Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  While the defensive coaches met, Bart Scott, so stout against the run but a liability in pass coverage, was outside running sprints. If he wanted to remain a three-down linebacker, he knew he really would have to change. The defensive coaches were happy they’d won but displeased with how many big passing plays they’d allowed. “I think,” said DT at the meeting, “we need to ask the question, What the fuck are we doing?” But there was also plenty of praise around the table for Tony Romo’s ability to complete “incredibly difficult” throws right up until “he fucks up at times you can’t fuck up—he’s got a little black cloud following his ass.” They talked about what winning coaches in the NFL say to their just-defeated opponents, debated what the losers liked to hear least. It was agreed that “Hey, good luck the rest of the way!” was a step up from the chuffing “Hey, you guys played hard!”

  “We did cover the shit out of the Oh Shit!” noted Pettine. That settled, the coaches went to the dining hall and ate layer-cake-size victory burgers for lunch.

  In the meetings, the need for improvement was stressed. “We won the game and I’ll just stop there,” Pettine began. As he watched a languid walk-through afterward, Ryan said, “Everybody’s tired today. After emotional games, that’s the way it is.” Ryan hadn’t been able to sleep, so he and his wife had climbed out of bed and gone to an all-night diner. JoJo Wooden, the even-tempered former Syracuse linebacker in the front office, had watched the game with Tannenbaum in the GM’s box. Wooden said the boss had become so excited at one point he’d bull-rushed Wooden and bloodied his nose. All the scouting people had such Tannenbaum-box stories. Clinkscales had once nearly been shoved out the window. Since I planned to watch the Jacksonville game with Tannenbaum, I asked him if I was in danger. I hoped so; it seemed wonderful to watch alongside such passion. “I’m not proud of how I act and I apologize in advance,” Tannenbaum said. “But I can’t help it.”

  The defensive coaches spent the Tuesday after the Dallas game piecing together their plan for Jacksonville, a team with a gifted running back, Maurice Jones-Drew—Ryan called him Pocket Hercules—and an inexperienced quarterback, Luke McCown. The Jaguars relied on a predictable carapace of conservative, ball-control running but would abruptly slip on a different skin and throw long passes, often to their tall (six-foot-six), fast (forty yards in 4.8) tight end Marcedes Lewis. (To Ryan, he was Hercules.) Ryan was for bulking up the box with extra linemen or as many as five linebackers, enticing the Jaguars to throw more than they liked to. “If they can run it, they’ve earned it,” he said. Pettine began shuffling through old computer files, retrieving Ravens run-stopping formations from 2005. “That’s some good shit,” said Ryan, looking at the old drawings. “Sumbitch used to work. We had some balls then!”

  “We never actually put them in,” Pettine told him. Ryan, undeterred, said, “Well, we had some balls in the meeting room!” Tannenbaum leaned in. The Patriots had cut Jeff Tarpinian. Interested? “No way!” Ryan responded. “He said no to us.” Gently, Tannenbaum reminded Ryan that Tarpinian had been Jeff Bauer’s draft-day sticker player and that the Patriots had paid Tarpinian more than twice the signing bonus the Jets had offered. “Rex, you have scar tissue because he said no to us.”

  “Absolutely,” said Ryan.

  “We’ll think about it” was how Tannenbaum left it.

  That night, Pettine, with help from Ryan, Smitty, and O’Neil, made the Jacksonville defensive game plan. A candle was lit, the (old) computer guy’s balls were busted, a brief trip was made to the hotbox, cans of Bula were consumed, shoes were removed, the songs of the Hawaiian singer Israel “Brother Iz” Kamakawiwo’ole were played. Listening to Brother Iz sing “Starting All Over Again” was a weekly defensive-game-planning ritual; it knocked the coaches out that a man who was so large—at one point he weighed more than two nose tackles (over 750 pounds)—could croon with such dulcet sweetness. Across the hall, as Mike Devlin drew up the week’s blitz protections for the offensive line, he had the film Friday Night Lights playing—“for ambience.”

