Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  As it happened, for many of the coaches, the highlight of the Bengals game had come afterward. Ryan always received a police escort out of the stadium after home games, and so, following this one, a squad car, lights flashing, parted the thick postgame traffic to make way for the head coach. Though it was not Ryan’s sleek green-and-black truck that appeared next but a battered compact Toyota with Jeff Weeks, its owner, at the wheel and Ryan, knees scrunched to chest, riding shotgun.

  I spent the last week of August with the offense. I was greeted with suspicion. There were comments about my being a “mole for the defense” and doubts about my stamina: “Don’t fall asleep,” Schotty warned me. The defense regarded my defection with contempt. “You’ll be bored to death with the offense,” Bart Scott promised. It was, sort of, all in fun. The loyalties to one’s unit were so tribal and immersive that on my first day “over there,” when I looked through Schotty’s office window and saw Sutton and DT walking by in the hallway, to my surprise I found I missed the defense.

  Offense was, said A-Lynn, “a different planet.” One world made something and the other tore it apart. The Jets defense was intense and they put in hard days, but Schottenheimer’s men were triple-shift piecework laborers, insomniacs kept awake by “performance” energy drinks, fresh cups of strong coffee, and Schotty’s committed desire to provide his players with a solution for every predicament. Tom Moore said that when he first saw the Jets offensive playbook it made him feel that in Indianapolis, he and Peyton Manning had run “a mom-and-pop operation.” Longer offensive play calls typically designated passes and went like this: “Twins Right Middle Gun Scan Right F Yogi X Oklahoma H Balloon.” Westhoff was horrified by all the words: “It’s catastrophic. It’s another language. Like the Dead Sea Scrolls.” At the beginning of the week, with things not going well so far for the offense, A-Lynn knew what that meant. The running-backs coach looked over at Lance Taylor and me and said, “Bring yo’ pillow!”

  Jets employees who’d worked for the Giants’ Tom Coughlin, famous around the NFL for treating his staff like first-year law-firm associates, said that even Coughlin put out his candle before Schotty did. For the offense, there were no mid-film bathroom breaks, as Pettine gave, and far less levity. And in contrast to Pettine’s rule that when watching film, you rewound a play a maximum of three times, at three looks, Schotty was just getting started. This was partly due to the difference between a defense that was “fully built” and the inchoate state of the offense. “We’re trying to do what the defense is doing,” said Matt Cavanaugh, the quarterbacks coach. “But we have a lot of young players.”

  The offense divided its primary responsibilities. Schotty handled the skill players, leaving Callahan to devise the runs and the protection schemes. Thus the offense comprised two player units that rarely met together. That division worried Ryan, who also wondered if the offense had brought in too many free-agent “individual contractors.”

  The offensive coaches did all come together to watch practice film, either in Schotty’s office or in the main offensive meeting room. Cavanaugh had told me, “This is a much more complex and difficult world. Defense, you can have ten guys screw up and one guy makes a great play. Offense, everybody has to be together.” He was saying that the offensive approach had a more speculative feel than the defense’s steel certainty about what a call should look like and whether or not the players had met their obligations. The truth behind that observation was evident as we watched a screen pass that Scott disrupted. “This one had a chance,” said Schotty. “Hell of a play by Bart.” Callahan agreed. “If Slauson takes care of Bart, it springs.” Over in the defensive room, had Slauson played for them, the coaches would have talked about Slauson’s failure, and the conversation would have been tinged with derision.

  The distribution of blocking assignments in a protection scheme called Midway was debated. Callahan could see “clear as a bell” how it all ought to look.

  “Dev, you okay?” Schotty asked the tight-ends coach.

  “No,” Devlin said. The linebacker designations that the call relied on to tell the offensive linemen who to block were confusing to him. “It’s like we’re making the Mike the Sam, and the Sam the Jack.” The Mike and Will are the strong-side and weak-side inside linebackers in a 3-4 formation. The Sam and Jack are the strong-side and weak-side outside linebackers. Such designations differed around the league; the Jets defense called the Jack the Rush. But Callahan and Cavanaugh were not confused and they didn’t think Devlin should be either.

