Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  Five

  THE SOUND OF SILENCE

  I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

  The lockout meant that with the draft over, the usual rhythm and texture of a football off-season was disrupted. A strange time felt stranger to many of the Jets coaches and front-office people because of the way the draft had ended. Large disappointments came with the job; football people were used to overcoming far bigger setbacks than the drafting of Scotty McKnight. They did so by pointing their emotions toward the next crucial date on the calendar. In a normal year, right after the draft, teams attempted to sign the desirable rookies who had not been chosen. But now, at the beginning of May, the clocks had been indefinitely stopped, and teams were forbidden to contact any player. And so, with Ryan away for a few days speaking about his book, all around the quiet Jets facility, people dwelled on the drafting of Mark Sanchez’s best friend.

  “It was out of the blue,” Joey Clinkscales said, straining so hard to be diplomatic that inadvertently he wasn’t. “But tons of free agents make it. He could be one.” Downstairs in his office, the receivers coach Henry Ellard was watching McKnight’s University of Colorado tape for the first time. “Needs a lot of work,” he said in his quiet, matter-of-fact way. Schottenheimer, the offensive coordinator, had never seen McKnight play either, but he’d “heard all about him from Mark!” Schottenheimer himself would have made a different choice, but he was a deeply religious Christian, and one of the qualities his faith had given him was the capacity to move on from what angered or hurt him. Schotty was, like Ryan, the son of a respected professional football coach. He knew this was an unstable, cutthroat profession, and he understood the reassurance a coach or a young quarterback might feel at having beside him someone of unquestioned devotion.

  One day, not long after Ryan returned to the facility, I was having lunch by myself, something people rarely did in the cafeteria, when I heard a concerned voice: “What are you doing eating alone?” It was Ryan. Down he sat and proceeded to tell me about his son Seth’s recent junior-varsity high-school baseball exploits in such a way that I felt instantly absorbed by the story, invested in whether or not Seth would soon be called up to the varsity. This was a common experience when Ryan talked about his son; Sanchez and other Jets players were always turning up at Seth’s games. Ryan’s eyes were clear blue, his teeth porcelain tiles, his spirits as infectious as ever, and as he spoke I thought of what a great companion he was, the adult version of the sort of kid you always wanted to be with because he could make anything involving. This was such a helpful quality in somebody who coached a game. He offered the kind of interaction most people rarely experienced in adulthood. Later, as I was driving home, thinking about Ryan’s fear that I was lonely, it occurred to me that Ryan enjoyed taking care of people and that one reason he was drawn to young football players, so many of whom came from broken families, and drawn to Jeff Weeks, must be that the players and Weeks needed him. They all were acceptable objects of Ryan’s great inclusive sympathy.

  The person who took the Scotty McKnight draft hardest might have been Pettine. Winning was everything to the defensive coordinator, and he didn’t see how choosing McKnight had made any sense when draft-grade players were still available. The incident was to him a betrayal of football ethics. What did turning a draft choice into a favor for one player say to the scouts and the other players? Why wasn’t McKnight simply brought in as a free agent, which to Pettine’s thinking would have been favor enough? Pettine worried that it all signaled Ryan had become “day-to-day less connected” with the morale of his staff, that his personal whims were trumping what was best for the group. It bothered Pettine to see people like Weeks and McKnight receiving prestigious NFL positions from Ryan for reasons other than pure ability, reasons of personal connection. Becoming an NFL draft choice was an honor, something Nick Bellore had earned and now would never experience. (It would also cost Bellore financially; seventh-round draft choices typically received a signing bonus of $35,000 to $40,000. Undrafted free agents typically got less than $10,000.) Pettine knew that he himself had worked his way up under Ryan, had busted his ass to earn his place in the NFL, but others thought of him first as a Ryan protégé. Ryan’s actions reflected on Pettine. In darker moments, Pettine feared that he and Ryan, who’d once been as close as siblings, who now had everything they used to dream of together in Baltimore, suddenly no longer shared the same football values. The defensive coordinator would think, in those moments, that the time was approaching for him to leave Ryan, to go somewhere else and show how much he knew about football, prove that he was his own guy.

