While he was still at Tulane, Tannenbaum was hired for his first (unpaid) NFL job by Chet Franklin, the director of player personnel for the New Orleans Saints. Franklin liked Tannenbaum because—as Franklin said, clicking off the boxes like a scout—“he was confident, competent, dogged, smart, and a good guy.” As a reward, Franklin allowed Tannenbaum to sign a free agent. “Toderick Malone,” said Tannenbaum. “I offered him eighteen thousand dollars. He signed for eighteen thousand dollars. I’ll never forget it. It’s like the first time I had sex. I probably remember Toderick better. More exciting to me!”
It was difficult for Tannenbaum to describe how much he enjoyed his job. He tried words such as “unbelievable” and “amazing,” and then he offered more and more superlatives, but they all seemed insufficient to him. His fulfillment was such that it poured over the rim and became a source of anxiety that could be forestalled only by greater and greater exertions. “I’m relentless,” he said. “I’m going to show up every day almost to an irrational extent. I want to work. Insecurity drives me. Every day. I don’t want to go back to Needham. I don’t want to be the man in the frozen-foods section of the grocery store, the guy who ten seconds after I pass by with my peas hears people whisper, ‘That guy used to be the GM of the Jets.’ ”
Disciplined as Tannenbaum was, his vigilance was crosscut by looming disorder. The NFL draft, the team salary budgets, and the schedule were all designed to help the previous year’s losing teams improve in the next year at the expense of the winning teams. And most losing teams weren’t drastically inferior to begin with. While the qualifying standard for joining any NFL roster was rigorous—Rex Ryan liked to say it was easier to win the lottery than play in the NFL—once a player made a team, he found that the difference in the abilities of NFL starters and reserves “wasn’t dramatic,” as Tannenbaum put it. All of which was to say, the system worked. In recent years, anywhere from half to three-quarters of NFL games had been decided by one score. And sheathed right there in cold, blunt statistic was the murmuring anxiety of Tannenbaum’s predicament: the NFL teams had achieved such a level of parity that a form of competitive entropy existed. In any given game, either team could win. Tannenbaum was in command of what he could not control.
During my conversations with Tannenbaum in the off-white armchairs, a phrase often came up to express this low standard deviation of NFL teams: “those slender margins.” As the GM saw it, his job was to scrutinize football so thoroughly that he could locate—and then exploit—any inefficiencies in a system grooved with very few of them. He knew that areas of potential advantage did exist. He was also aware that the most pronounced of them depended on something the Jets didn’t possess.
Because most people watched football to see touchdowns, and also because head injuries leading to degenerative brain disease in former players had recently become an urgent NFL concern, the game’s evolving rules regarding pass protection (increasingly liberal) and physical contact (increasingly restrictive) gave a significant advantage to teams with preeminent quarterbacks—players on the level of the Patriots’ Tom Brady, the Packers’ Aaron Rodgers, the Saints’ Drew Brees, the Giants’ Eli Manning, and the former Colts’ and now Denver Broncos’ Peyton Manning, Eli’s brother. A team with a great quarterback in effect drove a car that was more likely to start up on a frigid winter morning than did a team with a still unproven signal caller, like Mark Sanchez.
An exceptional quarterback was a wonderful thing to own, but if you didn’t have one, then you’d need a significant compensatory asset. The reason Ryan called football the ultimate team game was that every play involved eleven people. Training eleven large, fast men to the point where they could move as one through exacting choreography with violence erupting everywhere around them required so much time and commitment that football players had to spend almost every waking hour of the year together. Perhaps the most revealing football term was “reps,” an omnibus shorthand for repetitions of actions, be they games or practice plays or lifts on a weight machine. There were even mental reps, which required the injured and those not otherwise engaged to watch a given activity and experience it vicariously. It was a game of reps, an over-and-over pursuit; reps made the man. All that montonous laboring could make even an outdoor field feel claustrophobic. The frequently tedious immersion required that people like coming to work. So if a man in Tannenbaum’s position could find a bonding agent, some emulsion that promoted a quick-setting and dependable sense of joy in the purpose, that element would be of rare value. In other words, Ryan was a potential competitive advantage.
