Play Like You Mean It

by Rex Ryan

  Like I said, we’d been talking about all the stuff all week about how the Cowboys viewed us as their homecoming team and all they are planning for is the big dance after the game, and so on. But you can’t just keep repeating the same message all the time, so I felt like I had to come up with something new for my speech the night before the game.

  Hello, Jason Garrett.

  Jason Garrett was the Dallas offensive coordinator at the time and had been during the previous season. He’s a smart guy, went to Princeton, was the son of a terrific coach, and had a brother who worked for Dallas as well. He’s a good football man and I’ve got nothing personal against the guy, but during the previous off-season, while the Ravens were going through their coaching search, he was offered the Baltimore job. Well, he went back to Jones and Jones gave him a monster raise to around $3 million a year on a three-year contract. That’s the kind of money that a lot of head coaches get when they’re starting out. Garrett was still the offensive coordinator, but it’s pretty obvious to everybody in the league that he was going to take over for Wade Phillips. (Sure enough, Garrett did replace Phillips in 2010, but it’s because the Cowboys were 1-7 halfway through that season—not exactly what Jones had planned, I think.) So, as you already know, Garrett turned down the Ravens job. That was the job I was begging for at the time, the job I dreamed of having back then—and that guy turns it down. Now, it was basically my defense and me against him and his offense that week, with all the other BS going on.

  There aren’t many times in your career that you get better material than that to work with for a pregame pep talk. Bart Scott, who was playing for Baltimore that year, really understood how deep it got for me in that meeting with the defense:

  Rex is not afraid to show his emotion. The day before that game, he came in our meeting and he couldn’t hold it in. He always looks like Droopy, that real old cartoon character, when he starts crying and all that stuff. He was really upset; it wasn’t even about the playoff implications. He said: “I have never wanted to beat a team so bad. That guy over there, man, he didn’t want to coach you. Are you serious? Who wouldn’t want to coach the men in this room?” He was talking about Jason Garrett. Rex is like: “He didn’t believe in the character of the Baltimore Ravens. Are you serious, he would turn down an opportunity to coach you guys? This team?” It wasn’t like we were a team that had sucked forever. We were the Baltimore Ravens, a great team. He knew at the end of the day it was his defense against Jason Garrett’s offense and that could be the difference in us going to the playoffs. He didn’t want to give that guy the satisfaction of knowing that he outfoxed him.

  The other thing Scott and the players will tell you is that these messages are delivered in a pretty coarse fashion. Some of the guys even have under-over bets on how many times I’ll drop the f-bomb during a speech. One guy is in charge of counting. I’ve heard that I’ll get to 40 or 50 in a 10-minute speech. Well, that’s me talking from the heart, and Scott and a lot of those guys will tell you it gets them fired up. Trust me, not all coaches swear like me. They just don’t. I’m not just doing it for show, though. Scott will tell me, “If you hear a coach talking that way, saying he wants to f— up the other team, that gets you thinking as a player, ‘Damn right! Let’s go beat the hell out of them!’ ”

  I can’t tell you exactly how great my speech before the Dallas game was, but I probably had more f-bombs than the Cowboys had yards for the first 54 minutes. We kicked the crap out of the Cowboys. On their first eight possessions, they punted five times, we intercepted two passes, and they scored one gimp touchdown after we fumbled at our own 4-yard line when Flacco got sacked. They gained a total of 113 yards on those possessions. This is an ass-kicking, total domination. Finally, they got a field-goal drive to open the fourth quarter, driving 51 yards on 12 plays (still not exactly awesome stuff for a team with that kind of talent). After we got a field goal, it was 19-10 with 6:30 remaining, when the game got a little wild. They had good drives, but we answered with a 77-yard run by Willis McGahee and an 82-yard run by Le’Ron McClain. Damn, McClain is almost built like me, and he went 82 yards—that’s how much the Cowboys gave up by the end. We won 33-24 and we were just laughing all the way home to Baltimore. We won the next game to close the season and ended up going to the AFC Championship Game.