  “Will you let me talk?” Devlin said to Callahan. “I played seven years. How many you play?”

  “Ohh!” everyone cried.

  “Coached thirty-four,” said Callahan. “You?”

  “Ooh!” swelled the chorus. Soon Callahan and Devlin were comparing how long they’d been married, to much laughter.

  “We’ve got nine minutes left,” Schottenheimer interceded. “Do we have to watch the runs?” Like most modern offensive coordinators, Schotty was immersed in the aerial game.

  “Yes!” said Callahan, who devised the handoffs.

  “Wake me up when it’s over!” Schottenheimer told him.

  “Oooh!” said Devlin.

  Listening to them, I suddenly saw a band trying to compose a song, saw the guitars, the possibility in all the strings and frets, the shouting difficulty of making something new and pleasing out of nothing, how rare a thing was a standard. Devlin’s point was that if you couldn’t agree on the key, there was no harmony and everything immediately became destabilized. Even if you could agree, it very likely would still fall apart. That the offense was always vulnerable was the nature of the game’s design. You could never tell whether you had something until it was finished and you put it out there. A good blocking scheme had logical integrity. A really good one had integrity and also rubato—expressive feeling.

  Early in the week Sanchez had a fine day of practice, completing nineteen of twenty-five passes. In the quarterbacks’ meeting that followed, the Southern California–bred starter wore shorts, flip-flops, and bracelets made of rubber and yarn. On the wall, somebody had scrawled “19-25!” They were discussing a 5:30 a.m. text Sanchez had sent McElroy informing McElroy that he needed to take a shower before arriving at the facility. McElroy deemed the morning shower excessive since they showered at the facility after every workout. “I don’t want you coming in here all scuzzy like everyone else,” Sanchez explained. I’d been told that Sanchez’s belief in proper hygiene was such that in the locker room on game days he applied deodorant before putting on his uniform and that at halftime he brushed his teeth. In the history of athletics, this made him just one more guy with a ritual. Revis’s uncle, the retired NFL defensive lineman Sean Gilbert, was spending some time at training camp as a coaching intern, and Gilbert talked often about the necessity of becoming a different person to play professional football, that when you changed into the uniform, you had to change yourself: “Everybody in football has a split personality. It’s a switch. The light goes on and you have to think, Kill! Kill! Afterwards, you have to turn it off. You can’t go to the mall thinking, Kill! Kill!” Yet in the bedlam of a game, players also had to remain collected, especially the quarterback.

  Sanchez clearly considered McElroy to be his rookie. In the time-honored veteran way, so did Mark Brunell, the forty-one-year-old backup. McElroy was always being asked to fetch smoothies or omelets from the dining hall. They’d watch him enter Schotty’s office, watch him settle into his chair, watch him thinking maybe this time they’d give him a break, let him see a little of the film Schotty and Cav were showing, let him imagine that finally he was going to learn something he could use, and then it would come—“Hey, Greg”—and off he’d go, on the trot.

  McElroy had led Alabama to a collegiate national championship by being the sturdy vinculum binding more gifted elements. At the facility, everybody knew that he’d been an excellent student at Alabama; that he’d completed his degree in three years an
d graduated from the business program, where athletes rarely ventured; that he’d then pursued his master’s; that he’d been a Rhodes Scholarship finalist; that on the Wonderlic intelligence test, he’d scored a very high 43 out of 50. (Sanchez had scored 28; Brunell 22.) Although McElroy could throw a football into a trash can from forty yards, his arm was considered weak by NFL standards, and he presented no evident threat to Sanchez or even Brunell.

  Even so, Sanchez seemed preoccupied with him. After viewing some practice film of McElroy scrambling, Sanchez asked, “Greg, what did you run at the Combine?”

  “Four-eight-four,” said McElroy. “Why? Do I look slow?”

  “No!” said Sanchez. “You looked faster than I thought you’d be.” He paused for many seconds. “I ran a four-eight-eight,” he said.

