Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  Cromartie’s physical ability made him a football player capable of rare feats. Even Revis said that Cro, not himself, ought to be the best cornerback in the league. In the first half of one game, while playing for the San Diego Chargers, Cro had had three interceptions against Peyton Manning, including a one-handed snare he made by reaching behind his own head with his back nearly parallel to the ground. Among his teammates, however, Cro was known as a tough talker but an indifferent tackler, which made him expendable in San Diego. The Chargers traded him to the Jets after the 2009 season.

  The next year, during the filming of Hard Knocks, the HBO producers sat Cromartie down on a pile of equipment and asked him to name the eight children he had fathered by six women in five states. It was impossible to watch his painfully deliberate recitation without considering the possibility that Cromartie would forget somebody. He didn’t, but the image of him furrowing his brow and appearing to tabulate on his fingers was indelible.

  During the 2010 season, Cromartie was at times an excellent Jets cornerback. He was also prone to strange lapses in coverage, especially when he played off the line of scrimmage. It was difficult for the coaches watching film to understand his tendency to drop back several yards before the snap, which allowed receivers free release, since Cromartie’s long arms gave him excellent leverage to control his opponents at the line, diverting them before they set off on their pass routes. That somebody could be so good at something and yet so resistant to doing it that he exposed himself to public failure baffled the coaches. You could find very few instances on NFL film when a defensive player avoided contact. You had to look to other sports to find an analogue. As Sutton said, “Cro’s like an NBA player who hates to play defense.” After watching film of Cromartie ducking a tackle, just as he’d done as a Charger, the coaches, thunderstruck, would say things like “He’d already made his one for the day” and “Cro is a visual deterrent!” In the winter of 2011, Cro was a free agent, and the coaches were ambivalent. They wanted Tannenbaum to sign him back, and at the same time, they dreaded it.

  The coaches had enormous respect for anybody who could play NFL football. “Go stand ten yards behind the quarterback and see what they see,” Thurman told me, reminding me how tall and wide offensive and defensive linemen were. “You can’t see anything. And yet they see so much. It’s hard to play quarterback in this league.” The defensive coaches all employed Pettine’s style of bestowing film-room credit through what sounded like authorial recognition. The distribution of those spoken bylines—“Good initial burst by Bo!”—felt to me as though the coach were saying that the player had done something beyond worthy there on the film, had created something of lasting significance. In the NFL, a player’s game film is referred to as his résumé, and since what he puts on tape in practice is archived by his team, there was tangible truth to the idea that every snap mattered.

  Yet within the realm of the game, there were standards for the coaches to enforce, and the one thing they could not brook was submissiveness in any form. At first, their caustic responses to what they saw on the film took me aback. But it was a matter of context. On the one hand, the players were actual people the coaches guided, taught, and came to know and care about. On the other, the players were abstractions, works perpetually in progress for the coaches to edit, improve, even transform. It was up to the coaches to reimagine the familiar thing they saw on film in a new light. This was one of the ways in which the sensibility of football coaches, who drew up plays for a living, had much in common with that of fine artists. Cézanne slashed the paintings that dissatisfied him. Giacometti gasped, swore furiously, and descended into melancholy or anguish as he painted James Lord’s portrait, often screaming with rage at the canvas and then scrubbing it and beginning anew. On film, the players were the coaches’ creations.

  The coaches’ (often harsh) way of talking about the players was so different from the (usually supportive and encouraging) way they talked to the players that there seemed to be hypocrisy. It took me a long time to understand how ingrained it was for the coaches to toggle between these binary perspectives of men on film and men in life. When I began to think of the players in dual terms, it all made sense. This wasn’t, in the end, so different from the way doctors spoke to other doctors about their patients, the way teachers conversed in the faculty lounge.

  It was likewise true that the coaches put everything of themselves into the games and, unlike the players, had no violent physical outlet. Listening to them through February and March, I realized that this was the time of year when all the frustrations of the season had to be purged so that everything could then recede, making way for optimism as the coaches began to look forward.

