Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  Maybe Pettine. A scout slipped Ryan a cookie. “Enabler!” the coordinator cried. Chips and salsa were served.

  Ryan: “Yesss!”

  Pettine: “Rex, you better go change your shirt.”

  Whenever the moment called for a digression, Ryan was always there to provide it. He recalled his early days coaching in the impoverished program at New Mexico Highlands University, where he mowed the field himself and then burned yard stripes in with gasoline because paint was too expensive. During discussion of Sam Acho, Ryan engaged in imagining and subsequently handicapping a spelling contest pitting the well-read Texas linebacker against Eric Smith, the Jets safety who had been recruited by both Harvard and Yale. The coach would go with Acho, he said, with compelling logic, because Acho was more difficult to spell.

  One afternoon, Ryan was praising Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town” as American lyric poetry, and Clinkscales objected: “Can you fill in some of us guys with a darker complexion on what you’re talking about?”

  “Hey!” said Ryan. “Bruce is for everybody.”

  Pretty clearly, so was football. In a largely black game (two-thirds of all NFL players), long gone were the days when teams believed black men didn’t have the brains to play quarterback, safety, or center—“The thinking man’s positions,” as DT called them. It still pissed DT off that when he’d played for the Cowboys, it had taken injuries to three white safeties before the team had let him try the position. Prejudice was now so much the enemy of good drafting that the scouts scoured their souls for bias. Many said they struggled not to overrate effort, the try-hard guys. Others confessed soft spots for small-school linemen, offensive linemen who were converted from defensive linemen, players from the South, and even players who were raised by their grandmothers (esteemed for their old-school values). The scout Michael Davis said, “I like the underdog. But I have to fight liking the underdog too much.”

  Sitting in the unvarying fluorescence of the draft room, a person lost track of the days, the sense of connection to anything but the matter at hand. Toward the end of the linebacker discussion, Nick Bellore’s and Jeff Tarpinian’s names came up. Seen on the video screen, Bellore had a huge head; he looked friendly and round. He’d played for the Central Michigan Chippewas, a second-tier program, but no player in college football had accumulated more tackles. Jeff Bauer, the Iowa-based scout, was all for Tarpinian, an Iowa linebacker Pettine had met out at the Iowa pro day. During that visit, Pettine put Tarpinian up at a blackboard and spent half an hour quizzing him about techniques, formations, coverages, and flow. Tarpinian hadn’t missed a question. But Tarpinian was undersized and had suffered several college injuries. Tannenbaum shook his head: “Everybody’ll fall in love with him and then he’ll just get hurt.” Either one of those two players, it was agreed, might make an excellent seventh-round choice.

  The seventh and final round was traditionally the moment when those in the risk-averse process gave way to gold speculation. Locating an impact player so late in the draft was rare. As an incentive to find one, and following NFL tradition, each Jets scout could designate a favorite unheralded collegian as his “face” or “sticker player.” Should that player be drafted by the Jets, the scout who’d supported him would receive a bonus.

  Reviewing the cornerbacks took the most time. Across the league in 2011, corners were the most drafted players (thirty-nine). The reason was simple: Corners are football’s best athletes. Wide receivers are sprinters who know their destination, and corners must react and keep up. And now what was this there on the video screen, some corner going for a retro look? No! Ryan had found DT’s draft card and slipped it in with the others. “Shit,” DT said. “If I was coming out today, I’d be so rich I wouldn’t know any of you!”

  Sometimes during the conversations, interest in a player achieved sudden momentum, as happened with Louisville corner Johnny Patrick. On film he was a stunning athlete—he possessed wonderful body control, tracked pass receivers as though there were a GPS in his helmet—until the ball arrived, at which point Patrick at times seemed to lack the will to make plays. But Pettine believed Patrick could be the Wilkerson of the secondary. “Look,” he said to a long line of skeptical faces. “Revis is so much the exception. With corners, you have to tolerate more. Most corners you’ll have issues with.” Now Ryan, always in search of objects on which to shine his enthusiasm, discovered he completely loved the kid. Okay, Patrick didn’t play like a Jet, but neither did Cro. For such bijous you made exceptions. Tannenbaum was warming to Patrick as well. The team had saved a few of their thirty visiting slots for just such an occurrence. Tannenbaum and Ryan decided to bring Patrick in to the facility. Ryan went bounding out of the room to set up the visit himself. When he returned, the coach was asked if his wife had ordered new guest-room furniture for Johnny Patrick’s stay. “Hell,” said Clinkscales. “By now Patrick’s got a wing in the Tannenbaum house!”