He was also a potential disadvantage. Tannenbaum supervised the Jets’ entire football operation, everyone from Jeff Bauer, the Jets college scout based in Ankeny, Iowa, to Sara Hickmann, the team’s Upper West Side psychotherapist who once told me that in a world where everyone walks around with anger and aggression, football appeals “to an unconscious wish that we could drill somebody.” Tannenbaum was the sort of boss who tried to keep up with the lives of all one hundred and twenty people who worked at the facility—he would ask how their renovations were going, remembered birthdays and significant life events. Yet it was Ryan who preoccupied the GM. Before the Jets owner Woody Johnson and Tannenbaum hired Ryan, Tannenbaum compiled reports on potential coaching candidates, enough to fill a big black binder. What those reports told him about Ryan fascinated Tannenbaum and also had given him pause—and Tannenbaum wasn’t the only one. Over the years, Ryan had interviewed for several head-coaching jobs, including one with his own team, the Ravens, and always he’d been considered too big of a risk. His appearance suggested a lack of control, and so did a police report describing the bloody pulp Ryan had made of a Maryland neighbor’s face after an argument on the man’s front porch. Was Ryan too emotional to be an effective head coach? Was Ryan sufficiently organized? Could he, a defensive specialist, manage a game when the Jets offense had the ball? Did the pleasure he took in getting along with his players mean he’d be unable to draw the line at recalcitrant behavior? It was one thing for Ryan to urge players not to take football too seriously, but nothing was more serious to Tannenbaum. Tannenbaum worried about everything; would Ryan worry enough?
In Ryan’s first months with the Jets came an event that Tannenbaum considered of defining, if inexplicable, significance in their relationship. These being men, it involved a road trip and many hamburgers. Ryan; Tannenbaum; the Jets offensive coordinator, Brian Schottenheimer; and the quarterbacks coach, Matt Cavanaugh, were going to Kansas to scout a potential draft choice: Kansas State quarterback Josh Freeman. Ryan dutifully appeared wearing a spread-collar shirt and pressed trousers, as he had for the many business dinners he’d attended since being hired. This time Tannenbaum told his new coach: “Rex, he’s a draftable player. He has to impress us.” Ryan’s eyes grew big. He disappeared back into his office and reemerged in a flowing garment that he referred to as “the dress sweats.” The four men flew west, landed, and got their rental car, a pickup truck. Ryan drove, Tannenbaum rode shotgun, Schottenheimer and Cavanaugh sat knees to chest in the back. Ryan told stories of the Great Plains. Soon all four were dusty. Nobody minded. They watched Freeman throw and run. Then, on the way back to the airport, Ryan suggested a visit to a Sonic Drive-In for some refreshments. Most of the items on the menu were ordered, including, for Ryan, a cup of limeade the size of Topeka. The truck shook. Nobody can say why. Possibly it was the many men feasting. The result was that Ryan’s cup began to tip. Freshets of limeade poured everywhere. “Oh, no!” Ryan cried. “The dress sweats!” It became an iconic line, and every time Tannenbaum remembered those words, he felt happiness.
When he came out from behind his desk to sit facing Ryan in one of the matching off-white chairs, Tannenbaum thought of himself as being in partnership with Ryan, not so much a supervisor as a buttress providing the core support that allowed the coach to stand tall against lateral pressures. Reinforcing Ryan was such a significant part of Tannenbaum’s job that on days when Tan
nenbaum arrived at the Jets facility parking lot and could read the painted word Rex on the space adjacent to his because Ryan’s green-and-black extended-cab Ford pickup wasn’t there, Tannenbaum developed a ritual. “I walk around his name. It’s my way of reminding myself I have his back, I have him covered.” To Tannenbaum, Ryan was like “chocolate. He makes everyone feel better.” He was also “the ultimate musician. He won’t sit still for long or read binders full of statistical studies, but his game plan for beating Tom Brady is second to none. He’s a football savant.”
