Outside the facility walls, football men tended to close ranks and rarely criticized one another unless they took a network analyst’s position. In the meeting rooms, between coaches, however, they were merciless. The league to them was a big family, and everybody talked smack about his cousins.
Don “Wink” Martindale, a former Ryan colleague from the University of Cincinnati, came to the facility. He was there to brief the defensive coaches on the AFC Western Division, whose four teams, Denver, Kansas City, San Diego, and Oakland, would all be on the Jets schedule. Martindale had been the Denver defensive coordinator but he’d been let go after the season. Here, half a year later, he talked openly about how upset he remained with his former boss Josh McDaniels, who was thirteen years younger than Martindale and had treated him, Martindale felt, like chattel. That his pride was still tender, Martindale recognized, even as he kept returning (apologetically) to the subject of the wrong he’d been done: “Take a deep breath. It’s over!… I appreciate you guys letting me vent. My wife’s tired of it, my dog’s sick of it.” Despite everything, Martindale had made impressive use of his time off from coaching. He’d lost dozens of pounds and radiated good health.
Martindale hadn’t watched tape in six months and was eager to do so. Getting down to the crux of things, he told the coaches about players who were better than they knew (like the Denver linebacker Joe Mays) and worse (like Matt Cassel, the Kansas City quarterback, who, Martindale said, “couldn’t hit Black Beauty in a field of white mice”). The Chiefs, he thought, weren’t yet sold on Cassel, just as he doubted the Jets were completely convinced by Mark Sanchez. Martindale was a good football man, and one of his virtues was his ability to elicit trenchant commentary from other people. The conversation continued in a similar key as the coaches moved around the league, with everyone now contributing. The Bengals aging quarterback Carson Palmer was “a bee who’s lost his stinger,” while Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo excelled except under “hot” conditions late in close games, when he’d make senseless mistakes. As for the Broncos, Martindale said he was confident Tim Tebow would be the Denver starting quarterback by the time the Jets played at Denver in mid-November.
This was intriguing. In Ryan’s opinion, Tebow “might be the greatest player in the history of college football.” During Tebow’s second year at the University of Florida, he ran and passed for more than fifty touchdowns and became the first sophomore to win the Heisman Trophy, the award for college football’s best player. In Tebow’s years at Florida, the Gators won two national championships. During a school vacation, Tebow accompanied his father, Bob, an evangelical missionary, on a trip to the Philippines, where they spread the Gospel, and Tebow circumcised little boys. He was perhaps this country’s best-loved athlete. But Tebow threw more like an outfielder than a quarterback, and to this point the Broncos had been wary of the unorthodox motion. Martindale said it was true that Tebow couldn’t excel if you kept him in the pocket—“He bounces passes off buildings.” But, Martindale warned, once Tebow began improvising, something shifted and he became an entirely different player.
How Ryan should schedule his hour-to-hour time in the off-season was a source of uncertainty to him. Ryan was now, in effect, the COO of Jets football, and COOs were distanced big thinkers, not hands-on detail men. But Ryan was a football coach, not a businessman, and back in his office, isolated from the others, Ryan had ambivalent pangs that he had given up what he loved to do all day. In the offensive meeting rooms, where he could offer no particular tactical expertise, Ryan felt like a trespasser on somebody else’s land. And with the defense, where the daily subject was the scheme he had developed with Pettine, there was now a similar tinge of being an interloper. You could tell how some days Ryan really missed the room. He’d enter the meeting at noon ready to get everyone to join him for lunch, take a look at what was running on the film screen, and instantly become involved in it, saying, “Rip off the block! Rip off the block and it’s a holding call on the tackle!” Giving others your favorite responsibilities, delegating and supervising: these were aspects of being a head coach nobody told you how to handle.
