Former players who took coaching jobs didn’t always have that ability to move forward, to fully reimagine themselves as coaches, to embrace the grind, as the saying went, and embrace the entry-level money. That Smitty did have it made Ryan and Pettine want to help him with everything from groceries to the extra room in Pettine’s town house, which Smitty lived in, rent-free. In return, Pettine, who hadn’t had a younger brother when he was growing up, got the closest thing possible to one, as well as an excellent wingman.
Pettine was a very eligible bachelor, and his approach to women was not unlike his approach to football—he thrived on process. The quickening increments of courtship seemed to interest him so much that Smitty came to regard him as a romantic lighthouse whose beam was intermittently intense and alluringly withdrawn. He admired Pettine’s poised remove, and so did women. Once Pettine invited a woman he’d reached “a special point with” to dinner. He took her to a fine restaurant located on a promontory across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Their table offered a dramatic panorama of the city lights. (In NFL coaching circles, this is sometimes referred to as a “drop-your-pants view.”) The evening progressed as all such evenings should until Pettine realized that after a last-second decision to switch sport jackets, he had forgotten to transfer his wallet. Remaining composed, Pettine remembered that Smitty had recently been to the same restaurant and had gotten along famously with the manager. An idea blossomed. When Pettine’s date visited the powder room, Pettine called Smitty, who, in turn, telephoned the manager, put Pettine’s bill on his credit card, and supplied the man with some dialogue to recite. The manager then appeared at the defensive coordinator’s table and announced, “Mr. Pettine, it’s an honor to have you here with us tonight. Your bill is all taken care of.”
Most professional football coaches make it a policy not to become friends with the players they are coaching. Therefore, it’s immensely important for the seven or so people in an offensive or a defensive coaching unit to get along well together. Football coaches see more of one another than they do of their own families, and in the most favorable circumstances, coaching staffs develop a familial feeling. As Andy Samberg said to describe the staff of another work-obsessed endeavor, Saturday Night Live, “You’re not just hiring talented people, you’re hiring people you don’t mind seeing in a dark hallway at six in the morning.” With Ryan, that closeness was, as the coach said, “nonnegotiable.” To Ryan, nepotism was a virtue, and so were connections; he wanted coincidences of biography, commonalities of past experiences with those he was going to be living and fighting with. The words he used to describe his relationships with Pettine and Weeks and Smith, as well as the Jets defensive-backs coach Dennis Thurman and the defensive-line coach Mark Carrier, were these: “My brothers.”
Thurman, the son of an aircraft-company worker, grew up in Santa Monica in a three-bedroom house with eight siblings. It was a religious household—every Sunday, Thurman wore his clip-on reversible tie to church. (Later on, a large, bejeweled cross always hung around his neck.) Thurman was a magnificent high-school quarterback and shortstop. Major League Baseball scouts called his home promising bonuses if he’d forgo college and football and sign with them, but nobody in his family had ever gone to college, and, Thurman recalled, “My mother said, ‘My son’s going to college.’ ” That was also Thurman’s choice. “I was better at baseball, but football got to everything inside of me. Whatever was inside of me could all come out.”
Both UCLA and USC, the two best college programs in California, recruited him. Thurman said the UCLA people took him to fashionable restaurants in Westwood, and the coach, Dick Vermeil, promised Thurman he would start as a freshman. USC’s John McKay sent Thurman off to eat in the dorms and told him he’d have the chance to prove how good he was. “I felt like USC was showing me how it really would be,” he said. “I couldn’t afford a fancy restaurant. I couldn’t go to Beverly Hills or Hollywood, plus if I could come in as a true freshman and start at UCLA, how good could they be? I fit in more at USC. I was a blue-collar kid. There’s a toughness at USC. We always felt like that was an edge for us.”
In 1978, the NFL draft still had twelve rounds, and though Thurman had been an all-American safety at USC, an injured knee he suffered in a college all-star game dropped him to the eleventh round, where the Cowboys took him. At training camp, there were twenty-six rookie defensive backs and one open defensive-back job. Thurman was the last man standing because, he said, “Nobody outworked me.” As for the knee injury, beginning in Pop Warner and through all his years in football, Thurman missed not a single game. A case of strep throat forced him to sit out a junior-high-school practice in 1972. That was the only rehearsal he didn’t participate in. If it had been left to him, Thurman would have suited up that day, but strep was highly infectious, and, thinking of the other kids, his coach wouldn’t allow it.
