by Rex Ryan
I hear people say that you should just make time to work out, that’s the answer. Right—when am I going to do that in this job the way it needs to be done? As it is, I don’t see my family enough, and now I’m supposed to get up an hour or hour and a half earlier so I can hit the treadmill? Look, I’ve done that and I know it’s the best way, but it’s not realistic. I’m 48 years old and I’m the head coach of this team. I love doing my job and I love my family. If I have to sacrifice somewhere, I’ll do it another way.
That’s why lap-band surgery was important for me. I dropped 40 pounds almost right away and I felt so much better. The inspiration for me was Tony Siragusa. He told me he got to be over 400 pounds at one time and then decided to do the procedure and got back down to 325 right away. Jamie Dukes, the old offensive lineman who is with the NFL Network now, he had it, too. We also had a woman in our office who did it, and it really worked. The only drawback for her was that she would throw up if she ate too much. I hate throwing up. I’ll just fight through it rather than throw up. When people look at me they say, “Just get rid of it if you’re feeling bad,” but I just can’t.
I had to do the surgery, even when my brother was telling me not to. I had to get off that roller coaster of dieting, then ballooning back up. And it’s been the greatest thing I ever did. I studied it beforehand to make sure it was the right choice for me. So did our owner, Woody Johnson. In fact, the band is one that’s made by his company, Johnson & Johnson. He got involved and he said, “If you’re going to do this, we’re going to find the best person.” The other thing I did was look at the gastric bypass option. I wasn’t going to do that. I found out that 3 percent of the people who do that die, and I know that Charlie Weis had real problems with it. Plus, I’ve heard that people eventually gain some of the weight back. Probably not so bad that it’s not a good idea, but eventually your stomach stretches out again even with the gastric bypass. I know there are ways around the lap band. People who eat a lot of ice cream don’t have as much success with the lap band. Still, it just seemed like a better option for me. Look, either way that people do it, I understand. Once you get on the eating roller coaster, it’s so hard to get off it. It’s brutal.
The funny thing is that I didn’t do it because my health was awful. I’d go to the doctor and all the tests would come back looking fine. My cholesterol, my blood pressure, liver function, and kidney function—all that stuff was just fine. Back in Baltimore, the doctor used to bust my balls all the time. He looked at me and said, “You look great … on paper.” I’m huge. I love to eat. Like I said, my favorite is Mexican food. I just love tacos. Then there’s pizza and lasagna. Yeah, just pour on the carbs. I don’t even know how many I’d eat when we went out—probably more after a loss, but you just eat because you love it. You start and all of a sudden you forget how much you have pounded down because you’re having such a good time. It’s like at Thanksgiving—I love all that food. You get turkey, stuffing, green bean casserole, the cranberry sauce, the corn, then pecan pie, pumpkin pie, apple pie.
Yeah, just line up the pies and keep them coming.
The lap band has been great for me, because now I still eat a lot of that stuff; I just can’t eat as much. Now when I’m full, I stop or it gets uncomfortable, or if I try to have something like a cheeseburger, I feel awful. The bread just expands in my stomach and I’m miserable. With pizza, now all I can do is eat the toppings, not the bread. I get pissed about it, but that works for me. I have to watch what I eat, because physically I’m not going to feel good. We still go out after games, but I get uncomfortable very quickly and I just stop eating. It’s perfect. I will tell anybody who needs this that they should do it. I feel great now and I don’t have to constantly think, “Hey, how much did I eat earlier today? What can I eat now?” When you’re going and going and going the way we do in this job, it’s like you’re always looking for something to fuel you.
Maybe that’s why I always end every team meeting with the line “Let’s go snack.” Now, I know people who were watching that stuff on Hard Knocks were thinking, “Yeah, there goes the fat guy. He can’t wait to eat.” But that’s not how I’m thinking about it. Yes, I love to eat, but I also want guys to finish on a positive note after a meeting. It’s one thing to talk about being great, but you have to follow through on it. That’s the point of putting pressure on yourself, to keep you working at it. Now, I want the guys to have fun when we’re doing our job, but I make sure they know we’re here for a purpose, even if we may not all be here forever.
