Everything about the man was big. His voice—flat, stentorian, tinged with the one-horse-Oklahoma inflections of his forebears—was an instrument whose design predated the age of microphones. Standing beneath the media kliegs, which emphasized the astonishing whiteness of his teeth, the smooth flush of his face, the convexity of his configuration, Ryan brought to mind a Coca-Cola Belt politician planted atop the back of a flatbed truck, suit jacket flung at his feet, imparting jubilant election-week promises to the little guy. And yet there was that rumpled fabric of precedent. The Jets had not won all of anything in forty years. Nor would they in Ryan’s first two seasons. To vote against such valor seemed the better part of discretion.
But from inside a helmet, the view was different. The essential NFL coaching dilemma is this: When everything seems so impersonal and so fleeting, how do you create a unified sense of group purpose? As the Jets began to consider hiring Ryan as head coach, they had just parted ways with Belichick’s protégé Eric Mangini. Like Belichick, Mangini was a graduate of Wesleyan, a young master builder both studious and disciplined. Mangini talked often about the importance of players possessing “good character,” but “he made me hate football, how he used to put people down,” remembered the Jets All-Pro cornerback Darrelle Revis.
Revis soon came to feel affection for Ryan. A professional football head coach’s daily encounters with players are mainly transitory. Somebody’s walking toward him down a hallway; somebody’s standing next to him during a drill at practice. No one ever got more out of these moments than Ryan. He’d come sidling up to a massive nose tackle, and in no time they’d both have their shirts pulled high, debating who had the “better boiler.” He kept up with his players’ interests and employed this knowledge in the old male art of faux adversary. Word would come to him that Nick Mangold, a center, had begun collecting California vintages. Whereupon Mangold would soon be confronted with “I hate wine. I like beer!”—Ryan’s sideways means of expressing that what he really knew and loved was Mangold. Onward Ryan would amble, though even when he was at a distance, Ryan didn’t keep his distance; the just-within-earshot compliment was another specialty. Through the clamor and cry of practice, a feather would drift to Mangold: “He’s the prototype center—size, strength, smart as hell, big ass, and he’s from Centerville, Ohio!”
The game itself was a series of short, intense interactions punctuated by pauses, and that was how Ryan walked the world—he had a football metabolism. It was challenging to keep up with all fifty-three members of a team’s active roster, the eight members of the practice squad, and those disabled by injury. Ryan could do it because he was naturally curious. He drew people out, made them secure in revealing themselves. Ryan noticed personality and character traits and then found ways to apply them to football, could foresee players having success, and saw it with such certainty that they believed him.
Ryan’s approach to defensive play was the strategic manifestation of his intense personal interest in his players. The signal feature of Organized Chaos was limitless possibility. Most NFL defenses are built from a rigid template and require players to adapt to the mold. The players who fit the system best are the ones who are chosen to play. Ryan’s idea was that on any given down, anything might happen. He rejected the durable premise that offenses are cerebral and determine the unfolding of play, whereas defenses are aggressive and responsive. He wanted a defense that was imaginative enough to take the initiative and yet tough enough to break your face.
All but the very best NFL players have significant limitations as well as pronounced strengths. The joy of the game for Ryan was creating calls and strategic situations that made capital of as many of those strengths as possible—he wanted to find everybody a role. As Ryan conceived it with the Ravens in Baltimore, his defense was a force of relentless, unpredictable mayhem. He began with the proposition that whatever an opposing team’s offense did best, “we’re going to take away from you.” A broad mandate of aggression required adaptability. There are six basic defensive fronts in football. Teams usually play one, typically either the 4-3, with four down linemen and three linebackers, or the 3-4. Ryan featured all six fronts, each packaged with dozens of variations. Probing for mismatches, he often lined up the defense in one front and then shifted to another before the snap. Another thing almost all defenses do is distribute personnel in a balanced left-to-right, back-to-front formation. When Ryan was their defensive coordinator, the Ravens were almost always unbalanced, and pretty quickly so were opposing quarterbacks.