  The Cowboys? After that game, they lost the final game of the season at Philadelphia 44-6 and the Eagles got the last spot in the playoffs over the Cowboys. How funny is that? Call it coincidence if you want, but that loss to the Eagles was the most lopsided for Dallas since that famous 44-0 game they lost to my dad when he was in Chicago in 1985. Thank you, Jason Garrett. All it took was a little extra motivation.

  Of course, meetings can’t all be about emotion. Trust me, you can go to that George Patton speech only so many times before guys get tired of hearing it. Plus, you’re draining guys if you do that too much. Football is a sport where you have to get amped up to a controlled frenzy (how about that for an oxymoron?) at just the right time. Do that too early or too late and you blow it. Do it too often and it gets harder and harder to get there. This isn’t like baseball or basketball, where you play so many games that you have to control your emotion. Football is that rush like being shot out of a cannon after gulping 20 energy drinks.

  Sometimes when you’re coaching, you have to bring it down just a little, cut the mood. Trust me, I’m always talking about winning the next game, dominating, doing whatever it takes—but you have to have some fun along the way, too.

  Even if that fun isn’t exactly the stuff from an after-school special.

  Now, before I go too much further, you have to understand some things. First off, not everything I do completely translates to the corporate world. Not that I’ve ever been a part of that world, but I can’t imagine you can always do these things in front of a mixed crowd. In football, there are 53 young, testosterone-laced men who aren’t exactly training to wear a suit and tie for their career. As I said before, we have rough guys from rough backgrounds … and that’s just some of the coaches.

  Anyway, it was Week 14 of the 2009 season and we were playing at Tampa Bay. By this time in the season, the Bucs had Josh Freeman playing. He was a rookie and he was also the other guy we thought about taking if we didn’t get Mark Sanchez. Freeman is a great kid and a big, strong athlete. We just liked Sanchez a little better; we had a conviction about him. Freeman didn’t start the year, but the Bucs had Byron Leftwich get hurt and then another backup named Josh Johnson played awhile until Freeman was ready, which was about midseason. By that time, though, none of those guys would have been ready for us. We just crushed them. Through the first half, the Bucs gained zero yards once you throw in their penalties. That’s not a typo. I mean zero yards. They didn’t get a first down and they didn’t have a drive of longer than three plays. One interception, six punts, and a kneel-down at the end of the half is all they got against us.

  In the second half, it was more of the same. On their first possession, they went three and out after gaining five yards. The second possession was the same thing: three and out after we fumbled to give them the ball at their own 45-yard line. On third-and-9, Scott sacked Freeman but got called for unnecessary roughness. They got 15 yards and another first down. They finally cobbled together a first down on their own (it only took them 38 minutes of game time to do it) after going for it on fourth down, and then settled for a field goal after they got to our 25. They gained all of 15 yards on their own after Scott gave them 15 yards. With all of that, we blew the shutout. We ended up winning 26-3 and gave up a total of six first downs for the whole game.

  Well, Scott is my guy, but I have to give him hell. That is part of breaking the ice with your players and keeping things loose. So I have to come up with something special for him and finally settled on the Dumb Dick Award. Now, with awards like this, it’s not enough to just say he’s earned it—it has to be like the Oscars. You have to do the presentation, the whole award performance. I even
thought about having an orchestra come in and play that music you hear when they announce the winners. It was going to be a real special event.

  The trophy was … how should I put this … a seriously impressive phallic statue. It was the biggest one I could possibly find. I called a meeting with my coordinators, Mike Pettine and Brian Schottenheimer, plus a couple of other coaches and our special-teams coach, Mike Westhoff. Laura Young, my great assistant who loves a practical joke, was in there too, taking notes with me for my presentation to the team. I told them all about the statue and my idea, but made sure to do it before Westhoff arrived.