One thing Tannenbaum never had to worry about was my expectations. I just hoped to see a representative NFL season, see the NFL for what it really was. Even in the silver light of February, where all the talk at the Jets facility was of the bright victories to come in the fall, I knew that, while football wasn’t exactly subject to the butterfly effect, there were deeply random forces at play. Yet, though I understood that part of what people enjoyed about football was the idea that anything could happen, I thought they also liked that there were men out there pushing hard against that premise—thirty-two groups of coaches and personnel men, all of whom thought that their team could win. That’s what I most looked forward to watching, the attempt to impose order on a significantly unstable pursuit. Serious people who thought they could plan well enough to control an uncontrollable world labored under a profound delusion. That was art. That was life. Or maybe it was death.
What defined Ryan was the fullness of feeling. Ryan really believed he could organize chaos. He seemed to think he could overcome the randomness with conviction, as though his wanting something badly enough meant he could will it into being. No matter that Ryan didn’t have a Tom Brady or a Manning brother. No matter that he was setting off on his 2011 quest with a strong defense in an offensive age. In Ryan there wasn’t any trace of inadequacy. He believed, his belief would be contagious, and everybody else would believe what he believed so ardently that it would come to pass. That was what really drew me to Ryan and his roostering Jets, and what lent them an emblematic quality. They would suppress nothing. They teemed with thermal ambition and powerful desires, and because of the combination, they had more at stake than other teams. Small pleasures would never be enough for them. They were going to be about either the ecstasy Ryan imagined or the despair Bill Parcells had known. I had the sense that whatever happened to them, the Jets were a kind of plumb line. They would somehow go deeper toward football’s center of gravity. To be with the Jets promised a real human adventure.
One
COMBINE
He seems very strong. Did you notice his torso?
—Preston Sturges, Sullivan’s Travels
The year really began in the last days of February, at the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis. The Scouting Combine is an annual invitation-only event at which more than three hundred of the country’s most promising draft-eligible college football players gather to audition for NFL teams by running, jumping, lifting weights, taking intelligence tests, and sitting down for private interviews, where each one might be asked about almost anything, including his injured shoulder, his bar brawl, his decision to save himself for marriage, and, as had happened the year before with the receiver Dez Bryant, whether his mother was a prostitute. When Eric Mangini led the Jets, he sometimes began a Combine interview by requiring the ten or so people in the room to introduce themselves to the player, after which the coach turned to the player and asked him to repeat all the names he’d just heard. This did not always go over well. LSU’s Dwayne Bowe, now a Chiefs receiver, believed Mangini was trying to humiliate him, and he shut down, producing a lengthy awkward moment that Jets officials still can’t recall without shuddering.
The Combine was a spectacle that had elements of other spectacles: it was a football screen test; a football beauty pageant; a strongman contest at a football county fair. Jets receivers coach Henry Ellard, a former NFL star, thought back to his own Combine experience and remembered the queasy feeling of standing on display, “only in shorts,” for crowds of men who tugged and pulled at him “like a piece of meat.” Ellard, like most Combine attendees and most NFL players, is black. The majority of the people evaluating the players are white, creating a dynamic the Jets coaches warned me I might find disquieting: “It looks like a fucking slave auction,” one coach said.
The Combine was also exactly what the word proclaimed it was: an NFL harvester that winnowed the field of ripe young football players and separated them into wheat and chaff. Two months after the Combine, at the end of April, the threshing would be completed in New York, when two-thirds of the contestants would hear their names called at the NFL draft ceremony. For the players, the Combine loomed the way the MCAT did for their classmates who hoped to become doctors, and most of them prepared just as assiduously. These study sessions were often conducted by agents, who helped the players to have ready responses for just about anything anybody might ask them to do or say.
The Jets had been preparing too. In Florham Park, after a season spent living in the moment, coming within a game of reaching the Super Bowl, the Jets coaches and team officials had stepped back, evaluated the team, assessed its deficiencies, decided what had kept them from the championship, and then discussed whom they could find at the Combine to deliver them. Defensive coordinator Mike Pettine, for instance, hoped to discover “a bitch-kitty pass rusher.” By this he meant a defensive end or, in a 3-4 alignment, an outside linebacker who would smell a warm quarterback and become an insatiable, unblockable, pocket-infiltrating force of war-daddy bedlam. In other words, a sacking specialist. A fundamental fact of a defensive coordinator’s life was that a sack reduced the chance of the opposing team’s scoring in any drive to 7 percent. For all their reputation as a pressuring defense, the Jets didn’t generate many sacks, leading to the perception that they lacked a real pass rush, were doing it with mirrors. Their basic problem was that there were not many large men capable of accelerating off a mark at high speed and then making a feline curve around the edge of pass protection by dipping their shoulders low enough to the grass that you could imagine them passing beneath a café table without disturbing the vase of tulips on top before raising a little backfield harm.