  There was an observer effect to the draft—a midstream adjustment of the value of one player meant shifting the room’s assessment of other players. Patrick’s improving profile raised that of Julian Posey of Ohio University. Posey was a smart corner who’d acted as both on-field tutor and disciplinarian for the rest of his college secondary, praiseworthy qualities Patrick lacked. Alas, Posey had not played well in the game against Ohio State, Ohio University’s only elite opponent. But Posey would be brought in too. And Tarpinian.

  On to safeties the group went, and UCLA’s Rahim Moore elicited pushback from USC grads DT and Carrier. “That Southern Cal, UCLA thing, that’s real to them,” said Michael Davis. “They mean it. UCLA’s the other side—no toughness.” Later DT, unsmiling, said, “USC men are tougher and the women are more beautiful.” If the Jets drafted a UCLA defensive player, said DT, “He’ll have to prove himself to me.”

  No such obligations for Jaiquawn Jarrett. The Temple safety was lauded as “a hired killer” who would “knock your face in! Pow!” Jarrett got so much love that suddenly the room quieted, the way it did when Jimmy Smith’s name had come up the day before. Would he still be there in the third round at pick ninety-four?

  On Wednesday, six days in and still eight days before the draft, DT was breaking out the sunflower seeds at eight in the morning. At ten, Johnny Patrick arrived for his interview. He had sweaty palms, seemed fragile. He’d lived with his father since his mother had told him, when he was twelve, that she couldn’t “deal with” him.

  Julian Posey, by contrast, was friendly and enthusiastic, and he wore a bright green-and-white checked shirt, the only visiting player to think to dress in the Jets colors. His mother was an HIV prevention director in Cincinnati; she’d worked for the Urban League and the State of Ohio. Posey seemed to share that caring part of her nature. In response to Tannenbaum’s question about a recent act of generosity, Posey said he had just the day before given away his lunch to a hungry person at the bus station. What did he like about playing cornerback? “I like the comfort of space,” he said.

  By now various people in the draft room were firmly attached to certain players. Tannenbaum had, of course, been taking note of all these crushes. He referred to Michael Davis as “Kenrick Ellis’s legal guardian, Mr. Mike.” With a gimlet eye, the GM watched Pettine exhale as the crucial strength-and-conditioning report yielded the words “Wilkerson: 314 pounds of solid muscle.” When Posey was described as “a good kid,” I thought, “Yes, but he’s so much more!” and looked over to find Tannenbaum’s gaze fastened on me.

  At 6:58 the next morning, with a rolling boatman’s walk, Mike Westhoff approached the draft room to make his three-hour case for special teams. The gait was due to a long titanium rod surgically inserted in Westhoff’s left leg to replace a cancer-riven femur—one more detail for a figure straight out of a Carl Hiaasen novel. Another was that Westy spent vacations off the Florida coast hunting sharks, his favorite animal. Accompanying him into the meeting was his deputy, Ben Kotwica, a former Army football captain and Apache c
ombat-helicopter pilot who had mastered the West Point swivel that allows a young officer to confidently lead in one moment and be crisply subordinate in the next.

  Westhoff was a diva who played small clubs, a grumping, growling peacock with a gift for crusty, old-salt agitation that wore on the busy men who ran the team. “Upstairs,” he said a little proudly, “they don’t like to see me!” Every man who’d worked a few NFL drafts remembered the present Pro Bowlers he’d touted who had been passed over by the higher-ups. Westhoff remembered them like fresh grudges. He still frequently lamented the Jets’ 2002 decision, against his advice, to select Bryan Thomas even though the peerless safety Ed Reed was still there for the taking. (Westy could be fuzzier on the matter of his less successful recommendations.) And while he was strident at times, as special-teams coach, Westy knew that not holding back was his job, and upstairs knew it too. Year after year, they found themselves conceding that the man only wanted to save them from themselves—and he could. Westy was the voice of the easily overlooked, the football dispossessed, and any year the Jets didn’t draft players who could be special-teams mainstays, there would be field-position consequences all season long.

