Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  On the way to the game, we hoped to stop for Philly cheesesteaks at Tony Luke’s South Philly emporium, not far from the ballpark, but the shop proved difficult to find. I suggested rolling down the window and consulting a passerby. “We don’t ask for directions,” said Pettine.

  Despite the fact that he worked in professional sports, Pettine retained his strong affection for the Phillies, followed them closely, and like many otherwise somewhat-closed men, was open and emotional on the subject of his favorite team. I thought it was interesting that Pettine could remain such a big fan while also working in the business. He said, “Outside of our sport, it doesn’t change. As a Phillies fan, for me it still goes back to childhood.”

  He thought that baseball was a simpler game, much more by the book. Even the most educated football fan could really hope to follow only the back-and-forth of possessions. What they couldn’t see, and what baseball didn’t have, were the multifarious strategic options confronting football teams on every play. Pettine told of how the Jets defensive coaches had decided in the 2010 playoff game against the Patriots to lure the Patriots into running, allowing New England a reasonably effective series of runs that distracted the Patriots from what they did best: pass. To a fan, Pettine said, it looked like the Jets were porous against the run that day. But that was intentional, what won them the game. The other strikingly effective strategic innovation in the game had been to present Tom Brady with much more zone coverage than he was accustomed to seeing from the Jets pass defense—usually a man-to-man operation. “In football,” Pettine said, “only afterward will people figure out what we were doing, and that’s if it worked.”

  The baseball game began, and soon the Phillies were winning. Between innings, we pondered the mystery of how the 2009 Jets, without Cromartie, had given up only eight passing touchdowns, while the 2010 Jets, with a second world-class corner now paired with Revis, gave up triple that number, twenty-four. Was it possible that Cromartie, so accustomed to being a number-one corner, found it disconcerting not to be the main guy? Had paired man-cover corners made the Jets coverages too predictable? Or was the root of it a less potent pass rush? The difficulty with football problems was that there were often so many potential explanations that causal clarity slipped behind passing clouds of irrelevance and caprice.

  The hour was very late by the time we got back to Doylestown and so I went to bed in a guest room. A little after eight the next morning, drumbeats sounded on my door and a ringing voice wanted to know, “You gonna sleep all day?” It was Senior. I was on the road in no time.

  Back in Florham Park in July after his own vacation, Tannenbaum scrunched his heavy brows and narrowed his dark eyes into an expression that brought to mind French bulldogs. The GM craved work, wanted to have at problems. That the lockout might end any day was the rumor, and his desk was covered with preparation for that moment. “The game face is on!” he cried. Several Jets, including safety Eric Smith, Cromartie, offensive lineman Wayne Hunter, receivers Braylon Edwards and Santonio Holmes, and the running quarterback and special-teams star Brad Smith, were free agents, and the Jets had to be prepared for the likely event that some of them might join other teams. Tannenbaum was running roster scenarios. One of them involved signing the Raiders star free-agent cornerback Nnamdi Asomugha, the best player at the position in the game except Revis.

  Downstairs, Sutton worried about limitation, how much material would be too much to expect the players to learn now that they’d missed both their off-season organized team activities and mini-camp. And heaven help the rookies. “We’ve got the water,” Sutton said. “But the cup’s only so big.”

  Thinking of the young players, O’Neil was reviewing film, finding examples of model defensive backfield play so as to create a “teach-tape.” It was a repetitious endeavor. “That’s really good by Revis,” he said, marking the play with a click of his mouse. And then: “That’s great technique by Revis.” Click. And: “Look at Revis break the hypotenuse.” Click. “Look at Revis!” Click.

  Later, in the meeting room, the defensive coaches watched tape of all the free agents available around the league at positions the Jets might need players. One criterion they were evaluating, per Sutton, was whether the man’s play suggested he had sufficient football intelligence for him to learn the Jets system by September.

  It was now mid-July; Smitty was still in the Southwest tending to his father, and the coaches, missing him, told Smitty stories. They reveled in a new meteorological explanation he’d recently given for his badly parked car. Discounting the strong-winds theory, Smitty now posited that because it had rained while his car was parked that day, and the temperatures had then plummeted, the car had “probably slipped.” Or, Smitty said, maybe the water hadn’t quite frozen, in which case the car likely had “stationary hydroplaned.” Smitty’s colleagues noted that Smitty’s real thirtieth birthday was coming up soon. All of it led Sutton to say, “Mike is short in only two areas: math and logic.”

  As for Ryan, also back from vacation, on his right calf there was now a large green tattoo, a Hawaiian tribal marking that Ryan said meant “believe in yourself.” Ryan had picked up the new stamp on vacation to show his Hawaiian tackle, Wayne Hunter, how much he wanted him back.

