Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  The offensive and defensive coaching staffs shared a pod of first-floor offices. The two staffs faced each other across an intern bullpen, much like a Wall Street firm where the partners have the private spaces. No coach had a window to the outdoors in his office; the back of each room was solid wall, and the front was glass, so that everybody looked out only on other football coaches. There was also a kitchen area that was kept stocked with snacks and drinks, many of which had the word “energy” on the label. Across a small lobby was Ryan’s large office, and next to it a meeting room where the defensive coaches often gathered.

  Ryan had decorated his office with sports photographs and souvenirs. Most of the other coaches placed no personal mementos on the walls of the rooms where they spent twice as much time as they spent at home. Why put up what you might soon have to take down? Learning how to lose your job was part of the job. “It’s like joining the navy,” said Bill Callahan. “There’s elements of risk, but I know this. I wasn’t gonna live in Chicago all my life, be one of those guys going to the same job and the same bar. I wanted to go out and experience the world.”

  The separation between offensive and defensive coaching offices reflected the fundamental football dichotomy. At the facility now, as in Buddy Ryan’s time, the team’s offense and defense existed as autonomous city-states, regions that operated under independent administrations and merged only at team meetings and games. Because they practiced against each other every day, they were rivalrous. “It’s a different culture over there, a different world, the difference between a pirate ship and a ship of the line,” Callahan said. “Those guys over there dock anywhere hooting and hollering, drinking island rum. They think we’re sitting here, over thinking everything.”

  I had chosen to spend my time with the defense, so after the morning procession, I rarely saw the offensive coaches. I spent most of the day in the defensive meeting room or occupying one of the black swivel chairs surrounding the white conference table in Pettine’s office. The chair next to mine, the last chair along the near wall, was left empty, in case Ryan came by to participate. Since managing the defense was Pettine’s job, most of the time during meetings, the only evidence of Ryan was the empty chair and a gash in the wall behind it. When Ryan did sit in, he liked to rock back in his chair until he was propped against the wall. After he left, along Pettine’s floor there’d always be a few more scattered filaments of drywall dust. Pettine detested all forms of mess, especially crumbs. If you walked into his office carrying an unopened bag of chips, he’d glare at the bag, might hand you a pair of scissors so he didn’t have to hear you open it. Sometimes you’d catch him looking at the scar in his wall with real pain in his eyes.

  For the time being, the coaches had somewhere to go but nobody to coach when they got there. The players were on postseason vacation, and the NFL’s labor problems threatened to prolong their absence. On March 11, the players would be locked out by the owners until a new collective bargaining agreement was signed. What the players would be missing were the optional off-season strength and conditioning programs at the facility, as well as football school. In the football-school sessions, the players immersed themselves in the Jets playbook, dressed in shorts and walked through plays out of various formations, and played bonding games, like Jets Pictionary, where a player had once drawn Tannenbaum, who was Jewish, as a sheriff with a Star of David on his chest. In many communities that would have been offensive, but at the facility, neither Tannenbaum nor anybody else considered the star any big deal. In football, everybody was as aware of race and ethnicity as the rest of society. Football people just tended to talk about it all, and since none of them softened the blow for anybody, many differences seemed less different. Around the facility, where everything was joked about, what got you ostracized was the inability to take it. There was simply no such thing as political correctness in a football meeting room. Ryan urged those who worked for him to grow “skin like an armadillo” and advised them that the best way to approach anything was “blunt-force trauma.” With the Jets, Ryan imposed sensitivity fines on thin-skinned players and coaches.

  Because just about every Jet attended the off-season workouts, Ryan used them to help the players to deepen their understanding of the Jets’ relatively complex offensive and defensive systems and as a way for the team to achieve closeness. But this year, with it all in the hands of lawyers and union officials, only the coaches came to the facility, where most of their day, and hence mine, was spent watching film of past Jets games and cut-ups of college players and NFL free agents the Jets were evaluating.

  Even during the season, NFL coaches watch football on film far more than they see it live on the field. Tape dominates their days, their evaluation of players the quotidian constant during the season, and after it, in retrospective review. Everything that happened at a Jets game or on the practice field was filmed by sideline and end-zone cameras, which created images of sufficient scope that the coaches could track what all twenty-two players did on each play. Once recorded, the images ended up on a hard drive in the video department, so that during subsequent meetings, Pettine, sitting at the head of the conference table with a laptop in front of him and a remote in hand, simply opened a file and then clicked his way through, showing each play. Some coaches rewound the same play dozens of times, which Pettine considered a path to an unquiet grave. His policy was no more than three times.

  I watched several daily sessions of Jets film with the defensive coaches, and at first, the pictures seemed to me to present an indistinguishable convergence of humankind. I’d look at the screen and think about Thanksgiving-night shoppers massed outside an appliance store, awaiting the Black Friday sales. I’d seen only TV broadcasts of football, which tracked the ball, so here, as each play began, my eye went always to the ball, and I missed everything on the periphery, which really weren’t peripheral events at all because in football, everything has to do with everything else. There wasn’t any audio, so the coaches did the announcing, as it were. By listening to their commentary, I gradually found the turgid football amoeba taking on an individuating clarity.