  Coaching football excited Westy because it was the only sport where you could orchestrate the event as it happened. “Me, as a coach, I take total ownership,” he said. “I believe, as a metaphor, I won it or I lost it. Intellectually I know all of us New York Jets do it, but that’s how I have to think about it. I want everyone who plays for me to feel that way. I tell them the defensive guys missed the bus; the offensive guys, they ate bad fish and got sick. It’s up to us.” He said he’d been formed as a person during the years he’d spent in the Pennsylvania steel mills as a teenager, working with grown men, standing over swimming pools of molten metal. “I learned the importance of every job,” he said of the mill. “No job was too small.” As a coach, he said his favorite players were the blue-collar, no-job-is-too-small athletes at the bottom of the NFL pay scale—“Not the guy everybody knows is a hell of a player. I get to give them an opportunity.”

  Now, taking his place at the draft table and speaking in staccato beats of snare, he began the meeting with a lengthy policy preamble during which he argued, “I believe you get beat with dumb guys.” About kickoffs and punt returns, his opinion was “I think they should all be touchdowns!” Then he said of Jeff Tarpinian, “I’m lying across the table for him.” Somebody began reading back the Tarpinian medical report, and Westhoff, who’d survived an aggressive cancer, waved the report off. “Doctors! Don’t let ’em scare you. I’m still here.”

  The man wanted smart safeties and smart linebackers, the versatile position players suited to running beneath a soaring football and performing the unique open-field special-teams tasks. (The intelligence of these players was of crucial importance, because in addition to being on special teams, these players were reserves, had to know the defensive calls despite few practice reps.) Westy repeatedly took off his glasses and put them on again for emphasis as he praised Nick Bellore, who’d impressed the old master by suiting up and playing right after oral surgery: “Football player!” Another linebacker, USC’s Malcolm Smith—the brother of Steve Smith, the former Giants receiver—had been, Westhoff said, a problem for him to resolve. Initially, Westhoff had found the young Smith too quiet and shy—not what you want in a linebacker. “But I showed him some stuff. He got into it. I decided, I’ll take this guy! Soon as I thought it, he changed. Smiled. Got excited. I don’t know.”

  Then he brought up Akeem Ayers. “I’ll be shocked if this guy makes it,” he volunteered, before describing how docile Ayers had been during a drill at the Combine. “Is this a guy we’d consider with the thirtieth pick?” he wanted to know. Tannenbaum confirmed the possibility. Disbelief crossed Westhoff’s face. He got to his feet. “I’m gonna take a shower,” he said. Then he thought better of it and sat down again. “He’s not a demon,” he said of Ayers. “Thirty years ago I was on the field for that drill. You guys think of me as an old guy. I was on the field.” After a long silence, the group moved on to Jarrett. “My number-one-rated guy of anybody,” Westhoff said.

  “Join the party!” Tannenbaum told him.

  “I’m getting out of the shower!” said Westhoff.

  Three days before the draft, the personnel men met with Ryan and Tannenbaum in Tannenbaum’s office to review the board. Outside the room, Jets employees were checking in with many dozens of players, confirming telephone numbers so on draft night, right before making a choice, the team could check in with those they intended to select to be sure all was well. “What if he gets into an accident the night before the draft?” explained Clinkscales. In the office, the men discussed the bilious feeling a team that drafts late can experience as it prepares to take somebody twenty-nine teams have just passed on. So Ryan told how, in 1971, the Michigan lineman Dan Dierdorf “kept falling and falling.” Cardinals owner Bill Bidwill wanted to know what was wrong with Dierdorf, and since nobody could think of anything, the team drafted the future Hall of Fame tackle. As the conversation continued, it doubled back on itself, and suddenly they were finding unsung worth in every player. Ryan said, “This is when you realize we’ll be lucky to get anybody.” He ordered a large whipped cream with a little coffee from Starbucks. “The diet is off,” he declared. “I’m fat and I have to live with it.”