  By late July, details of the proposed new collective-bargaining agreement were making their way across the facility transom. One of those proposed changes would limit teams to a single training-camp practice a day instead of the dreaded two-a-days that had been a camp staple for generations. (This did come to pass, as did strict regulations for the number of padded workouts allowed during the seventeen-week season—fourteen—as well as restrictions on how long the players could be on the practice field.) The prospect of less practice time made the coaches very concerned. Football was the only professional sport in which teams practiced more days than they played. Practice was the essence of football, where a team learned and perfected all those plays, where a team became a team. How effectively an NFL team practiced during the week was a reliable indication of how well it would play on Sunday. Carrier and Sutton blamed the necessity for the changes on coaches who’d known no moderation about practice, had overworked their players in the summer and fall so they’d collapsed in December. Now that was going to be a thing of the past.

  Over in his office, which, like every coach’s office, had no windows facing the outdoors, A-Lynn said the lockout and the new rules all suggested how much more serious a business football had become. When A-Lynn came into the league, as a player in 1993, there were more nicknames, more characters, more pranks. Even the star players on his team, the Broncos, didn’t take themselves too seriously. Linebacker Simon Fletcher might well be smoking a cigarette on the field just before practice. During the stretching that began practice, tight end Shannon Sharpe told nonstop funny stories, “so you couldn’t stretch, you were laughing so much. Didn’t matter, he made you loose with his jokes.” The big money, A-Lynn said, had homogenized the game, making it riskier to take risks and more difficult to relax. “You play better when you’re relaxed,” he said. This also held, he said, for coaches. Looking around his office, he said, “I want a window, baby. I’d feel a little more alive. You can be here eighteen hours and never see the sun.” He said that whenever he left the facility, he had to adjust to the “regular world,” where different behavior was in order, where his wife sometimes had to tell him, “I’m not one of your players.”

  Another way football was different now had to do with how sophisticated pass-defense techniques had become. In the defensive meeting room DT gave a master class on defensive backfield play, and a large crowd of coaches and front-office people turned out for him. It had taken a lot of convincing to get DT to address the masses. Standing at the front of the room, DT began with reference to his own playing days. He said he’d never looked at a receiver below the waist or above the chest, and as he ran, he shifted his eyes from quarterback to receiver and back every two steps. What made Revis so good, DT said, wa
s patience. Revis prepared so carefully and then played with such deep concentration that he never panicked; he could endure the pressure of something being primed to happen that had not yet happened, could exist in an inconclusive state until the man finally committed to his route. Think, DT said, of a baseball hitter who waited on the approaching pitch because he trusted his good hand mechanics to protect him.

  DT was putting so much effort into his presentation that there was sweat glistening atop his shaved head, and with that and his muscular torso, he began to resemble an aging middleweight prizefighter. He described a series of eight “help concepts” that defensive backs could call on to avert crises. This included limbo, a technique used by the defensive backs to declare who had whom when two receivers crossed paths in close proximity. For closely paired receivers who cut in the same direction and might afterward stay short or go long, you could sort responsibilities on the fly by calling out for the triangle technique, a distribution prearranged for the nickel, corner, and safety. Triangle was tricky for Revis, whose instinct was never to accept help—he preferred to latch on to his man and never let him go. When he finished talking, DT received an orator’s applause.

  Later, in his office, DT said that the simpler the passing attack, the more complicated the defense’s array of coverages had to be in response; otherwise, a quarterback would simply take what the coverage gave him—as Tom Moore had described Peyton Manning doing. Tom Brady followed the same approach. The Patriots offense was a gyre of surprising actions on television and was also that for defenses, yet to Brady, all the elements of the Patriots offensive scheme were rudimentary. The New England coaches were switching out ends and receivers and backs, making the offense appear different, but from play to play they used identical route combinations out of the different personnel alignments. All this made life easy for the quarterback, who, of course, knew what everyone’s role was, and hell for a defense. That’s why the defense needed to counterconfuse with those techniques DT had just described. Of the eight advanced-coverage concepts he’d discussed, DT said, he’d been aware of none in college. Carrier hadn’t either. This was cutting-edge, postdoc NFL stuff. And even in pro ball, not everyone believed in them. Al Davis, the very involved Oakland team owner, would never allow his defensive backs to use the radar concept, which involved moving the safety away from the middle of the field, where, Davis imagined, the safety’s speed could always save the day. DT thought Davis overvalued speed and pure athleticism in football players, probably because he’d never had either himself. Then DT shook his head and said, “Nick, all this and unless you win, nobody gives a shit.” After two near misses in the past two years, if the Jets didn’t win this year, DT said, then everybody would be over them. Things happened that fast in the NFL.

  On July 25, the defensive coaches walked down the hall to watch film together, and just as they settled in, Smitty returned, entering the room in new black cowboy boots to applause. Instantly apprised of the tenor of the conversations involving him that had taken place in his absence, Smitty reaffirmed all previous denials of culpability in the parking-space saga. He did, however, submit yet another fresh theory. He’d left his SUV parked there for several days with the keys inside, so perhaps somebody else had “moved it on me.” Later, discussing golf, Smitty made everyone smile by describing a particular hole of personal scorecard doom as “my nemis.” Spoken with a West Texas accent, this sounded like “my nimis.” Smitty could tell how much pleasure his shaggy-dog misadventures and malapropisms brought the others, and he was good-natured enough not to begrudge them that. He was who he was, and made no pretenses otherwise—the quality players always said they most responded to in a coach. As Wayne Hunter would tell me, “Mike Smith is so genuine.”