Ryan’s solution was to drop in occasionally on the defensive coaches, always bringing something to share. One day it was a photograph of a lithe, muscular Carrier in his old USC uniform, looking like an action hero under massive shoulder, thigh, and arm pads. “You raid Anthony Muñoz’s locker, MC?” Pettine wanted to know, referring to the large and ultra-fit former Bengals lineman. Another day Ryan had with him film of a hit DT had once delivered at full speed to the chest of the six-foot-eight Eagles receiver Harold Carmichael. Carmichael had crumpled like a sling-shotted stork. After they all watched it, DT explained that the pass had been tipped, throwing off his timing so that he couldn’t stop. With the receiver looming in front of him, the only thing to do was run right through him, and that he did. “What a shot!” said Ryan. “Okay, that’s my contribution for the day. I gotta go dig something up on Sutton!” On a morning I found telling, Ryan walked in to announce he’d just been visiting with Sara Hickmann, the team psychologist, and they’d agreed that everyone in this room, “including Nicky,” had “issues,” and guess whose were the most acute? Pettine’s! “Good bet,” said Pettine laconically, refusing to be drawn in.
Various senior Jets coaches were using the lockout time to offer master classes on their areas of expertise for their more junior colleagues, and one day Ryan talked defensive line. Slipping back into his old position-coach persona, he spoke with such intensity you could imagine him out on the Chautauqua circuit. There was method to the magnetism. Practicing defensive-line positions, Ryan said, was incredibly tedious, and it was the coach’s job to entertain the players so they’d think their lives were more interesting than the clogged over-and-over of doing the same drills practice after practice. Ryan said that he’d been an inventive line coach because he was such a “shitty” player; he’d needed to come up with insights to compensate. Walter Payton once told Ryan, “I run where the two butts are together,” and given that Payton was the finest running back Ryan ever saw, Ryan had dedicated himself to prying haunchy blockers apart by teaching defenders to “club” them, “skinny through” them, or just “penetrate, disrupt, wreck shit.” The temptation for defensive linemen was to remain standing too high so they could peek at the action and read the play, but such up-standers were doomed; defensive line was a position of leverage and feel, and you had to stay low to the ground. The ideal man for this job, said Ryan, was “a hired killer. A mean motherfucker. The good ones are big, ugly, and the snot’s running out of their nose. Banged-up helmet.” Ryan talked hand technique and foot technique and then he talked mystery, how some players just had the uncanny ability to deliver a short, powerful blow, and the opponent was suddenly knocked five yards back. As for the great ones, he said, they were so quick you didn’t even notice, and they were gone by.
As much as the coaches discussed the game and watched it on film, nothing could make up for the absence from the facility of those who did the actual blocking and tackling. During the lockout, the league forbade the coaches from having any contact with their own players. What was difficult about this for Sutton was how much he missed the players, especially Bart Scott. Sutton would look out at the empty practice fields and think about the sound of the voluble linebacker, who woke up talking and didn’t stop through the morning, afternoon, and evening until, presumably, he went unsilent into the night. Scott often began a conversation by saying, “If you want to be great…” Through the lockout, Sutton tried to honor his player by doing something extra to complete the sentence every day. Sutt still came to the facility by 6:00 a.m. at the latest, even on many weekends. Once there, he followed his curiosity through innumerable football studies. He had done all he could in these weeks to improve, and yet, he said, there was ennui: “I’m looking to meet with somebody, talk to anybody, do something!”
All of the coaches missed the players, and all of them missed Scott. An eff
ect of this was that when the coaches watched the players on film, the usual frisson of interaction now had a heightened intensity. As film frames flashed by with Bart Scott eddying off in haphazard directions, vectoring across the field along angles at steep variance with those he was supposed to take, Pettine proposed setting the commentary on a loop: “Where’s Bart going? What’s Bart thinking?” Carrier watched Scott deliver a leg whip and said, “God, I love Bart. Dude makes me laugh.” To Sutton, Scott’s position coach, Scott was challenging because he kept many coaching points in mind and might apply any one at any given moment. However, Sutt said, the offense had no more idea of Scott’s intentions than Scott did, and this allowed Scott to make surprising and important plays. Scott knew nothing of eggshells. He was decisive and did everything at high speed, which was what you wanted in a linebacker.
Once in a while the coaches did receive actual word of the players’ lockout activities. Kyle Wilson was said to be spending his time working out with Revis—if true, a very pleasing development. And Bart Scott had been observed in a yellow Ferrari flying along doing ninety in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. This was comforting news only because it was so normal. In his own way, Bart Scott was near.