Ryan’s game plans were designed to provoke confusion by disguising the sources of the blitzing pressure he sent in waves toward opposing backfields. He sought to create the apprehension that sorties of pass rushers were about to come strafing. Sometimes they did come, in numbers; sometimes they traveled alone; and sometimes it was “simulated pressure,” and everybody dropped into coverage. Different calls required players to shift between positions and then from any of those positions take on tasks that defied traditional conceptions of their roles: massive nose tackles floated out of the pit to defend against passes; defensive ends turned up in the secondary; linebackers morphed inside and out like peppered moths, so many linebackers flying around the flame.
Ryan’s girth and bluster belied what he was, a thinking man’s defensive coach. Tom Moore had been the Colts offensive coordinator during Peyton Manning’s years with the team, from 1998 to 2010. Moore spent the football season by the quarterback’s side, helping Manning prepare for games. Moore prized his years with Manning because the player was so curious and so demanding, constantly imagining potential football problems and asking for answers. Their lives became suffused with these football problem sets, to the point where the Jets defensive coordinator, Mike Pettine, said that Manning became “legendary in the NFL for how much of a maniac he is, prep-wise.” In the 2009 NFL playoffs, after his team had defeated the Ravens in the divisional playoffs, Manning left the winning locker room and drove straight to the Colts facility, where he began preparing for the Colts’ next opponent, the Jets, whom they would play in the AFC championship game. Manning did not start by watching Jets tape. First he went back and looked at film of the Ravens defense from Ryan’s years in Baltimore. Moore and Manning admired Ryan because Ryan understood how deeply they thought about things, and Ryan (and Pettine) thought right along with them. As Pettine said, “If we wanted to be successful we had to use Peyton’s preparation against him.” All the film study enabled Manning to run an offense predicated on his fluent ability to translate his opponent’s intentions. Manning routinely made his play calls and set the blocking scheme by standing behind the center and decoding the roles of defenders. Against Ryan, said Moore, it was more difficult for Manning to trust what he was seeing: “In protection schemes, you had to figure out who the down linemen were and who the linebackers were, and sometimes they all had linebacker numbers! We were constantly blocking guys who weren’t coming.” It was a hybrid landscape and a distorted one. There was the unsettling realization that trouble could come from anywhere, and probably would; that you were far from home, in lost country, after dark, without a flashlight and your passing game was in bad decline.
A model Ryan player was the linebacker Bart Scott. Scott came from the slums of Detroit; “It was the Wild, Wild West.” Scott said. “Nobody sees any hope. Crackheads, drug dealers, violence, and I was right in the middle of it trying to be normal.” Scott received no scholarship offers from Division I college football programs, and, after playing at Southern Illinois, he was not chosen in the 2002 NFL draft. He did receive a free-agent tryout invitation from Baltimore, where he went out and scrimmaged—abnormally. Scott was like one of those remote-controlled toy cars children play with; he spun and careened across the field at skewed, frantic velocities. Scott became a Raven through his willingness to sacrifice himself, to fling his body into multiple blockers, to pulverize the wall of protection on special teams. After hard hits, he delivered hard promises: “Next time I
’m gonna knock your punk ass out.”
Scott belonged to a category of player Ryan particularly relished: the unheralded, unwanted outsider whose response to indifference was to force his way onto a team by pure effort and excellence. (As is the way with such things, Ryan was drawn to this type of personality because it was more or less how Ryan saw himself.) And so, although Scott was on a Ravens team with many veteran stars, Ryan ennobled him, giving him featured opportunities, calling a personnel package and blitzes after him. Scott, in return, christened the scheme Organized Chaos and never missed a game, despite dislocated clavicles, torn knee ligaments, and a broken hand that kept shattering into more slivered fractures—he shot it up with numbing and painkilling drugs and played on. “I didn’t want to let Rex down,” he said.