  One afternoon at lunch, a couple of people whom I didn’t know well were discussing the Patriots, the one NFL team whose window of winning opportunity seemed wedged forever open. Life around the New England facility was described in contrast to life at Florham Park as a pure football culture, where casual conversation was rare, and where everyone walked tensed through the hallways, wary of being chewed out for some perceived deviation from the mission. (As a result, Patriots games were beautiful business-school case studies of how to win at football.) In the NFL, victories on the field dictated the righteousness of the Patriots’ approach, but of course Bill Belichick, a defensive specialist in an era of parity and passing, owed some significant measure of his success to good fortune. Back in 2000, Belichick, like everyone else, had had no idea how good a quarterback Tom Brady was. In a compensatory sixth-round draft choice, the coach had found his offensive double: a player of lethal brains, talent, and ambition, a supremely prepared athlete who strode the facility hallways in the same frame of mind as the head coach. In 2001, because of an injury to Drew Bledsoe, Belichick was forced to play Brady, and when Brady began winning NFL games by the dozen, a magnificent defensive coach became a magnificent head coach.

  It was a restive time, everybody working but not doing the usual work, everybody ready for the resumption of the usual, preparing for the usual, while the usual remained elusive. When the defensive coaches watched film of free-agent defensive backs, it reminded them—as if they needed more reminding!—that it was approaching August and they still didn’t know who their safeties or their starting cornerback opposite Revis would be. Evaluating yet again the free-agent candidates for these jobs, the defensive coaches were like skilled carpet traders at the souk: in every player, they could identify some kind of striking deficiency. Among the flaws they named were low self-confidence, overreliance on painkillers, poor technique, “not a trained killer,” “has some Bob Sanders in him,” “a pit boss,” and “lousy teammate.” A non–trained killer was a reluctant tackler. Having the Sanders gene meant that, like the former Colts star safety, a man played so hard and so recklessly he was going to get hurt every year. A pit boss was too much of a gambler, took too many chances on the field. What did it mean to be a good teammate? Pettine had examples at the ready. After a touchdown was scored against the defense, the usual procedure was for the position coach to gather his defensive players on the sideline and make a correction. Then the coordinator might add something. But during one Ravens game when the safety was beaten for a score, the head coach Brian Billick, whose expertise was on the offensive side, interceded with the defensive backs. Seeing this, the cornerback Samari Rolle told his head coach, “Get out of here! You come talk to us after we give up a TD? Either talk to us all along or just stay out of it.” A good teammate also covered for the mistakes of others. When various Ed Reed improvisations led to big plays by the opposition that seemed to be Rolle’s fault because he was the only person left in the area that the safety, Reed, had vacated, Rolle accepted the public blame, never sold out Reed. And after Wes Welker took it upon himself to hit the Ravens defensive back Corey Ivy late from the blind side, it was Rolle who saw the cheap shot and on the next running play hunted down Welker and delivered a blow to his mouth. Pettine and Ryan had film of all these moments and were always finding reasons to show them to their players and to watch them again themselves, as if to reinforce their own standards.

  The lockout made for months of frustration, but I never got the sense that people thought it was any more damaging to the Jets than to other NFL teams. There was confidence among the coaches that they were making the best of a trying situation, and during the lockout, optimism about the coming season pervaded. The optimism around me was so staunch that, after six months with the Jets, I myself was at a point where I could imagine only success for the team. This despite the Jets franchise’s long, dreary record of failures, despite the fact that the team lacked a proven player at the game’s difference-making position—quarterback. Optimistic was the way you were supposed to feel within a football team. Confidence was crucial to winning, and the long off-season spent walled off from your opponents was designed to create the necessary air of your team’s invulnerability. As the weeks passed, it was easy to
imagine the Jets doing well. What grew difficult to picture was the lockout ever ending.

  And then, in late July, it did. The long holding pattern, the daily uncertainty, the thwarting anxiety, the reduced paychecks—abruptly, all that was gone. It was as if snow that for months had obscured everything in a white cover of silence had melted overnight to reveal the bright-size life of the world. Once the lockout was over, all memory of its inhibiting inconvenience slipped forever out of the minds of the organization. Industrious as everyone around the facility had seemed during the lockout weeks, they had merely been burning off secondary energy, enduring a longueur, making a tolerable new life while pining for the old one. Now they were rejuvenated by just the promise of seeing the players again. “I can’t wait to get with my guys,” said Pettine, speaking for everyone. Callahan was equally excited. “You do realize what you’ll be dealing with?” he asked me. “These are rare cats. Freakish athletes. I had a guy in Oakland, Mo Collins. He’d hit you on the back and it was like an anvil was in his hand. Boom! My wife would see me, and she’d say, ‘What happened?,’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, Mo Collins saying hello.’ ”

  PART II

  During

  Seven