That’s one of the things that had been brought up about the 2010 season. They said that we were just going for it this year, which is why we brought in Jason Taylor, LaDainian Tomlinson, Braylon Edwards, Santonio Holmes, and Antonio Cromartie. All those guys are either at an age where they could retire soon or they had one-year contracts and would be free agents at the end of the season. I hear people say that those guys are “rentals.”
Well, for many of these players this may be a rent-to-own situation. You don’t know what’s going to happen with certain guys and we’re open on a lot of fronts. Some players are best off when they have that one-year deal, where the pressure is on them all the time to make good decisions, work as hard as they can. That’s a tough decision, and that’s where you have to be a business manager in this job as well. Obviously, that’s where Mike Tannenbaum gets the brunt of it. The key thing is we’ll never keep a player I don’t want just because of salary. We have to do what’s best for the football team. Sometimes it’s a tough decision, like letting Thomas Jones and Alan Faneca go. Sometimes it’s an easy one, like letting Eric Barton and Chris Baker go. With Faneca, it was really hard, but I was able to lean on coaches like Bill Callahan and Director of Player Development Dave Szott. It was the same type of situation we had with our kicker, Jay Feely. I didn’t want him to go. Mike Westhoff, our special-teams coach, loved him and Feely was a guy who was emotionally tough. He could handle the pressure in New York, but we let him go and got Nick Folk, and Folk has been great for us. I wanted to keep Marques Douglas, but I couldn’t. I’ve been around that guy for like 10 years. He’s one of my guys, but these are the decisions you make because of the rules.
Coming into the 2010 season we were in a tough spot. Because we finished in the top four of the league in 2009—meaning, we were one of the four teams to make the conference championship games—we were really limited about what we could do. It’ll be the same thing preparing for 2011. If we lost a player in free agency, we could sign somebody. Otherwise, we had to wait until June to sign some guys, like we did last year with backup quarterback Mark Brunell and Jason Taylor. Now, some teams might complain about those rules because it was all based on the fact that the collective bargaining agreement went into the last year and there was no salary cap. What I did was use it as motivation for our guys. I told them that we were going to lose some players and not be able to replace them because of the rules. That meant they were going to have to find ways to get better on their own. They were going to have to find solutions. All we had to do was get a little bit better across the board and we could get to the top of the game, because we were already a conference finalist. We were that close—it wasn’t going to take much more to get to the Super Bowl. So coming into last year each guy worked his butt off. Physically, we got better in the weight room. We are the only team in the league that had 100 percent participation in the off-season program. I knew that as a coach I was going to have to get better, too, if we were going to stay with teams like Indianapolis and New England. That’s how it is every year.
So when people say we’re just going for it one given year, I tell them that’s complete bull. We’re going for it every year. I’m trying to win every year with the best collection of players I can get for that given season or set of circumstances. Did it hurt us in 2010 that we brought in Taylor or Tomlinson? Hell, no. They weren’t taking some guy’s job away or keeping some young guy on the bench. Those young guys that we had to have play,
like Matt Slauson, they’re out there. They’re getting their chance. With Taylor and Tomlinson, we knew they’d help us and we knew we’d have to fill that position somewhere down the line.
When you get desperate, you’re bringing in guys you don’t care about. You’re bringing in guys to just be mercenaries. I never do that. That’s why with Edwards, Holmes, and Cromartie, I’m not hoping they leave. I’m hoping our mutual experience has been so great that they want to stay and that we can find a way to make it work. The thing I’m going to make sure they understand is I’m 100 percent behind them. However long they’re here, they’re my guys and I’m supporting them. Yeah, there are going to be some rough times along the way. Guys are going to get in trouble here and there. I don’t like it and I don’t want them to like it, but it happens and we’re going to fix it. Maybe that means that I’m going to rip somebody’s ass once in a while, but when I’m done I trust it won’t happen again and I’m letting that moment go.
