bowl the year before, had drafted this kid with the No. 25 overall pick in the 2006 draft. In fact, they traded up to get him. They had the last pick in the first round, the No. 32 pick, and moved all the way up to get him at No. 25. You have to know this—Pittsburgh isn’t very big on making moves in the draft, so you know they had to be convinced about this guy, even if he had a rough background.

  Holmes grew up in Belle Glade, Florida, which is right next to this other town called Pahokee. That part of Florida is where they grow half the sugarcane in the country and a ton of citrus fruit.

  And a ton of football players.

  Joel Segal, an agent who has represented a great number of guys in this league over the years, represents Holmes. Segal also represents Michael Vick, Reggie Bush, and Randy Moss. We’re talking about some serious players and guys who came from really rough backgrounds. But Segal said that in all the years he has been representing guys, Holmes came from probably the toughest background he had ever seen—all kinds of brutal stuff.

  That’s part of the deal with Holmes; he doesn’t have many people around him he trusts. He has a huge heart and he’s a good kid and a charismatic guy. Really, you talk to him and he’s a sweetheart of a guy, but he doesn’t trust people and that makes it hard. At the same time, it’s part of what makes guys great football players. If you want to get out of the environment where you grew up, you have to throw yourself into the game with nothing to lose, and that’s part of the reason you see so many great players with backgrounds somewhat similar to Santonio’s.

  Holmes will tell you stories about chasing rabbits for dinner. You want to become quick, that’s a way to do it. Before the Super Bowl in the 2008 season, Holmes admitted that he sold drugs when he was a teenager growing up there, but he quit when his mom told him he had a future to worry about.

  Holmes had his problems right off the bat—he was involved in an incident even before he got to the Steelers that started his challenges there—but on the football field, you could tell right away that he was special. He’s a skinny, little dude at 5-foot-11, 192 pounds. You’d think you could break his skinny ass in half, but to do that, you have to catch him first … and that’s the problem.

  In this kid’s career, he has averaged 5.8 yards after the catch. In football lingo, we call that YAC. You always hear quarterbacks telling their receivers, “Get me some YAC.” Oh, those greedy quarterbacks, they love those five-yard throws that turn into 25 yards when the receiver breaks a tackle. For those quarterbacks, Holmes is the guy. Most people will think, “What’s the big deal about 5.8 yards after the catch?” Put it this way: That’s better than the career numbers for Chad Ochocinco (3.3), Larry Fitzgerald (3.4), Randy Moss (3.9), Wes Welker (4.6), Andre Johnson (4.9), and Terrell Owens (5.3). Now, I’m not a huge stat guy because a lot of stats in football don’t mean much, but if you’re taking a stat and comparing it to some great players, that is when the stat means something. If Holmes keeps himself straight, he’s on the way to being a truly great player.

  Trust me, I saw it coming firsthand. As I was saying, in 2008, this kid started dominating. You didn’t see it right away in the stats, because the Steelers aren’t this big passing team. They throw it pretty well with Ben Roethlisberger, but that’s not their bread and butter. They play hard, brutal defense and they want to run it. In the AFC North, you have to play what we call December football—ground-and-pound style, as I call it here. When the weather gets cold and you’re playing outdoors like they do in Pittsburgh, New York, and Baltimore, throwing a bunch of deep passes gets harder and harder. Yeah, New England still does it, but they do it because they have Tom Brady. When you have one of the greatest of all time, you can do stuff like that.

  So when Holmes was in Pittsburgh, he wasn’t getting eight or 10 throws a game going his way on a regular basis. He had to make do sometimes with four or five opportunities per game. He was also splitting the chances with guys like Hines Ward and tight end Heath Miller. In Baltimore, we played them three times that year, and in those three games he caught a total of eight passes for 152 yards. Nothing out of control, right? Wrong. That kid killed us. He scored one touchdown in every game against us and they beat us by three points the first time, four the second game, and nine in the playoffs. The worst part is that in the 2008 AFC Championship Game between Pittsburgh and Baltimore, he turned a broken play into a 65-yard touchdown—ran right through our defense at the beginning of the second quarter to give the Steelers a 13-0 lead. The thing about Holmes is that he never stops running and he understands how to play the game when things break down. He knows how to hustle to come back to the quarterback. He knows how to find open areas when the quarterback scrambles, which was big with Roethlisberger, who loves to get out of the pocket and extend the play.