  Westhoff came in and then, after a couple of minutes, Laura said, “Mike, can you throw me that towel?” He didn’t know what was there and he damn near had a heart attack. It was hysterical, and was a good warm-up for what I wanted to do when I awarded it to Scott. Again, I know this stuff wouldn’t go over in some boardrooms, but that’s not who I am. If you heard me on Hard Knocks, this isn’t exactly news to you.

  Now, the other thing I did is I gave Scott the heads-up before I gave this thing to him. That is part of the deal—that I wanted him in on it. You can’t just embarrass a great athlete like him with a surprise like that, and it is never my goal to humiliate someone. Scott is an important guy on this team. He has to be part of the joke. So after I cleared it with him, I stood up in front of the team and said, “Guys, we had a great game, but I got an award to give. It’s a bad one to get. It’s the Dumb Dick Award.” The “trophy” had a wrapper on it, but everybody knew what it was. They were all laughing and having a great time as Scott came up and grabbed the thing, then he used it to hit people and we were all cracking up—but let me tell you, that’s one award you don’t want to win. We don’t give that out every week, and you only give it to guys who can handle it. You have to do something really dumb to win it.

  That’s one example of keeping it light but also getting your point across. Not everything can be a lecture or a punishment. Now, that one is hugging the line on being negative and I make sure I do more things that are positive, but you have to have fun.

  —————

  There are all sorts of stories about things that coaches have done to motivate their players. Bill Parcells was an expert at those kinds of messages. He had done the one with the mousetraps a bunch of times. You put the traps on your players’ stools in front of their lockers on weeks when you’re playing a team with a bad record. That’s called a trap game, one of those times when your team can start looking ahead and get beat. On the other side, Jimmy Johnson one time went into a meeting before a game against Cleveland when the Browns were bad and told his coaches, “We should be able to beat the Browns without having to even prepare.” You get all different approaches. Parcells once put a gas can in front of a player’s locker. Parcells left a note on there telling the player he was performing like he was running out of gas. Parcells used to get Lawrence Taylor, who’s probably the greatest linebacker of all time, amped up with all sorts of challenges about how Taylor couldn’t outplay the other team’s offensive linemen.

  You’re always looking for little things like that that will motivate in an unconventional way. In Baltimore, I did a lot of stuff on the field. Once a week, I’d line up against the defensive linemen like Tony Siragusa, Sam Adams, and Rob Burnett and let them go against me. Yeah, it bruised the hell out of me, but they really looked forward to it. I’m not saying I could handle those guys, but it gave them a way to take their frustrations out and gave us a way to bond a little. I wasn’t afraid of them. That said, I don’t advise a lot of coaches to do that. It’s not the easiest thing.

  The better way is to find something in a meeting that really gets guys going. The best way, in my viewpoint, is highlighting a specific guy on a specific play. There are going to be one or two times in a game where I’m really going to try to highlight somebody, give that guy a chance to be a star. Not every guy can be Ray Lewis or Bart Scott or Tony Siragusa all the time. It doesn’t work. But if you give that guy a chance, maybe design a blitz for him or a coverage where you’re trying to force the ball to the guy he’s covering, something like that, that gets that guy pumped up. That’s what all those guys are looking for, because really that’s what they’ve been all their lives. These guys were stars when they were kids, when they were in high school, most likely when they were in college, and now you want to make them feel like that again.

  Even if it’s only for a play or two.

  18. Hard Knocks

  One of my biggest goals for this franchise is for every coach to want to coach here and for every player to want to play here. We had already changed the culture of the Jets on the inside. We were a whole new team and we knew exactly how great we were. Our next step was to find a way to make sure outsiders knew it, too. In order for that to happen, we had to sell ourselves, and it turned out that Hard Knocks was our platform.