One day, during film, the new computer guy arrived to give a quick session on some next-generation coaching software. There were always new computer guys, all of them bearing fresh balms of electronic relief for the inefficiencies of the coaching life. The game was ruled by the relationship between what down it was and the distance an offense needed to cover for a first down. Bill Callahan compared these down and distance groupings to the different rooms in a house. Just as a home had a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, and so on, football game plans were organized by self-contained spaces you entered and left in the course of a game. Those “rooms” found in a typical football “house” included the opening minutes; the end of the half; third down; two minutes left in the game (when offensive teams often ran plays on fourth down instead of punting); red zone; four minutes left with the lead; change of possession after a turnover; backed up (inside the offense’s ten-yard line); short yardage; goal line. The game plan described what the coaches considered the best options for filling each of these rooms. The computer could help you measure what to expect from the opposition in each situation and also tell you how the opponent’s prior success might guide your ability to thwart him. When Callahan watched a football game on television, he didn’t take in the ebb and flow of possessions as typical spectators would. He saw the game as an emerging structure built of either sound or unsound responses to all those situations.
People liked to talk about coaching instincts, those who had a feel for the game, and that was fine. But Callahan knew, as did Schottenheimer and Pettine, that the greatest boon to instinct was foreknowledge: the understanding of self considered in relation to the understanding of others. Brilliant calls came from deep study. Computers were crucial because they organized, refined, and analyzed the data, allowing coaches to envision before games what they wanted players to do during them—to see before they saw. Still, these were football coaches, and when in the presence of a new computer guy, they would have been remiss not to mess with him a little.
Before the meeting began, Smitty took the new computer guy aside and warned him, “Whatever you do, don’t look Pettine in the eye. It makes him go crazy.” Since Pettine was a computer maven, interested in everything he could learn about the machines, the next hour for the new computer guy, by all appearances a man dedicated to his work, involved strenuous forays into the realms of gaze aversion and neck flinchery. The point of the session was to show the coaches that opposing-team play-calling tendencies in any given situation were now organized and, with a cursor click, available to them on video. If, for example, Carrier wanted to know what blocking scheme the Cleveland Browns offensive line was likely to choose on the first play of the half, the computer would sort the situation by play call, from those plays most frequently used by the Browns to begin the half, all the way down to those they’d tried only once. And alongside each play call, there was the blocking scheme the Browns had used with it. Afterward, Pettine wanted to know what was up with that new tech dude. “Did he think I was gonna Medusa him—turn him to stone?”
As the lockout bore steadily into June, its third month, there were more conversations than before about matters unrelated to football. Carrier and I were talking about music one day, and when I mentioned Simon and Garfunkel’s song “The Sound of Silence,” he said he’d never heard of it. “Really?” I asked him. “Everybody’s heard that one. You lived in LA in the seventies and eighties. You couldn’t have avoided it!” Carrier insisted that no, he had never heard it. Then, like the great attacking safety he’d been, Carrier went after Simon and Garfunkel. “So, Nick, let me ask you something,” he said. “Those two guys get along or are they like all those people who have success and end up hating each other?” I was about to tell him that he was on to something when DT walked by. “Hey, DT!” said Carrier. “Have you ever heard of the song ‘The Sound of Silence’?” DT looked at Carrier. Then he looked at me. You could see him considering the situation, noting who was doing the asking, who was standing next to that guy, and what it all must mean. Finally, the most intelligent cover corner of his time replied, “No! I might have been aware of it, but I never went ahead and heard it!”
Another morning Carrier arrived in the film-watching meeting with a parenting story. The previous day after work, he’d attended his thirteen-year-old daughter’s youth soccer-league game where she’d received a yellow card for inflicting violence on an opposing player. Hammer accepted chip-off-the-old-block congratulations from the other defensive coaches. Then he was asked how he’d reacted in the moment. Had he said anything vicious to the official? Carrier said he’d just sat there, cuddling his dog Lucky. What kind of dog was Lucky? Weeks wanted to know.