  One afternoon, Tannenbaum and I were talking about the head coach, how lovable he was and how that helped him get away with just about anything. Like Scotty McKnight, I said. “Not our finest moment as an organization,” Tannenbaum admitted. I never knew Tannenbaum not to take credit for a mistake. “You try to con people, they think you’re full of shit,” he told me once. The McKnight moment had been very stressful, he said, but he was already past it. These things happened pretty frequently in football, and you couldn’t allow a low seventh-round draft choice more significance than it deserved. You had to move on, get the next more important decision right. In the end, everybody in football knew that the talent-level difference between a seventh-round draft choice and a free agent was so negligible as to be nearly arbitrary. I got the feeling, however, that Ryan wasn’t going to be drafting anybody by himself again anytime soon.

  The real problem at hand, so far as Tannenbaum was concerned, was the lockout. Tannenbaum hated uncertainty almost as much as he hated vacation. He had a surging physical need to be working, to be improving. He put himself out there in such an extreme way that I worried about how he would stand it if the team didn’t do well. Even on desultory Wednesdays during these lockout weeks, he’d look at his watch, discover it was 6:40, and think, Where did my day go? Tannenbaum was scheduled to leave soon for a bicycle trip in France with his wife, Michelle, whom he loved so much that he’d agreed to join her for biking in France. Tannenbaum didn’t bike. But should the lockout suddenly end, he’d instructed Michelle to have ready the names of the top three people she’d like to replace him for France. In other words, she should create a vacation depth chart.

  The lockout wore on everyone. The staff members were task-oriented men of action who were now marooned, isolated, wan, and restless, just trying to push through. They were used to a regimented life. Days when they had to figure out what to do with their time were oppressive. Inertia was the abyss. Jim O’Neil, speaking for just about everyone, said, “I start to get antsy if I’m lingering.” So they created projects. The defensive coaches watched film of every defensive play inside their own twenty-yard line—the red zone—in an attempt to make themselves “less vanilla down there,” as Pettine put it. O’Neil was so motivated to work that with his wife, Stacy, soon to have their second child, he was planning to use his time at home after the birth of the baby to draw up every common passing route used against all the new red-zone coverages the Jets were considering.

  Schottenheimer was feeling just as disoriented by the limbo of lockout. “We’re such type-A personalities,” he marveled. “Look at us! We’re all over the place!” Nobody put in more hours “separated from real life” than Schotty. Seven months a year, he thought of his wife, Gemmi, as a single parent. Through most of Schotty’s childhood, his father, Marty, had been an NFL head coach, first in Cleveland and then in Kansas City. Growing up in that kind of household, Schotty became more interested in thinking about football than in playing it. He led his Kansas high-school team to a state title and began his college career as a quarterback at the University of Kansas, but, following advice received from Terry Bradway, then with the Chiefs, Schotty transferred to be a backup at Florida so he could learn a pro-style offense from the Gators’ innova
tive head coach Steve Spurrier. Schotty’s college triumphs came while he was wearing a visor and holding a clipboard. Since his first NFL job, as an offensive assistant with the Rams, under Dick Vermeil, Schotty had been, he said, “always driven to be known as myself, not as Marty Schottenheimer’s son. I was driven to be my own person.”

  The lockout also gave the football men time for something rare in their world, reflection on the game itself. As the defensive coaches workshopped the assorted new red-zone coverage ideas, Pettine and DT smiled at each other. They were having the same Ravens memory. “Okay,” Pettine said. “We’re playing New Orleans, and Ray Lewis calls Red (2) Drop, which means three pass rushers. But he doesn’t call the first part, which says who drops and who rushes. So everybody but Ray drops. Ray sees this and he says, ‘What the hell!’ and he drops too. Looked like recreation hour in a prison yard. We nearly got a pick out of it too! So on Monday Night Football, Ron Jaworski shows it and says, ‘Eleven-man drop! Rex Ryan is a genius!’ Rex says, ‘Don’t tell anybody!’ Out in Cincinnati, the Bengals begin to practice it and [head coach] Marvin Lewis sees and he yells, ‘You dumbasses! It was a mistake!’ ”