  So after Holmes got done beating us—that game is going to bug me for the rest of my life—he went to the Super Bowl and dominated. You’ve probably seen his game-winning catch … every Sunday for the past two years, six or seven times a day. It’s only maybe the greatest catch in Super Bowl history. He was MVP of Pittsburgh’s win over Arizona, catching nine passes for 131 yards. Most importantly, he was amazing on the final drive.

  The next year he was even more dominant, catching 79 passes for 1,248 yards, living up to everything people thought he could be. All the crap from earlier in his career seemed to be fading.

  Then, as everybody knows, Roethlisberger got in trouble down in Georgia in the 2010 off-season. On the heels of that, Holmes was in the news twice. First, he was accused by a woman in Orlando of throwing a glass at her. Then Holmes was suspended for the first four games of the season for violating the NFL’s substance-abuse policy. You put that all together and the Steelers felt like they had to do something. Hey, the quarterback isn’t going anywhere. I know there was some talk about them getting rid of Roethlisberger, but are you kidding me? Do you know how hard it is to find quarterbacks in this league? So the Steelers decided, at least in my opinion, to send a message by dumping Santonio. I think they wanted everyone, including Big Ben, to know that they had limits.

  Just before we made the deal, I was checking around about Holmes. Mike Tomlin, the Steelers’ coach, was done with Holmes by then, tired of dealing with everything. He told other coaches around the league that Holmes would never play another down of football. The whole league believed him, which is part of the way we worked out the deal. Nobody was offering anything for the guy. Look, we were definitely in the market for a receiver. We wanted to put more guys around Sanchez to make the job easier for him. At the time, we were talking about getting Brandon Marshall, who Denver eventually traded to Miami for two second-round picks. The Dolphins also gave Marshall a new contract: five years at $47.5 million.

  We could do that or get Holmes for a fifth-round pick. Are you kidding me? We kept our second-round pick and sent that to San Diego for Cromartie. Some people in New York were saying it was a bad deal, but I don’t know wha
t they were thinking. We gave up a fifth-round pick for Holmes. On good teams, you’re lucky if your fifth-round pick makes the roster half the time in the first year. I’m just talking about making the squad. I’m not even talking about whether the guy contributes. This was a no-brainer.

  Could it have blown up on us? Sure. I’ve been around long enough to know that some guys have a hard time with staying straight. With all the temptations that come your way in the NFL, it doesn’t matter what kind of background you come from, it’s not easy; but you do your best as a coach to get that guy to buy into the program, to be loyal to you, because that way he has something else and somebody else he’s responsible for.

  Santonio bought in. Thanks to a little help from Commissioner Goodell!

  —————

  With the other guys, like Cromartie and Edwards, the problems were different. Cromartie has a pretty complicated life. He has a lot of kids with a bunch of women. I’m not casting any stones. Like I said, I have my issues and I’ve made plenty of mistakes of my own. Among the most publicized after my first year with the Jets was the previously mentioned “moment” in Miami. It was bad, but it actually could have been a whole lot worse. I went down there to a Mixed Martial Arts event to see some of the guys who are trainers and to see Jay Glazer, the NFL reporter for Fox who also does MMA training. I had heard that several NFL players were developing themselves by getting into MMA training, and I wanted to see what all this was about for myself.

  Well, I was at the event and there were a bunch of fans screaming at me, but this one guy kept getting into it with me. At one point, he spit at me and I really almost went after him. Look, I’m a man, you’re not going to do that to me; but I thought better of it and just let it go. Then, of course, the people running the event introduced me and gave me the microphone. I was in Miami—what do you think I was going to say? “Next year, we’re coming to beat you twice.”