  Sanchez’s completion percentage in his first two years had been low for an NFL starter, only 54 percent. To go with it, there had been thirty-three interceptions, only twenty-nine touchdowns, and a surfeit of fumbles—nineteen in all. In the absence of Brad Smith and the Wildcat option packages he’d run so effectively for the Jets in 2010, Schottenheimer was using Jeremy Kerley, who’d been a Texas high-school quarterback, to take snaps out of the formation. The idea was to snap the ball directly to one of your best athletes, and, as Schotty said, “Let him make plays.” The Jets called their version of the Wildcat Seminole, after the team’s first practitioner of it, Leon Washington, who as a collegian had been a Florida State Seminole. No team that had full confidence in its quarterback took him away from center for a Leon Washington, a Brad Smith, or a Jeremy Kerley. Now when Schottenheimer scripted long-pass plays for Kerley to throw that were not in Sanchez’s play list, Sanchez’s reaction was to exclaim, “Oooh. Fifty-four percent passer!” In fact, Seminole was being installed only for the Giants exhibition game and then would be taken out—a ruse for the Dallas coaches so they’d see it on the film and waste time preparing for it. The Jets coaches weren’t telling their players this, in case Dallas claimed one of them after the team made its cuts at the end of training camp. How Sanchez felt about the prospects of an option package, he made clear through caricature. On Schottenheimer’s office whiteboard there appeared a Sanchez-drawn portrait of Tom Moore, still serving as Schotty’s offensive consultant, captioned “Tom Moore zoning out during a discussion of Seminole!”

  Schotty always talked of Sanchez with affection, the kind of affection a parent displays for a teenage son: “In the morning, his head is down; he can’t find his notebook. He doesn’t have a pen.” By evening Sanchez would be commenting freely on everything. Looking at some Cowboys preseason film he’d notice, “Sweet hand-warmer! It’s August, dude!”

  “At least Mark’s straight on the things he’s supposed to be watching!” said Schotty.

  Cavanaugh broke in. “What was the coverage, Mark?”

  “Three deep!” And so it was.

  On the field, Sanchez completed a little hitch route against Revis to a journeyman camp-body tight end named Keith Zinger. After the play ended, Sanchez was so excited he ran upfield to congratulate Zinger. Revis looked like he wanted to throttle him, but Devlin understood that Sanchez was thinking of what the moment would mean to Zinger: “No matter what happens in his life, this kid Zinger can say he caught a pass on Darrelle Revis.”

  Sanchez was an enthusiast. The quarterback had a range of interests that were unusual for an NFL player—he liked to sing and play the guitar, took teammates to Broadway musicals on off nights, monitored the progress of the Libyan civil war (“What’s up with Gaddafi?” he’d inquire), and might approach you in the facility hallway with a matter of urgent concern along the lines of “What are the Seven Wonders of the World?” His sense of humor was unique—a form of dry, deadpan repetition. Somebody in a meeting would observe, “Man, that quarterback has a hose!,” and Sanchez would say, “Yeah, he has a strong arm too.” If Schottenheimer said, “We suckered the shit out of Wilson,” Sanchez would come through with “He did bite hard on the play fake!” His expressions were comical. He had a way of glancing at people with hilarious severity, and when they laughed, he’d say, “Yesss!” Sanchez was also self-deprecating. “I’m a five-year-old,” he’d say. When bored, he’d begin writing amusing remarks in his notebook for others to discover, such as “Greg going bald!”

  He and McElroy were very different. Sanchez walked into early meetings carrying juice and a big box of Golden Grahams, a sugary breakfast cereal that wasn’t available in the cafeteria. Nobody else brought food from home. McElroy breakfasted like a coach, starting his day with eggs, coffee, and dip. About football, the rookie was all business, learning his playbook first by drawing the patterns and then by taking five-step drops at night in his bedroom while describing each play aloud to himself, in detail. As McElroy was telling me about this, Sanchez ran up behind him and pulled his shorts down. “Very mature,” said McElroy, re-hoisting.

  Schottenheimer, a man committed to his Christian faith, seemed to believe that all would turn out well for the offense if the players gave enough of themselves. “It’s just concentration, men. It’s gonna get us beat. We’re asking you guys as professionals to solve the problem.”