  Pettine had discovered a new run stunt, used against the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday by Baltimore’s Terrell Suggs, in which Suggs looped around the interior lineman Haloti Ngata, charged straight up the middle, and sacked Ben Roethlisberger. After drawing it, Pettine went to Callahan’s office to see what he thought. “That’s an unbelievable stunt,” Cally said. “Please don’t use it against us in practice.” Soon Pettine’s whiteboard wall grew red, green, blue, and black with new ideas. Some were Ryan’s. His role was generative—and then to insist every play would work. Pettine’s was to play the skeptical product-development chief, to say, “That gets you beat if they run the boot.” O’Neil’s was to wait until Ryan went to the kitchen to spoon a mouthful of peanut butter straight out of the jar and then ask Pettine, about the just-proposed play, “You want it?”

  Late in the evening Ryan asked, “Are we putting in too much stuff?” Pettine replied, “The fact that you’re wavering tells me to keep it simple and play football.” But simple was unappetizing to both of them. Ryan began proposing ideas about how to stop a favorite Jones-Drew run. The running back lined up split left behind the quarterback, broke left as if to begin a pass route, bent back right to take the handoff, and then cut behind the guard while the linebacker retreated in pass coverage. “I’ll draw ’em up real quick!” Ryan offered, reaching around for something to write with. “Pen or pencil?” Smitty asked. “Pen!” Ryan said. A moment later, Ryan said, “Got any Wite-Out?” Pettine offered him a pencil—“They have these things on them called erasers, Rex.” As he headed off to his office at midnight to draw, Ryan sang “My Eyes Adored You.” Across the hall, Schotty toiled alone.

  The Jets freshly signed veteran receivers Derrick Mason and Plaxico Burress were nine or more years older than Sanchez. Both expected to be frequent pass targets, as did Santonio Holmes. Sanchez had to figure out how to lead the older men, make them feel sufficiently on his side that they’d develop an on-field rhythm, stay with him, and not become disgruntled during games when the bulk of the action went elsewhere. The Jets, after all, were known as a run-first team. One approach was to go right at the situation. All the starting receivers attended the Wednesday quarterbacks’ meeting. Derrick Mason strode in wearing a black-stitched wool hat with a gold 85 on the back. Sanchez playfully attempted a de-hatting while telling him, “Don’t wear your Baltimore shit in here!”

  Mason, laughing, said, “Man, it’s not Baltimore, it’s Tennessee!”

  “That’s even worse, that crusty old thing you were wearing when I was on the couch in junior high watching you in the Super Bowl.”

  DT was worried that the Jets defense lacked aggression, lacked the necessary toughness. He was irritated with the way they’d played against Dallas, irritated with too much player bitching about play calls, irritated with poor fitness, irritated with how many pass completions his secondary was allowing in practice, irritated that when an offensive-scout-team player ran lazy routes, nobody was stepping up and telling him, Run the fucking route right because I’m getting ready for Sunday and I don’t care if you like me! He told them that good football players didn’t have many friends. They had teammates who respected them. In this way, DT was following his old coach Tom Landry’s theory of coaching, which held that you should be harder on your team when it won because the players were more receptive then. After losses, they were too busy “getting their swag back” to heed much rebuke.

  Speaking of attitude, word out of Dallas was that after battling Revis all night, the Cowboys receiver Dez Bryant had been too sore to practice on Wednesday. Revis was out there, though, as usual wearing extra layers of sweat clothes in the late-summer heat to make himself as uncomfortable as possible. He said that during the game Bryant had cussed and trash-talked him in ways “there was nothing funny about” until the end, when, abruptly, Bryant told Revis, “I respect you!” A man Revis respected was Sutton, he said, because, no matter what, Sutton kept up his daily fit
ness running.

  “Only a moron could fuck this fabulous game plan up!” is how Schotty began the Friday-morning quarterbacks’ meeting before Sunday’s Jacksonville game.

  “Hi! My name’s Mark!” said Sanchez.

  Everyone was in high spirits. Part of it was the first-week win and part of it was Kev. Days before the Dallas game, Tannenbaum had signed Kevin O’Connell to replace McElroy as the team’s third-stringer. If you were writing a movie and needed a stock character for the groom’s best man, Kev was your guy. He was bright, diligent, and friendly to all. Schotty’s good cheer also had to do with the end of a long, eremitic week. “Men,” Schotty said. “My wife’s coming in today at eleven forty-five. Get out the way!” Since she seldom saw her husband during the fall anyway, Schotty’s wife, Gemmi, was spending the season with their children at the family home in Nashville. “I’m really fired up,” Schotty said. Soon he was teasing Sanchez about parts of the Jacksonville plan, “Mark, you’re not good enough to do this!” Then he looked at McElroy. “Men, I’m hungry. You want anything?” On Schotty’s computer, the new screen saver was a photograph of McElroy flat on his back after being sacked during the Houston exhibition game.