The Cowboys moved Thurman from safety to cornerback. Safety was, like quarterback and center, considered a thinking man’s position, and Thurman remembers that many pro-football coaches were still skeptical that a black man could be intelligent enough to play it. Cornerback was then a poorly paid position—“The thankless football job,” Thurman said. Thurman did something to change that. As Cowboys, he and Everson Walls together intercepted more than sixty balls while playing as a cornerback tandem, among the highest totals in NFL history. Thurman’s approach was to learn “the whole defense” and also to go heavy on opposition research. Cowboys coach Tom Landry noticed this. One day Landry called Thurman into his office and told him he could be a coach. “It’s a lot of time and it’s mentally very draining,” Landry said, “but I have a sense that you are a guy who knows how to prepare.” Thurman was an excellent cornerback in part because he could handle being out at a remove, on his own, playing a position where the failures are prominent and a measure of success is remaining inconspicuous.
As a coach, “DT” was always hard on young defensive backs, because, he said, “We’re looking for guys who can handle hugely stressful situations.” During the 2010 Jets rookie mini-camp, Thurman spent most of the three-day session messing with a Penn State free agent named Knowledge Timmons. He referred to the cornerback exclusively as Ka-Nahledge, and during positional meetings, he might suddenly stop his lecture to frown and demand, “Ka-Nahledge, why you always looking at me like I’m crazy?” Timmons would freeze. The room would go silent. After a few beats Thurman would smile and say, “I kind of like you, man.” Timmons was among the lowest-rated prospects in the room. He had been given no chance of making the Jets, and he played to expectations. But although Thurman thought Timmons was “tuurrible,” as he liked to say, he kept after him throughout the camp because, like Ryan, DT was drawn to the marginal player, always hoping for the outsider. Not that he admitted that. “I keep it simple so people think I’m deep” was his way of deflecting such observations.
When Mark Carrier was ten, his father was partially paralyzed in an automobile accident. Not long afterward Carrier’s parents divorced. Carrier and his sisters grew up with a single mother who supported the family by ripping asbestos out of old boats at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard. For Carrier, playing defensive football meshed with his worldview and gave him an outlet. “I preferred to stop teams from scoring to scoring,” he said. “I thought it was harder. Everybody wants glory. I wanted to deny people the glory. For me, defense meant I am gonna shut guys down who want to have fun. My fun was to stop fun. I had a sense of the world as a tough place. It was tight at home.”
After high school, Carrier made a verbal commitment to attend Notre Dame. Then he received a call at his mother’s house in Long Beach from a very worked-up man who identified himself as Dennis Thurman, USC class of ’78. Thurman kept Carrier on the phone—“Notre Dame! Not Notre Dame! Why you want to go to Notre Dame?”—for hours until he’d convinced Carrier to pledge to USC. “DT wasn’t as mellow back then,” remembered Carrier.
During Carrier’s career as an all-American safety at U
SC and then as an All-Pro safety in the NFL, the Hammer was known for his shrewd in-game management of a defensive backfield as well as for delivering such brutal helmet-first hits that several times he knocked himself out. Owing to such hitting, by his calculations, Carrier retired as the most-fined player in NFL history.
Ryan came to know both Thurman and Carrier in Baltimore, where the two coached the Ravens secondary. To Thurman, Organized Chaos was “a beautiful language, such a beautiful language you don’t want to speak anything else.” For a man of action, there is nothing more challenging than becoming a man of response, but Ryan didn’t see coaching or defense as responses, and neither did DT. DT always stood with Ryan during Ravens games—Ryan trusted Thurman’s calm strategic acumen under fire—and DT stayed right alongside Ryan when he was hired by the Jets.