  Tannenbaum, Ryan’s defender even against Ryan, averred: “Husky!”

  Then they were betting milkshakes on how good a pro Ryan Kerrigan would be, which reminded Ryan that in 2009, similar terms had been placed on Sanchez. Sanchez had been to the playoffs twice in his first two years. Someone had a milkshake coming to him. Who could it be? “I like Sanchez!” said Ryan smacking his lips, whereupon Tannenbaum gently steered him back to the main course. “Jarrett or Patrick?” he asked.

  The relentless, never-ending thoroughness of football men, I loved. To them, an additional hour was never superfluous, one more trip through the film never unnecessary. In the end, the slates might still remain mostly blank, but they were chalk-dusted with informed hope.

  Two days before the draft, yet another meeting of the coaches, pro-personnel people, and scouts began. The offensive and defensive lists had been combined and sorted. Boise State receiver Titus Young had sold them all on his ability. Yet many in the room were opposed to the idea of using the second-round draft pick Young would probably require on a receiver because receivers rarely touched the ball for more than a few plays in a game. Which receivers would last to the middle rounds? They hoped for Denarius Moore or Texas Christian’s Jeremy Kerley, whom Brian Schottenheimer thought had the sort of zippy movement that would yield big plays out of the slot.

  By now the investigation phase was over, and critical theory had given way to the poetry of praise, all of them strenuous in working up odes to those they’d discovered in some hinterland or whom they hoped to coach. “Okay!” said Tannenbaum, shaking his head. “So Titus Young’s better than Percy Harvin and Jeremy Kerley’s better than Santonio Holmes?” This, I suspected, was the true nature of these men, one so often suppressed. They played hard to get but yearned to fall madly and deeply. Despite all the meetings, when they talked about the short-area foot speed and bending ability of a three-hundred-pound lineman, there remained incredulity and reverence in their tones.

  Although some days the meetings lasted fifteen hours, nobody ever drowsed or seemed particularly enervated; there was too much pressure. True, throughout all the many long meetings, Jeff Weeks said nothing, and when, by mistake, he managed to tilt his chair so far back he banged into the wall switch and sent the video screen plunging noisily from the ceiling, it was Ryan who blushed the deepest as he snapped, “Sit on the front of your chair and get into it.” In moments like these, I always thought of Ryan as football’s Samuel Johnson, the ursine dean of Augustan London who routinely clawed at his old student David Garrick but permitted nobody else the privilege.

  Later, in Tannenbaum’s office, Ry
an and a few others volleyed their preferences back and forth, a process that made Ryan wistful as he considered all the players he’d never get the chance to coach. When Nate Solder lost a head-to-head rankings battle with the Missouri pass rusher Aldon Smith, Ryan looked so sad about losing the big Colorado offensive tackle, Tannenbaum offered to buy him “an emergency Frappuccino.” Ryan cheered up at the thought of Mark Ingram, the Alabama running back, suited up in hunter green and white but then was cast down afresh when Wilkerson’s name arose. “Gone,” Ryan said sadly. “No chance. Gone.”

  The fallback strategy of forsaking the first round altogether, trading down, and taking Titus Young meant yielding all hope of drafting Jimmy Smith, which, in turn, meant they’d need a cornerback opposite Revis. Tannenbaum, keeper of the salary-cap keys, said in that event Ryan could then try to re-sign Antonio Cromartie. “Fuck it, I’m in!” Ryan said. Bradway took the opportunity to press for drafting a reserve quarterback. Sanchez’s backup last year had been Mark Brunell, who would be forty-one years old soon but was regarded by Sanchez as a kind of football big brother. Keeping a less-than-ideal understudy because Sanchez liked him bothered Bradway, who joked that the Jets better not draft Scotty McKnight, a short, slow, but sure-handed Colorado receiver who was not on the Jets draft board. McKnight had great college stats, but in pro football, even a superb numerical past didn’t mean so much when your raw skills didn’t project. Yet McKnight did have something of intangible value. This was a game where the term “the quarterback’s favorite receiver” spoke to the mysteries of connection. McKnight was Mark Sanchez’s best childhood friend.