  There was a limitless number of things coaches could conceive for eleven players to do, extensive possibilities in the red zone alone. In this way, the coaches’ current red-zone investigations continually led them to consider perhaps the central NFL strategic dilemma. You could polish a few calls to perfection, as Vince Lombardi’s champion Green Bay Packers had done in the 1960s, most notably with their here-it-comes-try-to-stop-it power sweep. Or you could seek to create a more extensive catalog of looks tailored to counter the particular playing style of every opponent. That kind of opponent-specific game plan, however, risked that the players wouldn’t know the newer material well enough. For Ryan, Pettine, and Schottenheimer, part of the joy of coaching was mastering each opponent and customizing game plans accordingly, and they all talked of how hard it was for them to limit the volume of fresh calls, to locate the fine balance.

  This spring the coaches had the benefit of some expert companionship to help them think through the football problem sets they were dreaming up for themselves. Every year during May and June, a series of visitors came to facilities across the NFL to talk football with the offensive and defensive coaches. Some of the visitors were college coaches, out to observe and learn, and others were professionals, eager to informally exchange ideas. During the lockout, the Jets welcomed a larger number of these guests than usual, many of them hired consultants. Call volume was a recurrent theme in their conversations. One such visitor was the retired defensive-backs specialist Steve Shafer, who’d been with the Ravens in 2000 when they won the Super Bowl and set a record for least points allowed in a season. Shafer was sharp-eyed and weathered from years of standing on fields in the sun. Pettine showed Shafer film of the Jets defense so Shafer could offer commentary. Throughout, Shafer kept expressing amazement at the skills of Antonio Cromartie and Darrelle Revis. “Revis is our best practice player,” Pettine told him. “Catch a pass on Revis, you don’t want to line up on him again.”

  “I’d come out of retirement if I could coach those two corners!” Shafer exclaimed.

  “It’s what keeps DT young,” Sutton said.

  After he’d seen the film, Shafer said that his advice was to resist the urge to overcomplicate things. Pointing toward Ryan’s office and smiling, he said, “The guy I used to have to calm down was the big boy over there. He wanted to reinvent the wheel every week.” Ryan walked in a moment later, and Pettine, smiling mischievously, greeted him and said, “You’ve just been accused of trying to reinvent the wheel every week!”

  “I’m selling simple,” Shafer said, embarrassed. But Ryan was unbothered. “KILL philosophy!” he said easily. “ ‘Keep it likable and learnable.’ ”

  Shafer now framed the discussion in terms of boredom. In his time, the Ravens had been a defensive version of Lombardi’s Packers. The Ravens relied on a few calls practiced to perfection. In the red zone, the Ravens for years relentlessly used but a single call. Eventually the call became so familiar that the players grew blasé about that most threatening defensive situation, and so the Ravens coaches added another look, not so much for opponents as for the Ravens themselves.

  During the lockout, Tom Moore was commuting up to the facility from retirement in Hilton Head to serve as a Jets off-season offensive consultant. Sutton said Moore had told him the Colts maintained similar concerns about overfamiliarity while he’d coordinated the Colts offense during all those years with Peyton Manning. The Colts ran a very limited variety of plays, their actual choice dependent on Manning’s peerless ability to read the defense at the line of scrimmage and audible the right call. The Colts coaching staff hated it when Manning went to the Pro Bowl and debriefed all the coaches from other teams that he met there, because then he’d return to Indianapolis bursting with fresh plays he wanted to try out. “Let’s just stick with what we do,” the Colts coaches would implore. Once in a while, Manning would throw a low-percentage deep route when a six-yard out was open, and the coaches would chide him, “Peyton, you’re bored.”

  “It’s a game of repetition,” said Sutt.

  “That’s it,” DT agreed. “Getting a few things perfect.”

  “Well,” said Shafer. “Now I can go back to California and say that in my time I had it right.”

  “We appreciate you, Coach,” DT told him.

  After Shafer left, the coaches affirmed their respect for him as an excellent coach but noted that his simple approach wouldn’t work for the Jets defense, which relied on many different options for each player within the scheme. Where Patrick Willis, the Pro Bowl 49ers linebacker, played the same role on every play, Bart Scott had myriad tasks depending on the situation. The Jets defense was the equivalent of the Colts or Patriots offense: a few fundamental features that were, as Pettine would say, “dressed up differently every week.”