  Watching film with the coaches deepened the team game for me, showing me the crucial contributions made by players who were not as celebrated as playmakers like Revis and Cromartie were. All eleven men on the field were eligible for the coaches to comment on, and more often than not, the action on which success hinged was something I had overlooked. Once you knew what was supposed to happen, it was fascinating to watch Pettine slow the film down to capture the exact moment when the best-laid plans went astray because one player was slow to a gap or displayed poor footwork or because the play caller up in the coaching booth had foreseen a run and set the defense accordingly, and the offense had chosen to pass. The Jets special-teams coach Mike Westhoff was notorious for insisting after games that the kickoff returns he’d designed “should” have been touchdowns, would have gone for six had this one player just done what he was supposed to do. This was both understandable and amusing to other coaches because that was the truth of nearly every play for offense and defense alike.

  One Jets player was so rarely chastised by the coaches I came to think of him as the star of the Jets film dailies. This was the safety Jim Leonhard, or Little Jimmy Leonhard, as Ryan delighted in calling him. It was rare for any player other than a quarterback to learn more than his own positional responsibilities in the various calls. But Leonhard knew the full defensive playbook, with the result that from his free-safety position, he could see twenty-two intersecting dramas and either react or hold his water accordingly. “Nice job by Jimmy—good patience” was the kind of in-absentia praise he regularly received from the coaches.

  Leonhard was only five foot eight and was slow-footed by NFL defensive-back standards. Like Eric Smith, his partner at safety, Leonhard was white, and therefore an NFL defensive minority—which was freely commented upon within the team, most frequently by Leonhard himself. Besides his quick mind, he had going for him a chippy drive he used to prove that even at his size, he belonged in the league. Defensive football required understanding the most efficient way to close the distance between two moving points. Leonhard, whose wife was an atmospheric scientist, had superior ability to track both fast-moving men and balls in relation to himself—a neat football analogue to the Coriolis effect. This made him seem faster on film than he was. Leonhard informed this intuition for angles by immersing himself in football detail to the extent that he wrote himself a 119-page PowerPoint document on the Rex Ryan defense. This was, in effect, a literate defender’s lecture notes. There were comments on the intricacies of defensive-line stunting and shading; a glossary of coverage terms like “Connie,” “Cathy,” and “Thumbs”; and a series of reminders such as “We attack, not react,” and “Make calls with less moving parts at home because of crowd noise. You can get more complicated on the road with no crowd noise.” To plan his path to the quarterback during a safety blitz, Leonhard instructed himself to “set railroad tracks and never leave them.” On any blitz, it was crucial to keep in mind that when your target saw you nearing, he might step forward, so “no fly-bys.” Leonhard wrote it all down because, he said, “I want to be able to react without thinking.” I asked him if, during his three years with the Jets, he’d seen an offense try something he hadn’t encountered on a football field before. He thought about it—then: Not once, he said.

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p; Leonhard came from the tiny northern Wisconsin town of Tony, and, at twenty-eight, he still had the face of a kid who had stretched the truth of his age by a couple of years to qualify for that paper route. In 2011, Rex Ryan’s son Seth was on the squad at nearby Summit High School, and when Summit had a big game coming up, Ryan liked to joke within earshot of Leonhard about sending his boyish-looking safety over to help the team out. Only by NFL standards was Leonhard anything less than an amazing athlete. As a high-school baseball pitcher, he once struck out nineteen of twenty-one batters, and at the University of Wisconsin he won the football team’s slam-dunk championship. He’d become a scholarship player only as a senior at Wisconsin; by then he was well on his way to tying the Badgers’ all-time interceptions record. Yet he knew what was to follow: “At the Combine I just waved and walked on by. I know you ain’t drafting me!” Still, Leonhard made the Buffalo Bills in 2005 as an undrafted free agent and he impressed Ryan enough during his one year with the Ravens that afterward the coach recruited him to go with him to New York.

  In 2010, Leonhard had broken his leg in a freak practice collision right before the big New England game, which the Jets then lost, 45 to 3. That blowout score seemed incongruous, given that the Jets defeated the Patriots in their other regular-season game and would again in the playoffs. To the coaches, the explanation had much to do with the on-field confusion caused by Leonhard’s abrupt absence.