My guys are professionals and I respect them. I also support them, and I do whatever I can to have their backs. That’s why I try to end everything on a positive note and keep us all together as a group.
That’s why I always say, “Let’s go snack.”
22. We’ll Be Back
Okay, time to get back to the rest of our 2010 season … and the Monday Night Football game in New England. We were flying high at 9-2—as were the Patriots—but let’s remember that no matter how well things seem to be going, in the NFL the whole mood of a team can change in a snap. It’s just like I was talking about in the beginning with blunt-force trauma. You get that first big hit, the one that can set the tone, and that moment can change everything right away.
The same thing can happen in a snap. The snap of a bone, in this case. It happened on the Friday before we were scheduled to play at New England on Monday, December 6. All week leading up to this game, I’m talking about how big this game is, how it’s the clash of the titans, the whole deal. The AFC East title is resting on this game. Both teams are 9-2. We’ve won four in a row and nine of 10. Yeah, we’ve been a little lucky, but we’re playing good football overall and, most important, we’re winning.
Likewise, New England is rolling along now. They’ve dealt with all the distraction from trading Randy Moss earlier in the season. They bring back Deion Branch just after trading Moss and Branch is getting on a roll. They’ve won three straight coming into this game and put up 39, 31, and 45 points in those games. Tom Brady is really starting to crank it up.
Still, we had beaten them earlier in the season and we’re feeling very confident this whole week. Really, really confident. I’m putting myself out there, as usual, but that’s all part of the plan. The important part is that the players are feeling loose, prepared, really on top of what they need to do. Nobody plays the Patriots better than we do, as we showed in the playoffs, and we just felt like this was going to be the same thing. We were going to play them hard.
Then, late in practice Friday, free safety Jim Leonhard breaks his leg. When I say he broke his leg, let me tell you, you knew it right away. You could hear it. It was a compound fracture and you knew just from the sound that it was bad. It was a crazy thing. It was the end of a defensive team period. The receiver is going up to get the ball and Jim is going to challenge it, trying to make a play on the football. Well, Jim does make a great play to get the ball, and he comes down and looks like he’s landing and turning all at once. He wasn’t even hit, but his leg snaps right there.
What made it seem stranger is that in the two years I’ve been head coach of the Jets, we haven’t had an injury like that on the practice field. We’ve had them in games, but we’ve been good in practice. Nothing. We’ve had pulled hamstrings, but nothing major, so the players aren’t really expecting it in any way. Well, as soon as it happens, it’s like we’re completely deflated. It was a killer moment. All the great energy from the week was gone, and you can’t have that when you’re playing New England. You have to be all in against the Patriots, both physically and mentally, or you’re not going to beat them.
I know what some people are going to say: “Coach, you’re talking about Jim Leonhard, not Darrelle Revis or Bart Scott or David Harris or Antonio Cromartie.” People don’t understand what Leonhard means to our team. Look, I talked about him earlier in the book. He was one of the guys I brought with me from Baltimore. He’s a scrappy, tough, smart guy who has worked hard to make himself into a terrific player. Leonhard is all of 5-foot-8 and about 190 pounds after a big dinner. But he’s going to hit you and he’s going to be smart.
When I mean smart, I mean quarterback smart. He was the guy who was the quarterback of our defense, the guy who made the calls and got people into the right spots all the time. So put it this way: How do you think most teams would do if they had their quarterback break his leg and had to play a game three days later? I’m not trying to say we would have won the game. We got killed 45-3. That’s the worst beatdown of my career. That was the Monday Night Massacre, the Monday Night Meltdown, the Monday Night Beatdown, whatever you want to call it. We got outplayed and outcoached in every phase of the game.