“The kind of little dog Jack Nicholson had in As Good as It Gets,” Carrier said.
“That’s a nice dog!” Weeks said.
Not to Carrier. “Hell no! It barks all the time, shits all over the house. But it’s good traveling and at soccer games.”
Pettine roused himself to ask: “Why not leave it in the car except for soccer games?”
Even during the lull, these were coaches, and they were always coaching something. When they learned that at a party for toddlers my son had interrupted some singing to run across the room and tackle a little girl dressed up as a ballerina in a pink tutu, the coaches were thrilled and gave me seminars on form-tackling technique to pass along. (“Lower your center of gravity”; “Hit on the rise.”) Another morning, I encountered Sutton in the kitchen area between the offensive and defensive sides of the coaching pod. Here there were two coffee options: A fresh pot of Dunkin’ Donuts brew was always available, or you could make your own single cup at the fancy Flavia machine, as Sutton was doing. I’d never tried the Flavia. Sutton said that had to change immediately. Then he proceeded to walk me through it. “Okay, Nick,” he began. “Get fired up! Proper procedure is everything, Nick. First, you choose your coffee.” I selected French roast, described on the packet as “dark and intense.” Sutton continued, “That choice secure? Okay! Good selection. Now you hit that upper left-hand button and open the machine. Now have your packet ready, Nick. Okay, install that packet. Got it in nice and snug? Good. Good technique. We’re making progress. Now close the window and—this is key—you must lock the empty cup in under the source or the coffee will not come out.” We locked it in and an aromatic smell filled the galley. Sutton nodded approvingly. “Nice job. Good work. Enjoy that coffee, Nick.”
In an ensuing meeting, Carrier said he had received some money as part of an injury settlement from his playing days. The coaches had much advice on how to handle such wham. What was “wham”? Was this an old George Michael thing? “Come on, Nick!” cried Carrier. WAM stood for “walking-around money.” Smitty, who had never been married, told Carrier that under no circumst
ances should he inform his wife about this windfall. Carrier, who’d been married for sixteen years, shook his head, disagreeing. You tell your wife about everything, was his view. He and his wife wanted each other to have nice things. Pettine, freshly divorced, agreed Carrier should tell his wife, but on more cynical grounds. Pettine saw football wives and girlfriends as an omniscient quilting circle, and if you failed to mention something like playoff shares or injury-settlement money, your name was soon going to be Doghouse Reilly.
It was a hot day outside. The mention of WAM led to a long group summertime daydream of brand-new convertibles, especially brand-new Maserati convertibles. A local car dealer had loaned Ryan a Maserati as a promotion, and the sight of that car out in the facility parking lot had induced much longing in the others. Carrier shook his head at all this. Noting that during the work stoppage coaching salaries had been reduced, he said, “Hell, if there weren’t a lockout you’d see a convertible in my parking space right now.” Just then Ryan walked in, freshly shorn. “Is it wrong,” the head coach asked, “that I’m driving this Maserati around and I go to Supercuts for an eight-dollar haircut?”
Under the current lockout circumstances, with no players on hand and the roster still undefined, there was only so much useful work the coaches could do. When they were given a long weekend, many traveled to see family. Yet even when separated, they maintained frequent contact with one another, sending streams of texts and also photographs of things they deemed unusual. Because the coaches usually lived in the bubble of the facility, these moments could function as explorations in a world that had gone through changes while they were at a remove, busy working. Upon everyone’s return after the long weekend, Smitty told a story of walking through the Memphis airport on his way to make a connecting flight when he espied a man with three cell phones on his belt. Finding this noteworthy, Smitty pulled out his own phone and snapped a photograph, which he planned to send to the other coaches. Whereupon the wife of Mr. Three Phones tapped him on the shoulder from behind and asked what he thought he was doing. Whereupon Smitty walked away. This led Carrier to hold forth on men who took cell-phone photographs of strange men’s wives. Some wives were freaked out by the practice, said Carrier, but he personally thought the women should consider it a positive because nobody was taking pictures of unattractive ladies. This was deemed unimpeachable logic.
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