  In the meeting room, as they now watched Leonhard excel on the screen, the coaches talked of their anxiety about whether his mending leg would be ready by training camp. Not only did the team need him, but Leonhard would be a free agent after the season and could expect to sign a life-changing contract. The coaches wanted that for him. They liked and respected him, thought he deserved it, and maybe it was also that on a football field and on a film screen, the small, studious safety seemed to embody what coaches stood for. He was active testament to the value of what they did.

  The bulk of the off-season film-watching subject matter was divided between the ongoing search for a college or free-agent bitch kitty and the laborious reviewing of every single Jets defensive snap from the preceding 2010 season—the effort to get better as a unit. The defensive coaches did the latter not by watching the games straight through but by grouping together all the uses of a given play, looking at them in succession, and then moving on to the next call. So the film skipped around from game to game, creating narratives completely removed from a single game’s context. These sequences sometimes led to dramatic emotional fluctuations among the coaches as the calls worked or didn’t work. In a call named 3-2 Gibbs 51 Rat, safety Eric Smith hit the Patriots’ Wes Welker so hard that the slot receiver’s helmet decal exploded off the plastic and fluttered downward like a falling leaf, and the coaches erupted too. A play later, they laughed and laughed as Revis and another cornerback, Drew Coleman, forced a fumble against the Browns and then detoured by the nearby Cleveland sideline to encourage the Browns coach, their former leader Eric Mangini, to congratulate them. Then came a clip of 3-2 Gibbs 51 Rat where the call didn’t work so well, leading to a long gain for the Miami Dolphins, and everyone ricocheted into annoyance. A moment later, Jim O’Neil began commenting on something the safety had done, and he confused Eric Smith and Jim Leonhard, which led Carrier to say, “All you white boys look alike!” High spirits were restored. Then Tom Brady threw an interception, and Sutt said, “That’s why he’s a sixth-round draft choice!” and the movie couldn’t get any better.

  One purpose of the exercise was to judge how frequently a call could be made without adverse consequences. Max Blow—a call that sounded like the name of an indie rocker but merely referred to bringing as many as four nonconventional pass rushers, such as inside linebackers, and playing man coverage underneath with the support of two deep safeties—was, Pettine thought, a good situational concept that had been overexposed. Max Blow was a minor character who had been given too many scenes in the movie. In the film of games played later in the season, you could see that opponents were ready for Max Blow. “Sometimes we get too cute,” Pettine told everyone. “Too much whiteboard coaching instead of just letting our guys play.”

  So many things surprising to the layman were common knowledge at that conference table, and these details informed the discussions. The coaches knew that until recently, you hadn’t been able to trust the sprint times clocked at Penn State pro-tryout days because the school’s indoor facility was set on a slope, and trial runs were made downhill. (A college’s recruiting efforts were helped when its players were drafted.) They knew that fully a third of Ed Reed’s career interceptions for the Ravens came from jumping the same route, the speedo, which is a standard intermediate crossing pattern. “Ed,” Pettine explained, was “just out there laying in the weeds.” They even knew which opposing lineman had uncommonly large testicles. (The lineman was so proud of this he’d offered proof in the locker room at the Pro Bowl.)

  While the coaches watched and discussed the film, soul music played out of Pettine’s computer, everybody sipped beverages, DT ate barbecue-flavor sunflower seeds, and several of the coaches spat chewing tobacco into clear plastic bottles. Mike Smith had been dipping since his father had taken him on a fishing trip at age ten. Now Smitty was trying to quit, abetted by the many wagers his colleagues were making with him that he’d fail and by more stealthy Pettine-inflicted deterrents. Smitty would walk into his office, sit down at his computer, and discover that he had a new screen saver—an oral cancer victim’s grotesquely deformed mouth. But here now in the film room was Clyde Simmons, a former Eagles lineman, serving as a coaching intern with the Jets and contentedly enjoying some dip down at the end of the table. This put a cruel, contrary look in the coordinator’s eye:

  Pettine: “Clyde, you’re dipping down there! How is it?”

  Simmons: “Delicious! Flavorful! Minty!”

  All eyes turned to Smitty, whose wincing mumbles fulfilled their hopes.

  Another morning, Thurman looked across the meeting-room table and said to Simmons and Carrier, “Clyde, MC, I appreciate you hanging out with me last night when I was lonely.”