Attending the Combine was the University of Wisconsin defensive end J. J. Watt and the Texas A&M outside linebacker Von Miller, and either would have been the answer to Mike Pettine’s (and Rex Ryan’s) prayers. But because the Jets had been the NFL’s third-best team the year before, their position for the seven rounds of the upcoming draft was low—they would pick thirtieth out of the thirty-two teams. Watt and Miller would be drafted by other teams long before that thirtieth slot. So Pettine was looking elsewhere. Pettine had watched cut-ups, collections of film footage on a common theme chosen from various games of the college careers of all the defensive players the Jets scouts and front-office people had graded draft-eligible. In his best moments on film, Temple University’s Muhammad Wilkerson had impressed Pettine as much as any lineman in the draft. He weighed 315 pounds, had arms that were three feet long, and he looked like a Volkswagen when he sprinted. But Pettine worried that on too many snaps, Wilkerson needed “a little gunpowder in his Wheaties.”
For the coaches and front-office people, the Combine was an industry convention. Downtown Indianapolis teemed with contingents from all the NFL organizations. Everybody knew everybody, and there was a reunion feel. At hotel lobbies and in restaurants and bars, you could hear scraps of conversation particular to the time and place: “You can’t coach nasty”; “He’s only six three”; “Optimal hips!”; “Josh McDaniels thinks he invented football.” McDaniels had been hired in 2009 to be the head coach of the Denver Broncos. Only thirty-two and another protégé of Bill Belichick, McDaniels was then the young NFL coach of the moment. But in December, with the Broncos a 3-and-9 dead horse, he’d been fired, and now there was a different ascendant NFL leader who also happened to be the undisputed king of the Combine—Rex Ryan.
The combination of
his coaching success, his charm, and a star turn in the 2010 season of HBO’s training-camp documentary Hard Knocks as the smack-talking, life-loving profane fat dude with motivating charisma—“Let’s go eat a goddamned snack!”—had earned Ryan first-name recognition out in the world: Rex! For him there were now invitations from the likes of Letterman, Sandler (a movie cameo), and Doubleday (a memoir). His popularity had only increased with Deadspin’s discovery of fetish videos in which Ryan praised the feet of his pretty wife of nearly thirty years, Michelle. Ryan was not only gregarious but also a happily married inamorato! (Around the facility, when the other coaches teased him about this episode, Ryan would retort affably, “I’m the only guy in history who gets in a sex scandal with his wife!”) Within the well-insulated facility, one could still believe that things with Ryan were as they had always been. Out at the Combine, it was clear that much was different.
In Indianapolis, as soon as Ryan was free of his long schedule of meetings, he was all over town, as he always was at the Combine. Only this time, everybody wanted to join him for a cheeseburger—or lob one at him. He’d given a press conference in which he’d guaranteed a Super Bowl victory for the Jets.
As for the Jets defensive coaches at the Combine, after hours of asking players to diagram their college base defenses and showing them cut-ups of themselves making good and poor plays on the field—clips chosen to stimulate a revealing discussion, assess the player’s football acumen, and measure his responses to uncomfortable situations—the Jets coaches would gather for a late meal or drinks and conversation. They discussed peekers (a player who so badly wanted to please that every time he made a mistake, he looked to see the coach’s reaction). They discussed various methods used to defend the back of the end zone (a discreet hand to a receiver’s hip to “help him out-of-bounds” was one). They discussed Stanford defensive players (“Buyer beware!”). The coaches worked together closely year-round, so it was understood that, in the interests of group harmony, they would not discuss politics, religion, or wives. The dating exploits of the unmarried coaches were, however, fair game, and questions arose on the order of what was the appropriate interval of time to let pass after breaking up with a woman before one asked her roommate out.
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