A necessary coaching obligation was putting players in harm’s way. What Scott and others appreciated about Ryan was that he valued their bravery and, within the realm of the game, didn’t abuse it—he might overrule an injured athlete who wanted to keep playing. “Sometimes,” said Ryan, “I make my own decision. ‘No, you’re not going back out there.’ They’re not a fucking piece of meat to me.”
Scott became a free agent in 2006 and was offered nine million dollars more to join the Cleveland Browns than the Ravens had put on the table. He stayed in Baltimore. Three years later, Ryan left Baltimore to coach the Jets. Scott was about to become a free agent again. At midnight on the day his Ravens contract expired, Scott answered the doorbell at his house in Maryland and discovered Ryan standing there. The coach asked the linebacker to fly back up to New Jersey with him and sign on with Ryan’s new team as “my flag-bearer.” Scott didn’t hesitate. “I would die for that man,” he said.
I could understand this, for from the time I met him, I too felt susceptible to Ryan. I found it easy to get caught up in his infectious confidence, considered him among the most appealing and seductive people I’d ever known. The way he talked was vivid and funny, a jumble-up of man-cave comic patter and jive inflection. His dining preferences were always his go-tos, as in “Chips Ahoy is my go-to cookie.” The day before a summer softball game Ryan was playing in, he confided to me that he hadn’t swung a bat in years but said he wasn’t worried: “I don’t practice. I just show up and crush!” Ryan’s go-to word was “absolutely,” the emphasis always on the third syllable. He liked country expressions, and he placed the intensifier “ole” before just about anything, elongating the vowel, as in the “oooole bell cow” or the “oooole hotbox”—which is what he called the sauna, where he retreated in early evening with several coaching companions to perspire and converse. This was known as the “ole executive workout.”
Ryan did nothing without company. He had grown up with a twin brother, Rob, and through college the two were inseparable, sharing one wallet and one set of car keys. After graduation, Rob went off to make his own way in the football world—he is currently the defensive coordinator of the New Orleans Saints—and Ryan spent his adult life accumulating surrogate brothers, many of whom have adopted his expressions as their own. Football is an ideal profession for someone who can’t stand being alone.
Sometimes Ryan would tell me with earnest sincerity, “I’m just an average person,” which always caught me by surprise, because the language he used in talking about football was outsize and mythic. Football players were “rare dudes,” those “mighty men.” What he said about “great players” like Ray Lewis and Darrelle Revis and “great teammates” like Samari Rolle and Bryan Thomas felt exhilarating and true to the sport in a manner that was as contemporary as his way of speaking and yet also traced back to something I’d only heard about, never seen—to a world populated by guys called Cookie, Crazy Legs, Night Train, Tank, Bruiser, Bulldog, and Greasy; to the Carlisle Indians, the Columbus Panhandles, and the Providence Steam Rollers; to a soulful old throwback charisma. It was now the great age of passing, and the fact that between-the-tackles football was Ryan’s passion seemed only to support my impression that he was one unique dude.
It wasn’t just me. To a lot of people who knew him far better than I did, Ryan, who was enthusiastic about playing football but never particularly good at it, seemed to embody the spirit of the dirty, risky sport. Ryan’s attitude was “It’s a game. Don’t take it so seriously,” by which he meant that the anxiety associated with football’s importance to others should never be allowed to overwhelm a player’s joy in the experience. Ryan approached football as the blues of sports, something difficult and emotionally complex and ultimately uplifting, and the night before games, when he spoke to his team behind closed doors, he was inspiring; he lifted them, lifted even the rookie who was supposed to be busy keeping track, for the players’ weekly pool, of how many times in the speech Ryan said the word “fuck.”