  “I’m gonna miss the good stuff,” lamented McElroy. He looked at Sanchez. “You want anything, Mark?”

  “How about, ‘Can I get you something, Mr. Sanchez, please?’ ” After that, it was one long string of Schottenheimer sentences that began, “Don’t forget!” Many of these reminders involved the Jaguars fine linebacker Paul Posluszny. “Take that, Posluszny!” Sanchez would say in reply to each point Schotty made. The meeting ended at 8:49 and seventeen seconds. They took the main corridor at a trot and were easing into their seats when Ryan began the team meeting at 8:50.

  Working in the New Jersey suburbs meant everyone on staff drove to and from the facility. Many of the coaches were fascinated by the road habits of New Jersey drivers and would talk about the subject in ways that seemed to redound to football. During the Friday practice, Kotwica discussed signature New Jersey driver moves, like tailgating at eighty-five miles an hour; meridian jumping to escape traffic jams; ninety-mile-an-hour cutoffs; lane-to-lane slaloming; and going slowly in the far left lane and refusing to move over for a faster car but then speeding up when the faster car slipped into the right lane and attempted to pass from there. “I don’t know how much they think about risk,” the former attack-helicopter pilot said. “It’s like a football player going for a fumble. Total disregard for the body: That’s mine! Same thing out there: It’s my lane!”

  Amid the Friday practice enchantments of the defensive linemen running their weekly pass routes and making one-handed catches, their buckboard fast-hands competition, the guest-kicker contest, and the hitting-the-crossbar game, hearts were light. Cavanaugh warned me that the scene was deceptive. “It’s always happy when you win,” he said. “When you lose is the test. You see who they are, how they handle their confidence.”

  At the team hotel near the Jets stadium on the Saturday night before the Jacksonville game, the quarterbacks sat around a table in a suite that felt like a living room. They all had copies of the large call sheet of plays that Schottenheimer would work from. Sanchez read each call aloud and they discussed some of them. Schotty was, as always, thorough and engaged. With the big play sheet in his hands, he looked like a young architect visiting his building site. Some coordinators scripted the entire first quarter. Not Schotty. After the first play, which would be a run by the halfback Shonn Greene, he went by “feel”—which was the primary reason he liked to be down on the field during games rather than in the box.

  The receivers arrived. Derrick Mason was mourning his college team, the Michigan State Spartans, losing to Notre Dame. “What’s up, people,” he greeted everyone. “I’m just happy that I get to come to a job that I love even though it’s been a bad day for Spartan Nation.” After the meeting, the players headed downstairs to the offensive meeting room, where, through the wall, you could hear Pettine addressing the defense, telling them that against Dallas, “We didn’t play like us.”

  Schotty gave his offense an efficient summary of the plan, and then everyone converged to hear from Ryan, who began, “I’m so fucking jacked up I don’t know where to start!” But, he said, he hated to “sweep anything under the carpet,” and he called out the offense for the failure to score a touchdown in sixteen consecutive first quarters, dating back to the previous season. Usually when the Jets won the opening coin toss, they elected to kick rather than receive, a sign of faith in the defense. Tomorrow, Ryan said, if they won the toss, they’d receive, and he wanted the offense to “show me why.” Ryan’s thinking on pregame speeches was that when the player’s head hit the pillow that night, he should have no doubt in his mind that his coach believed the opponent was in every way the lesser team, so Ryan followed his opening remarks with a profane panegyric to the Jets offense, the Jets defense, and even Ryan himself. Of the Jaguars coach Jack Del Rio, a former colleague of Ryan’s in Baltimore, Ryan said, “I coached with that guy. He can’t hold my jock!” Afterward, everyone stopped by the dining area, and the coaches lingered after the players went up to their rooms, eating sundaes and sipping nightcaps of family-recipe Mississippi moonshine poured from a bottle given to them by David Harris.