  Meanwhile, the former Super Bowl–winning head coach Jon Gruden had come from Florida to visit the Jets offense. Bill Callahan, who coached for years with the fiery Gruden, had asked Ryan “how honest” Gruden should be with his fellow Jets offensive coaches. “Very,” said Ryan. So Gruden was laying into them for overcomplicating their scheme. One problem Gruden cited with having so many calls was that so much “verbiage” was required just to say them. The protracted calls, said Gruden, absorbed valuable pre-snap seconds, sapped drive momentum, allowed time for defensive adjustments, and confused your own players, leading to penalties and blown assignments. “Justify it,” Gruden kept saying to Schottenheimer, not quietly. Gruden moved from the snap count to the Jets’ ragged offensive red-zone performance, which Gruden blamed on the team practicing it only on Fridays. The traditional NFL players’ drinking night is Thursday. “I’d rather stick my head in a car door and slam it than practice red-zone only on Friday,” Gruden yelled at the coaches. Then it was on to “How come the Jets screen game sucks so bad?” The Jets defensive coaches, whose first instinct on every day but game day was to be adversarial with the Jets offense, received news of this session with satisfaction.

  “Oh, he shredded us!” Callahan told me cheerfully after Gruden’s visit. “Which is what you want. Rex talks about having skin like an armadillo, not a deer. We took it all to heart.” Although Gruden was now a broadcaster, Callahan said his friend still awakened at four every morning to study the game with the same obsessive rigor he’d been known for as a coach. Now it was as though he were putting together a game plan for the whole league. That level of attention to detail, said Callahan, was the best lesson anyone could draw from Gruden. Callahan agreed with Gruden that the Jets calls had to be delivered faster. “There’s more communication in football than any other sport,” he said. “You have twenty-five to forty seconds to get a play off. And that’s on a normal clock, not in hurry-up. It’s intense, it’s rapid, it’s flying ten thousand miles an hour.” Callahan was speaking very quickly now. “Watch the backsid
e end! Heads-up for this pressure! What’s the sub package? Personnel substitutions! Get him in. Get him out. Up in the coaching box they’re relaying the fronts. It’s thrilling. A gas. When it flows, it’s incredible. When you put together a plan based on all these situations and your players see you’ve anticipated it all, you can see that giving them confidence. You predicted it, and now they’re making it happen. That’s pretty cool.”

  What Tom Moore had said to Sutton interested me, and I sought Moore out and asked how to square a Jets defense full of hybrid players who performed numerous roles cooked up for them by the defensive coaches with all the criticism of Schottenheimer and the offense’s apparently similar impulses. Moore had white hair, a craggy face with recessed owl’s eyes, and a deep, resonant way of speaking. Moore said he agreed with those coaches who were leery of trying to give a team too many options to draw from, but he pointed out that complexity was relative. Ryan’s defensive system had an array of packages, yes, but, he said, “It’s all simple to him and he can make it simple to his players, so they can still play fast. You get to the airport faster if you know exactly how to get there. It’s the same with blitzing.”

  Then I looked in on Matt Cavanaugh, the Jets quarterbacks coach. Cavanaugh had been the Ravens offensive coordinator when they won the 2001 Super Bowl. He’d offered to show me how he made the quarterbacks’ play-calling wristbands that were, in effect, the set list containing all the calls in a given game plan. Cavanaugh said that to contain the seventy-five plays the offense wanted available, he created three paper panels each containing twenty-five plays, numbered one to seventy-five. The three pages were then shrunk to size, laminated, and attached with a binding flap to the wristband proper. The call would come in from Schottenheimer first with the personnel group—twelve meant one back, two tight ends—and then the play number, say twenty-seven. The quarterback would open the flap, look down at the second play on the second panel, and see Deuce Right, Scat Right, Seahawk, H-Sneak—a pass call. Everything was written to go right, so if Schottenheimer wanted that same play run to the left, he’d say, “Twenty-seven flip it.” I found all the words confusing. Cavanaugh told me not to worry. “Half our guys don’t know what it means.”