And I mean every single phase. The only thing we did right in this game was hold them to a field goal on their first drive. We didn’t tackle, we didn’t cover, we played horrible on offense, we had a punt go 12 yards, it was everything. Even the weather seemed to affect us. We were cold and couldn’t get anything going. You looked at their sideline and their guys are into it, really pumped up. That’s why I said Belichick outcoached me that night. He did, he had his guys ready to play. I didn’t. That’s why I took the heat.
But let me say this, if we’d had Leonhard, there’s no way we would have been beaten that bad. I’m telling you, we were having the best week of practice we’ve ever had. We had put in a very complicated scheme for that week against New England and Leonhard was on top of it. He had it down. As soon as he got hurt, it was total deflation. It was horrible. I could feel it with the players and I think they sensed it coming from me. As soon as Leonhard got hurt, I still thought we could win, but I know that I was confused for a little while about how we were going to do that. I think the players picked up on that confusion. It doesn’t take a lot of mental gymnastics for guys to pick up on what I’m feeling, because I’m not a phony. I didn’t know how we were going to scale back the defense and make things work. Remember, after Friday, you really only have one more walk-through practice for the week, so we didn’t have time to work with Dwight Lowery, Leonhard’s backup, on much more than the base calls.
And, trust me, you’re not beating the Patriots with base calls and formations. You run base formation against Tom Brady and he’s going to kill you. They took it right to us. They ran up the score and they talked trash to us. Their fans were complete assholes to us. They let us have it. I’ve never had my butt kicked like that in my life, and I admitted it at the postgame press conference. But I also said I’d play them again, right now. I would have gone right back out on the field and played again. If I get decked in a fight and a guy gets the best of me, I’m fighting again. If it takes 50 times to win the fight, then I’m fighting 50 times. The other thing is—and I’m not saying it’s physically possible for a team to have gone out there and played another game right away—but I believe if I had walked in and said, “Men, let’s go out there again,” I think I have the kind of guys who would have followed me back out there.
Of course, when it got to playoff time, all of us who got our butts kicked that day were able to settle up the score. But trust me when I say that it took some rough weeks to get there. We weren’t done playing poorly that day and we still had a lot to overcome and a lot to deal with, on and off the field. The next week, we played Miami at home and we end up losing 10-6. We handed Miami 10 stupid points in the first quarter on two turnovers. Their two scoring drives go for a combined 39 yards and we hand them 10 points. The Dolphins didn’t do anything to us on offense the entire game. Nothing. They fin
ished with 131 yards of total offense and only 55 yards passing.
Then, on top of the fact that we lost to Miami, we have our latest bit of news to follow us when the league discovers that Sal Alosi, our strength and conditioning coach, had tripped one of the Dolphins players. I’m telling you right now, I had no idea about it. Mike Westhoff, our special-teams coach, had no idea about it. I promise you that. I’d happily take a lie-detector test to prove it. I didn’t see Alosi forming that wall with the other players and I didn’t see Alosi trip the Dolphins guy. I saw the kid on the sideline, hurt, and I’m trying to get the Miami trainers to come over and look at him. That trip was wrong, it was stupid, and it’s really a shame because Alosi is a heck of a coach. He was doing good work here.
It’s funny, he really didn’t want to be here at first. When I came to the Jets after the 2008 season, and I met him to see if he wanted to stay on staff, he acted kind of aloof. He was tight with Eric Mangini and I felt that he wanted to get let go from his contract so he could go to Cleveland. That’s fine, if you want to leave, you can go. It’s always a little awkward for the assistant coaches who were part of an old regime when a new head coach arrives. But before Sal walked out of the room, I said: “Let me tell you something. Whoever gets this job is going to have the best strength and conditioning job in the NFL, because I’m going to let you do what you want. I don’t know anything about strength and conditioning, so I’m going to trust you to do the job the way you want to do it. I’m not going to interfere.” So as we’re talking, he’s coming around and by the end of the conversation, he’s telling me he wants to stay and he ends up being great for us. He really worked hard. He had great ideas. He had motivational stuff, too. It’s a shame this all happened. The guy made a stupid mistake. Everybody makes mistakes. But I think he’s a hell of a coach.