As for Carrier, Ryan had noticed what Carrier would later describe to me as “my secret love for defensive linemen.” Since his Southern California childhood, Carrier had been fascinated by traffic patterns, by the obstructed flow of free movement you saw all over LA. It was a similar curiosity that had led to Carrier’s line-coaching job; he wanted to understand the intricate solutions enormous linemen found to negotiate their own crowded workspaces. That huge and powerful men could move with Bolshoi agility fascinated the relatively lithe former safety. Gazing at Ravens linemen like Haloti Ngata and Kelly Gregg, Carrier was like a small boy taking in earthmoving equipment. Ryan, in turn, was intrigued by someone who could be interested in the ways of players so different from the kind of athlete he’d been himself. Ryan had the idea that Carrier might make a fine future defensive coordinator. Mastering another positional area of coaching would make Carrier a more appealing candidate. So in 2010, Ryan invited Carrier to be the Jets defensive line coach, promising to help him learn the techniques. Carrier was trying to do a very ambitious thing: not only coach a position that was new to him but make a two-position jump. The more usual way would have been for him to work first with linebackers, where some of the responsibilities were similar to working with defensive backs. Carrier was flattered but initially unsure if he was up for the job, but Ryan was sure, and he convinced Carrier to come to Florham Park and try it.
Carrier was considered by the other Jets coaches to be a completely decent person, and also proud, which concerned some of them after the moment at the Combine when he’d referred to Terry Bradway as Mr. Bradbury. There were times lately in meetings where Carrier struggled to express himself, striving for long seconds to find the words he wanted, sometimes never locating them. And so while Bradbury was an amusing new nickname, at a point when everybody in football had become aware of the potential long-term consequences of repeated blows to the head, “Bradbury” also made the colleagues worry about Carrier’s memory—worry about all those punishing hits Carrier had delivered as a player.
Taking the other coaches in, always from slight remove, was the linebackers coach Bob Sutton. Sutton was to Ryan the voice of reason, not a brother, but a reassuring uncle who’d seen the world and who wanted the best for Ryan, just as Terry Bradway did for Mike Tannenbaum. Sutt had grown up in Ypsilanti, where his father had a business selling paint, and in 2011, at age sixty, with his spectacles, white hair, bright blue eyes, and composed, appreciative nature, Sutt looked like he belonged in a similar heartland domain—as the life-changing teacher at Harry S. Truman High. Among the Jets scouts, Sutt was known as Scoach (a portmanteau of “scout” and “coach”) because his player-evaluation reports matched the standard of their own. The scouts spent most of the year on the road, but from time to time they all worked for stretches of days at the facility, and some had never seen Sutt’s parking space without his blue car resting there.
Sutt had prepared his wife, Debbie, for that kind of schedule soon after they met in 1975, in a Kalamazoo bar. “I’m about to get very busy and I can only see you on Thursday nights,” he told her, and naturally she thought he was dating someone else. He wasn’t; it was that, at age twenty-four, he had just become the defensive coordinator at Western Michigan. As his career progressed, he coached in the North, he coached in the South, he coached offense, he coached more defense, and he became head coach at Army, where he worked for seventeen years, defeating Navy five consecutive times. In 1996, he won the Bobby Dodd Award for college-football coach of the year.
Under Eric Mangini, Sutt had been the Jets defensive coordinator. When Ryan arrived with his own defensive coordinator, Pettine, Sutt had coaching offers from other NFL teams, but Ryan’s defense fascinated him, and, as a football purist, he wanted to learn it. So Sutton stayed on as the linebacker coach, quietly making what amounted to a personal study of Ryan. He thought what Ryan had in common with all the best football coaches was his comfort with who he was. He noticed that Ryan was self-confident enough to make sure others knew how much he depended upon his subordinates. Ryan almost never drew his office curtains, and during the season’s crucial intervals, everyone who passed by the coach’s office could see Sutt in there, offering his counsel.
Sutt considered his job with the Jets linebackers to be preparing young men for a dangerous activity. To help him with his job, he kept on his desk well-thumbed copies of various books on American military history and tactics that instructors at West Point had recommended to him. Among his favorites was a history of the Bataan death march, which he liked because “it reveals the human capacity for perseverance under the most difficult and painful circumstances.”
Sutt got out of bed every morning at five and usually returned home by midevening. During Jets vacation weeks, postseason, and in the summer, he might leave the office a little earlier. After thirty-five years of marriage, he still didn’t know what time his wife woke up. Winning games, Sutton said, was the emotional coefficient of the effort that went into them: “It’s hard to define the energy in the first five minutes after you win, but it defines all of us and you’re always seeking it.” Losing, by contrast, was so horrible that Sutton would descend into a state of anomie that he would lift himself from only when he dug into the next game. Until then: “I’d be so off on my own.” In all the places he’d lived, Sutt had never known his neighbors. A particular sadness was the “events I missed in my son’s and daughter’s childhoods that I would have liked to have been part of.” He was intrigued by golf but had never learned the game and knew he never would.