  Mr. Johnson was actually approached by NFL Films last year with the proposal to do Hard Knocks during the 2009 season. He ended up saying no, because it was my first year as head coach and clearly we were going through changes. I think he knew that I needed a year to get settled, and truthfully, I’m sure he needed a year to get settled with me. When NFL Films came back in 2010, it was really Ross Greenburg, president of HBO Sports, who was pushing hard for us to do it. Mr. Greenburg is a great guy. He’s very smart and is highly respected by everyone in the league, so when Mr. Johnson knew he was behind it, he agreed. Over the years we had been deemed “the same old Jets” and Mr. Johnson was sick of it. Like any NFL team owner, he has a lot of pride in his franchise, and to him “the same old Jets” was a derogatory term that he wanted to get away from. There was a new head coach, a new practice facility, a new stadium, and most important, a whole new culture to the Jets. Hard Knocks was the way to show all that and to let everyone see firsthand that the New York Jets were not the same old team.

  I would be lying if I said that I was sold on doing the show right off the bat. I had experienced the Hard Knocks cameras before when they followed the Baltimore Ravens through training camp back in 2001. Needless to say, when I was first approached with the idea of doing it this year, my initial reaction was to pass. It wasn’t until I realized how important it was to Mr. Johnson that I was 100 percent on board. Mr. Johnson knew the kind of potential Hard Knocks had for us. He knew it would be a great vehicle to show the American public exactly what this franchise stands for. He was sure of the good it would bring to the Jets, and, honestly, the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right. When I looked at it that way, there was no reason not to do it.

  Before we signed on the dotted line, though, we needed to make sure that we were all on the same page about a couple things. We had to agree on the goals. In other words, what were we hoping to gain from doing the show? It was simple: When Hard Knocks was said and done, every coach and player should want to be a part of this franchise. It was agreed upon by Mr. Johnson, Mike Tannenbaum, and me that the only way that was going to happen was if we stayed true to who we are. I wasn’t going to change the way I coached, and they never expected any different from me. The way we looked at it, Hard Knocks was a reality television show and reality was exactly what we were going to give them.

  In itself, Hard Knocks was a commercial for the Jets. It was a five-hour commercial that followed our team through two weeks of training camp. It cut two weeks of footage down to a one-hour episode that aired Wednesday nights for five weeks. And what can I say? We were a hit. We gave Hard Knocks the highest ratings in history and provided sports broadcasters with enough color commentary to last them the entire regular season. People loved the show; they may not have loved us, but they sure as hell loved watching us.

  Training camp is one of the most critical times during the whole season. Those are the weeks that you’re building the team—not only from a roster standpoint, but the foundation and ideals of the team, too. As a coach, it’s the time when you are developing a relationship with
your players. You’re learning them and they’re learning you. It’s a constant roller coaster from beginning to end. You have players who have dreamed their entire lives of playing in the NFL. They’re out there fighting harder than hell for a spot on that roster, giving you everything they’ve got—and then you have to be the one to tell them that their best just isn’t good enough. You have to cut guys you love and guys who are damn good athletes, because in the end it’s about getting down to the 53-man roster. It’s emotional for the players and it’s tough for the coaches; there’s no question about it. Hard Knocks followed us through the entire process and showed everything from players getting cut to the coaching staff’s private meetings. A lot of people were shocked by how much the cameras revealed during episodes. Apparently, they showed the depth chart in one episode and it immediately sparked some talk. A lot of people felt like that was crossing the line (those were our fans). Others looked at us like we were stupid for just leaving our depth chart lying around (those probably weren’t our fans). It makes me laugh when I think about what a big deal they made out of stuff like that. There were teams that truly thought they were going to get some sort of an advantage out of watching Hard Knocks. Obviously, they were wrong.

  First of all, let me tell you that there is a board in every office with one of those charts. The names are not set in stone and the order has no significance. Secondly, I will tell you that there was a trust level between the Hard Knocks producers and our staff. There had to be because of situations like that. Sure, I guess they potentially could have revealed our entire season’s game plan, but nothing that important was even decided by then and they knew that. If it had been, I can promise you the producers never would have aired it. The names on those charts were not set in stone, clearly, given how the 53-man roster turned out.