  During Friday’s team meeting, as he did every week, Westhoff had previewed the officials who would work the game, a job he took very seriously and that was obviously necessary but whose actual utility seemed improbable to me. In real time, would players think to adjust their play because of a zebra? Nobody wanted to commit penalties. This week on Friday, however, Westy had mentioned that one of the Jacksonville game officials had played high-school football in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, for Pettine’s father, Senior. That could go a number of ways. So now, down on the field before the game on Sunday, Ryan approached the official, Scott Green. “You’re not gonna hold it against us that you played for Pettine’s dad, are you?” Ryan asked him.

  “Well, he did break a few clipboards over my head,” Green said.

  In the locker room, Schotty gathered the offense. “Men,” he said, “we’ve been challenged. Let’s do what champions do. Answer the challenge.”

  Tannenbaum greeted me as I entered his box by saying, “Nicky, don’t fuck it up or you’ll be out.” He had a yellow legal pad in front of him and was already scrawling thoughts. Bradway and Prophett were also there, wearing suits. The box had four televisions tuned to games around the league, stadium seats upholstered with buttery brown leather, and enough varnished-wood cabinetry that it felt like a law office. The Jets won the toss, elected to receive, and were driving down the field when the play clock wound down and Sanchez had to call a time-out. “Fuck! Not acceptable,” Tannenbaum cried, making furious yellow-legal-pad notations. Moments later Sanchez threw a touchdown to Holmes, and Tannenbaum was thrilled that Sanchez was now completing passes he wouldn’t have tried two years before. There followed a safety, and then a field goal. The score was 12–0 Jets. On one of the televisions, Dane Sanzenbacher, a rookie Bears receiver Tannenbaum hadn’t been impressed by during the draft, scored a touchdown. “Hey, Terry,” he called to Bradway, whose Sanzenbacher opinion had been more positive. “Why can’t we find receivers like that?” Tannenbaum was much more comfortable describing his mistakes than his victories, but he was shrewd. I’d learned recently that he’d made a team-by-team study of the personnel transactions of every NFL GM. There were some opposition front offices whose year-by-year record on releasing or trading their players spoke to such savvy that Tannenbaum didn’t do business with them.

  On the field, Wayne Hunter was struggling at right tackle for the second consecutive week. “We have to help him,” said Tannenbaum to his legal pad. Then tight end Dustin Keller missed his block on a linebacker and was thrown into Nick Mangold, who limped off the field. The Jets defense distracted everyone from these concerning developments by intercepting pass after pass. Cromartie snared two, and there wer
e others by Eric Smith and reserve linebacker Josh Mauga. On the ground, the labors of Maurice Jones-Drew were to minimal effect. For D-Lo, all this meant extra bad news. His new team was getting its stables cleaned by his former team, he himself was not playing terribly well, and from the sidelines Ryan, an inveterate in-game trash-talker, was keeping him abreast of every development: “Hey, D-Lo, how’d you like that catch? And that one!” The final score was 32–3.

  “There aren’t many like this,” Tannenbaum said. He went down to the locker room, where Santonio Holmes’s reaction was “Nice job, defense. Pretty fucking average, offense, but we’ll take it.” Schotty agreed. “We’re great in flashes and shitty in flashes and we’ve got to get more consistent.” To the coaches, the expansive victory was deceptive; nothing about the offense satisfied anyone, and many, like Schotty, were quietly worried. “Nick,” Sutton told me, “treat victory and defeat for the impostors they are.”

  According to the official NFL stat sheet distributed to the coaches, the Jets defense had held Jacksonville’s Luke McCown to the lowest opposing-passer rating in Jets history, 1.8 out of a possible 158.3. During the entire year, I never met any player or coach who knew how to calculate this convoluted statistic. (It takes into account attempts, completions, yards, touchdowns, and interceptions.) That the Jets didn’t know what passer rating actually was in no way interfered with their happiness at the passer-rating accomplishment. This seemed to me, in its way, a perfect little metaphor for a game intently watched by millions but truly understood by very few.

  Troubling news was that in this week’s game, the Jets would oppose the Oakland Raiders and their powerful defensive line without the fulcrum of the offensive line, Mangold, whose injury had been diagnosed as the dreaded high ankle sprain. The loss of the center, Pettine told the defensive players on Monday, meant: “Gotta put it on our back. We’ll gladly accept that.” Julian Posey wasn’t at the meeting. He’d just been cut. He had been late to a couple of meetings and grown drowsy in others. On the field, the coaches and personnel people thought Posey needed to prove himself to be “more than a pretty-boy corner.”