In the coaching day-to-day, Pettine leaned on Sutton’s experience, and he tried to do the same with DT, who processed football in a sophisticated way but sometimes required others to draw it out of him. Even by NFL standards, Pettine believed, the 2011 staff was “a special group.” Pettine loved Jim O’Neil for his eagerness to learn, the fearless way he’d speak up in meetings in front of far more experienced coaches, willing to take the chance that they’d dismiss his opinions. Pettine was sure both O’Neil and Smitty would someday be college or even professional coordinators themselves. He felt responsible for their careers. One day, Pettine presented Smitty with a video about chewing tobacco and mouth cancer, and then he stood behind Smitty’s desk chair, hands planted on Smitty’s shoulders, until Smitty had taken in every disgusting frame. “Tough love,” Pettine said as the video ended, and then he walked away. In football, some of the recompense for not spending much time with your real family was that you watched over the growth of able younger men and tended to their lives day by day.
Three
TAPE DON’T LIE
His feeling seemed to be almost one of spite, as though the drawings themselves had offended him and he wanted to revenge himself on them.
—James Lord, A Giacometti Portrait
After the Combine, mornings at the facility began with the coaches turning their SUVs and BMWs into parking spaces that had their nicknames painted on the asphalt. The parking lot was a time card rack for the facility. A quick scan told you who was there, or, really, who wasn’t, since just about everybody worked just about always. Football people could be as competitive about parking spaces as they we
re about most things. Which one someone got and how long his car spent there tended to be noticed. And so each space was assigned with a purpose.
In the hundred-and-eighty-space parking lot, the four spots closest to the facility entrance belonged to, respectively, team owner Woody Johnson; Tannenbaum; Ryan; and the equipment manager, Vito Contento. A native of the Appalachian mining town of Hazard, Kentucky, Contento left his Long Island home every morning at 5:30, drove his Toyota fifty-seven miles, and arrived at Florham Park at 6:30. Contento was a short, stout man shaped roughly like a U.S. Postal Service mailbox with a snapping turtle perched on top of it. Though Contento was only in his midthirties, he had the world-weary manner of a person who had seen far too many reasonably intelligent men toss their dirty shirts into the towel bin. Players and coaches delighted in trying to get a rise out of Contento and were even happier when he, well, snapped back at them. As I watched Contento grimly shouldering his way through the facility in the afternoons, enduring just a little torment everywhere he went, I liked to think of him encountering that beautiful parking space again at day’s end.
Before designing the entrance to the facility, the architect had been directed to draw up a lobby that might stimulate an uptick in aggression and focus, might encourage an off-tackle state of mind. The resulting ingress subliminally suggested the stadium tunnels that teams ran through on game days before bursting onto the field, and the lobby may have achieved its purpose. Watching the march of the coaches entering the facility in the morning, I thought of water pouring into a flume.
Here came the offense, always arriving first. The earliest to his desk was Bill Callahan, once a quarterback at Benedictine, a small Catholic college in Chicago, who coached the offensive line and designed the Jets running game. Callahan awoke daily at 4:45 a.m., taught line play like a catechism: “It personifies grinding. It’s all minutiae and it all matters.” Then the tight-ends mentor Mike Devlin pushed through the doors, shuffling along with his ex-lineman’s joints, a self-described “sawed-off guy, whatever,” whose torso seemed to call out for a bloodstained butcher’s apron. (He had worn one long ago at an Iowa City food market where he and several other University of Iowa students held summer jobs, including the woman working the cash register who became Dev’s wife.) Anthony Lynn—A-Lynn, as he was known—had been the best high-school halfback in Texas twenty-five years ago, and the Jets running-backs coach still walked in with newel-post posture that seemed to announce “athlete”; his face was expressionless until his large eyes met yours, when suddenly he might grin. When quarterbacks coach Matt Cavanaugh wore shorts, they revealed a Pitt tattoo alma-matering the former Panther signal caller’s left leg. Nothing about the offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer’s mood would have told you he hated the first half of the morning. All season long, I never saw a man more capable of keeping his adversities to himself.
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