  Here, in the off-season, we looked back at various cut-ups taken from several past seasons of Jets play. Pettine would show each clip and comment, and then anybody else could jump in and offer his own observations. It was a democratic procedure for a democratic form. As Pettine liked to say, “Tape don’t lie.” Pettine attributed commendable actions using an authorial “by,” as in “Good patience by Bart.” The less praiseworthy might lead him to growl, “That’s fucking porn!” There was thinking aloud: “I see what he’s seeing.” There were axioms. Pettine: “If you absolutely have to give up a sack, boys, put a tight end or a back on a legitimate pass rusher.” And there were rules subject to specific conditions. After Darrelle Revis obliterated the Ravens’ receiver Anquan Boldin with a block during the runback following an interception by the Jets other star cornerback, Antonio Cromartie, Mark Carrier said approvingly, “The two guys you have to block after an interception are the intended receiver and the quarterback because they’re the two most pissed-off people.”

  It was a tough crowd. When the twice-injured Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford appeared on the screen, he was called Fine China. After watching a Jets defensive back get badly beaten, Pettine asked Dennis Thurman, “DT, you slow down to look at accidents?” Poor officiating calls that went against the Jets on the film were so loudly and profanely lamented it was clear that, even months or years later, nobody in the room was near over them.

  Between evaluating the plays on the screen, the coaches had fun adding narrative detail. Of the nose tackle Howard Green, Pettine said, “Rare to see it, but here overeating had positive results.” In October, Green’s weight had soared to more than 360 pounds, and Ryan had told him to come back to the team after the Jets bye, their midseason vacation week, weighing 359, or else. “But he owns a restaurant,” Pettine continued, “and when he came back, turned out he’d eaten all the profits.
” So Green was cut. The Packers claimed him, and Green not only won the Super Bowl against the Steelers but pressured Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger into throwing an interception that was run back for a Packer touchdown.

  There was so much to see in the film. Using the “veteran flinch,” a heady defensive lineman like Mike DeVito might feint one way then square his feet and surge toward the gap. For a linebacker, the difficult thing to do was aim himself at an occupied spot and trust that the space would be vacated before his arrival. If the linebacker waited for the traffic to clear first, the ball carrier would be long past. Bart Scott approached his destinations at ramming speed, which occasionally meant planking people—“planking” being a term for laying out offensive players derived from the former hard-hitting Bears safety Doug Plank. The veteran outside linebacker Bryan Thomas, with his sure instinct for the tides of football motion, navigated obstacles with far less incident than Scott. Cornerback Isaiah Trufant, all 165 pounds of him, could cantilever and dip himself at high speeds with such a compact turning radius that the coaches liked to imagine things he could run beneath—cars, trains, furniture. Speaking of cornerbacks, Revis tracked receivers’ routes so closely on the film that the offensive players appeared to be covering him. “Revis is unbelievable,” DT said, for the 49,732nd time in the defensive-back coach’s life. It was a game of time and space, a fierce contest for shards of terrain that there were numerous methods of claiming.

  Each defensive coach approached the daily moviegoing with distinctive technique and style, imbuing the proceedings with his own critical personality. The three senior coaches, Pettine, DT, and Sutton, were the principal commentators. Thurman was funny, candid at some times and at other times a little mysterious. “This guy!” he was always exclaiming, before analyzing “tuurrible” coverage decisions. Sutton was milder, wry. “He’s two sixty, but he’s a light two sixty,” he might observe as a linebacker landed on his back. Or, “He’s an altar tackler—gets on his knees and prays.”

  I particularly savored Pettine’s critiques. Everyone did. While most of the coaches were obligated to concentrate on the areas of their personal positional concern, as coordinator, Pettine took it all in. To him football film was a Brueghel painting, a canvas strewn with fascinating little human interactions about which he was now the narrator. With remote in hand, in his droll, opinionated way, he would point out the cheap shots; the humorous bodily contortions; the small running backs who intentionally failed to see (and thus did not have to try to block) the big blitzers—Pettine called this “making a business decision”; the blown assignments; the selfish defensive back betraying resentment that somebody else had stepped in front of him and made “his” interception. Pettine could detect unpopular members of opposing teams: their teammates never jumped up and down for and high-fived them after those players had done something well. Pettine’s greatest powers of antipathy were reserved for the soft players who had a habit of arriving on the scene just after somebody else made the tackle. “Tape don’t lie,” Pettine would say, and there the soft player would be, skidding up to the edge of the pile, peering menacingly into the wreckage he’d once again avoided.