  “Hey, DT, any time,” said Carrier. “And if you ever need a kid or a dog…”

  A look of concern crossed DT’s face and he held up a hand. “All I need is a couple of hours and a cigar, but you don’t have to worry about me for any babysitting or dogsitting!”

  Divorced, with two grown daughters who lived in Texas, and in his middle fifties, Thurman remained the cornerback out on his own edge. When he had downtime in his office DT played endless games of computer solitaire (“It allows me to compete”) and was the one coach who followed soap operas (“I like that everybody’s always stirring up some shit”). DT once told me that the only time he had ever given in to coaching peer pressure was trying coffee—which did nothing for him. Instead, he had a desk stash of the Los Angeles candy maker See’s peanut brittle and butterscotch lollipops, which he’d liked since childhood and imported from California. At the end of a film review, some of the other coaches planned an early-morning workout for the next day. They invited DT to join them, but per usual, he declined. “You guys keep at it! I want nothing to do with that. For a fifty-five-year-old man, I’m looking fine! Just maintaining. And come summer, you know I’ll have my four-pack back!”

  After the meetings, the coaches went back to their respective offices and watched more film on their own. At this point, I would sometimes look in on the offensive coaches, who had all been doing the same thing—watching film. One day Bill Callahan—who lived for detail, who spent his days out on the practice field yelling, “One more time,” who was never satisfied—was evaluating the entire Jets career of his free-agent right tackle Wayne Hunter. Suddenly Callahan came upon a play during a 2009 game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers that sent the normally laconic coach somewhere toward ecstasy. In the two seasons since the play had taken place, there had been many thousands of game and practice snaps, so now it was as thoug
h Callahan were seeing the call fresh. It was a running play known as 20 Mike Draw designed to give the defense the impression that the Jets were passing. Hunter sold the pass by luring the defensive end upfield with three kick steps back and a display of the outside arm that he’d normally use for pass blocking. Then, when the Tampa end took the bait and came upfield at full speed, Hunter clubbed him farther along “like an Olympic shot-putter!” noted Callahan as the Jets running back sailed cleanly by in the opposite direction. The Tampa end recognized what was up and belatedly tried to retrace his steps, whereupon Hunter finished him off, cutting him to the ground. All of it was done so well that Callahan could not think of a single complaint with the technique. That never happened. But there it was—Callahan said he had to admit it, Hunter had been perfect. He seemed stunned. Shaking his head, Callahan said, “That club and cut. It was a thing of beauty.”

  It was public yet private perfection. Millions of people had watched the play, but it was likely that all had missed what to Callahan was most special about it. Callahan had curatorial instincts, and he wrote down the details in a journal he kept. Now the play was preserved in some tiny form for posterity. If nowhere else, it was forever noted in Callahan’s hand that on 20 Mike Draw, in a 26–3 victory over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Wayne Hunter had been perfect. “The footwork,” said Callahan, his tone of voice still reverent, “was extraordinary.”

  Callahan thought of coaching as a technical collaboration, and his experience with Hunter the previous year had been unusually satisfying to him. Hunter was one of the increasing numbers of players of Polynesian descent playing in the NFL. He had grown up on the Hawaiian island of Oahu: “Rough neighborhoods, Bounty Hunter neighborhoods where the coconut trees don’t sway” was how Hunter described them. Hunter’s mother held two full-time jobs. “My father was a druggie schizophrenic couch potato who smoked weed. My mom worked and left us with him. I was running around the neighborhood as a five-, six-, seven-, eight-, nine-year-old until ten o’clock at night.” The family was so poor that Hunter stuffed plastic bags inside his Converse All Stars, lining them to make them last longer. After his mother left his father, she moved with her children to Waikiki, and Hunter began playing football. He was very large and yet remarkably agile, and he did well. He was also a more than capable student. At first he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, but, feeling homesick, Hunter transferred to the University of Hawaii. The Seattle Seahawks drafted him in the third round of the 2003 draft, and Hunter was a reserve on the team for three years. During that time, he was charged with domestic violence. Then he and his brother were involved in a bar fight, and “Seattle let me go.”