And why wouldn’t the Jets win? is what I was thinking as I joined them full-time early in 2011. They’d come very close the previous two years, both times losing in the AFC championship game. The team’s defense was, as Ryan would say, “a given.” The young quarterback Mark Sanchez, whom Ryan frequently referred to as the Kid, had for two years been restrained by conservative game plans. Now he was a third-year veteran, no doubt more capable of diversifying Ryan’s “ground-and-pound” offense. Under Ryan, the Jets were joyful and optimistic, braying and bruiting with an uninhibited elation that proclaimed the bad times were behind them and there was nothing to hide. “What don’t we have?” Ryan would ask anybody who came near his (wide-open) door, and who was I to say that one reason people love professional football so much is that nobody has everything.
Mike Tannenbaum knew this as well as anybody. We often sat in Tannenbaum’s spacious second-floor office at the Jets facility in Florham Park, facing each other in the well-built custom off-white leather armchairs Tannenbaum had ordered because earlier seats had a propensity to give way and collapse under the ample weight of Ryan. Tannenbaum was, as he put it, “a belt-and-suspenders man”; he was always on the hunt for details that might be overlooked. Since he and Ryan spent most days in and out of each other’s offices, it made sense to order the more resilient furniture. It was also important that Ryan’s chair be monogrammed with two large cursive Rs, similar in style to the Ls that adorned the sweaters of Laverne DeFazio in that 1970s study of oddball friendship, Laverne & Shirley. Pro football functions best when it’s a buddy movie.
Outside Tannenbaum’s west-facing wall of windows there were four football fields, all of them Garden Club Lawn-of-the-Month kempt. The road between the security checkpoint and the parking lot for players and coaches was also visible, allowing Tannenbaum, if he chose, to monitor all comings and goings. Over my shoulder was an unusually large fish tank populated by what I always thought of as the waiver-wire tropical fish. Tannenbaum had bought them for his bedroom, but his wife, Michelle, considered fish inappropriate bedroom décor. Thus the fish were migrated upstream to Florham Park.
Maybe because Tannenbaum’s fish tank was the most conspicuous object in his office and served no obvious practical purpose, I began to associate the tank’s low, humming sound with its intensely practical owner. Most hours of the year, Tannenbaum was strictly regular in his busy habits: if he went downstairs for a workout in the morning, he left his dress shoes in the same spot close to his desk, but if he exercised later in the day, the shoes were placed in their afternoon location, several feet away. Tannenbaum was a curious and convivial person—he had been the president of his fraternity at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst—who often found it best to restrain his curiosity, subdue his warmth. He was in the habit of inviting people to join him for a “five-minute lunch.” When he heard of a new book that really interested him, he might attempt to convince his wife to read it for him and then send in a report. A substantial portion of the books that caught his attention tended to be about either how to run a business more effectively or Abraham Lincoln, but the truth was that Tannenbaum didn’t enjoy books nearly as much as he savored reports. He was always commissionin
g them, and when a new one arrived with an analysis of, say, the reasons premier NFL pass rushers were sometimes slow to develop, he might intend to read it later in the day on the StairMaster and then find himself unable to wait.
Tannenbaum grew up in Co-op City, the massive Bronx mixed-income housing complex, and then Needham, Massachusetts. His father, Richie, worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, as an electrical engineer, repairing signal lights and switches on New York’s and then Boston’s subways. Richie was a dutiful man, said Tannenbaum, but “at times he hated his job,” and this made an impression. Among his local suburban circle of friends, Tannenbaum came from the least prosperous family, and as Tannenbaum thought about it, he realized that his father probably worked the hardest but could give his family the fewest things. Tannenbaum’s great daily pleasure as a child was disappearing at the breakfast table into the Boston Globe sports pages, where there lived a parallel world of characters that brought him endless satisfaction and drama. How to join them? Tannenbaum wasn’t a good enough athlete to play anything beyond high-school sports, but perhaps there were alternative ways to avoid becoming, as he said, “another Jewish lawyer from Boston.” Tulane University’s law school, he discovered, offered a degree in sports-management law.
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