  Pettine, the former third video guy, was a football Tarantino. Tarantino had begun his career working in a video store, where he absorbed many genres and styles; these were refracted through the funny, violent, referential films he directed. Pettine had a football-film aesthetic that was grounded in those of his two great football mentors: his hardboiled, detail-oriented father, Senior, and the folksy stream-of-consciousness Ryan, whose theory of running backs, for instance, was “once a fumbler, always a fumbler.” What emerged was commentary that was distinctly Pettine, words and phrases from his grandfather’s generation—“ass over teakettle”—with a mordant Howard Stern edge. The defensive coordinator had terse wit and an instinct for epigrams. Pointing to a large lineman reversing course near the scrimmage-line scrum, Pettine said the player resembled “a tractor-trailer trying to make a U-turn in an alley.” Pettine was self-confident in his film comments, but what he sought to draw from the other coaches was group dialogue. Therefore he usually prefaced his remarks with “To me.” The provisional concession encouraged alternative or even opposing views. And the other coaches did follow his lead, freely making observations themselves and often using Pettine’s expressions as they did, bringing to mind something the Cowboys coach Tom Landry once claimed was the most crucial part of football leadership: “Make sure your coaches speak your language.”

  There were a lot of those Pettine expressions, and Smitty and I became amateur Pettine scholars, collecting the coordinator’s Pet words and Pet phrases under the rubric Pettisms. Here follows a sampling of the lexicon:

  Awareness: Usually employed as praise for a player whose movements indicated that he’d quickly and correctly read the play. Typical Pettine usage was “Good awareness by” with a player’s name following the preposition. Related words were “Recognition” and “Eyes.”

  Be the Hammer, Not the Nail: Philosophical: Play aggressive football; don’t allow the opponent to physically dictate to you.

  Beat ’Em or Hurt ’Em: Should you fail to defeat your opponent on a given play, at least deliver a tiring blow. Football is a game of attrition and one way to overcome a more talented player was to exhaust him through the course of a game until you’d become, by force of will, the better player. On this, Pettine liked to quote the old Ravens defensive-back coach Donnie Henderson: “You got to get an understanding early.”

  Big Rascal: A lineman Pettine thought well of.

  Bloated Tick: An ineffectual lineman.

  Foreshadowing: Early indications from opposing team play callers of a play they were setting up to run later in the game. It could also mean something a team was putting on film for opposition coordinators to see and have in mind, to their disadvantage, “down the road” in a subsequent game.

  Glass in the Shoes: A tentative player.

  Going Outlaw: A player who ignored the design of the play, acted in a rash, impetuous fashion, and undermined the scheme by taking himself out of position.

  Just a Guy: A mediocre player who won’t last in the NFL.

  Laying in the Weeds: A canny defender who had deciphered the offense’s intentions, held his water without attracting attention, and thus was in position to surprise the offense by making the play.

  Looks Like Tarzan, Plays Like Jane: An impressive physical specimen who was a lousy pro-football player. Exhibit A: Vernon Gholston.

  Not a Lot of Lead in the Pencil: Someone who was willing to hit but wasn’t heavy enough to do so with sufficient punch.

  Pezzed: A player who is hit so hard his neck snaps back like the head on a Pez candy dispenser: “Eric gets Pezzed here.”

  Production Breeds Tolerance (or P = T): The better player you are, the more of your bullshit we will put up with.

  Scalded Dog: A player moving with extreme urgency.

  Special-Delivery Jones: A reference to the professional wrestler who was a career jobber—a competitor hired to lose. In football, it meant a defensive practice player who was often beaten by his man, thus giving the offense some confidence.

  Suitcased: A player who had been folded up and packed away by his dominating opponent.

  The Bigger They Are, the Harder They Hit: Player evaluation truism.

  Truck: A violent, flattening hit.

  Yum-Yum: Just a guy.

  Pettine liked smart, physical play, and when he didn’t get it, as he sat with remote in hand, he was fierce. We heard often from him about Bart Scott’s erratic post-snap impulses and safety Brodney Pool’s indifferent knowledge of assignments. Football required more study than any major sport; every week new calls were added, old ones reconfigured. It was a question of precise timing and geometry. In football, where everything was a matter of degree, the leeway for error was so narrow that only by driving your team to improve with relentless, harping critique could you hope for success.

&n
bsp; One day we were watching clips from a 2010 game the Jets had played against the Bears on a snowy Chicago afternoon. Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie kept losing his footing on the slick field. He was wearing the wrong cleats for snow, and the coaches said the reason he had those on was that he didn’t like the way the snow cleats looked. “That’s the difference between knowing to wear a condom and not,” one of the coaches said thinly. Cromartie was a figure of complication for all the coaches. The best athlete on the team, the lanky cornerback stood six two, had legs that seemed to go up to his chin and long arms to match. For a tall man, he displayed astonishing torsion, and that was really only the beginning of his skills. Cromartie could throw a football more than eighty yards, could underhand it more than fifty, could skip a football on one bounce to a target twenty yards away (try it). He was the fastest Jet in both a four-yard race and also one across forty yards. Everybody could see the pleasure Cromartie took in movement, the pure joy athletics brought him.