  A person didn’t have to spend much time around Schotty to appreciate his dogged capacities. The huge whiteboards along two of his office walls now looked like pages from the OED, dense with lengthy, meticulous lists of primary and secondary plays, running plays, passing plays, protections, a full cache of screens, options for the various downs and yards-to-go, the calls that were game plan–specific. If he didn’t close the blinds in the window that faced the hallway, anybody could see the coordinator at work. There was no need to imagine Schotty at his desk in a hooded robe and scapular; the blinds were rarely employed. People passed back and forth, they stopped to chat out there, they fixed themselves snacks in the nearby kitchen. Ryan would even slip in through Schotty’s door and remove a couple of treats from the glass candy jar on Schotty’s conference table. None of it appeared to distract Schotty. Schotty told me once that the South’s Civil War generals fascinated him, and though in all the months I saw him every day, I rarely heard him digress from the topic of football, the knowledge that the campaigns and engagements of Lee, Stuart, Forrest, and the rest were of interest to him made a sort of sense. The offense wasn’t any kind of lost cause, but in Jets country, it was the unsympathetic side, the undermanned side, the side causing all the trouble. The future stability of the union was up to Schotty.

  Schotty remained patient with his players as the Jets defense had its way. “Here’s the beautiful thing,” he’d tell the offense. “It ain’t getting any harder than this. You guys should be glad you play against this every day. How would you like to be [Lions quarterback] Matt Stafford with that Tampa Two shit? Challenge yourself to pick this up.” When he and the other offensive coaches watched film, they were curious about and admiring of the defense. “This is a great blitz by Revis,” Schotty said. “I never saw it before.” They were pleased that Muhammad Wilkerson had begun to play well. Only one subject seemed to try the coordinator’s patience while watching film, the presence of Scotty McKnight. “Amazing Mark didn’t throw to Scotty here,” Schottenheimer would say. “He always throws to Scotty when Scotty’s in.”

  Sanchez, susceptible to distraction, was very different from Schottenheimer. At times Sanchez’s optimistic nature seemed to try the coordinator. When plays broke down, Sanchez sought to find something redeeming, whereas Schottenheimer, mindful that Manning, Brady, and Drew Brees never took kindly to failure, would have preferred his quarterback to be more brusque in holding others accountable.

  Still, the defining quality in Schotty—as in all the coaches, offensive and defensive—was his caring for his players. As Callahan put it, “I love ’em all. They’re my sons.” The way Schotty spoke of Sanchez was the way A-Lynn spoke of Joe McKnight, the young running back from New Orleans. During McKnight’s rookie year, A-Lynn had lost sleep over McKnight’s debilitating in
somnia and finally discovered that what was keeping Little Joe awake were the terrifying things he’d seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The dead bodies floating through his nightmares were so traumatic, McKnight had come to fear sleep. No wonder, said A-Lynn, that McKnight struggled to remember plays in the afternoon. Devlin likewise felt sympathy and affection for the tight ends he’d coached over the years, for the one who’d been abused by his father and then refused to go to school so people wouldn’t discover the bruises and send him to foster care; for the one whose father died of a drug overdose; for the one who had rare ability and no confidence. When one of his tight ends did something well during a game, Devlin, up in the coaching box, radiated with pride.

  The night before the third exhibition game, this one against the Giants, Ryan gathered the Jets at the team hotel and told them the game was being postponed because a tropical storm was bearing down on New York. “Hey, don’t worry about it,” the coach said. “We don’t care. We’ll play anybody anytime. Just be safe.” The facility would be locked and all entry pass codes deactivated so coaches wouldn’t try to drive through the storm and keep working. Film would be made available online so they could access it from home by laptop. Immediately, some of the offensive coaches began plotting to go straight to Florham Park, ahead of the storm, and stay there, locked in through the hurricane, bedding down under their desks. The mere idea of unexpected free time was dreaded—they feared not working, because working all the time was the only salve for the anxiety-driven nature of the job.