Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  Up in his box, Tannenbaum had plainly forgotten all about what had happened in the locker room. During the coin toss he talked of “the angst running through my body.” The game began, and Kyle Wilson dismantled the Woody boot; “Just how we drill it,” as O’Neil said later. Almost everything went the Jets’ way. They won 27–11, and the Bills’ only touchdown came at the very end. The defense was physical, with David Harris especially on point, making an interception, defending another pass, stuffing the run. Calvin Pace faked a blitz, dropped into what had looked like single coverage, and intercepted a Fitzpatrick pass. Even 38 Special worked, going for twelve yards, whereupon Ryan announced his retirement as an offensive play-caller. Brad Smith had been telling the truth: the Bills seemed to have given up the Wildcat. One of the privileges of charter flights was that you could keep your eletronic devices turned on while up in the air. En route to New Jersey, everyone around me followed the progress of the Patriots game against the Giants, and when New England lost, there was much happiness. The Patriots and Jets were now both 5 and 3 and would play again on Sunday night.

  As the coaches watched the Bills film on Monday, their favorite plays all involved Maybin. First Pettine froze the film to reveal Maybin checking his wristband while in his three-point stance at the line. Nobody had ever seen this happen before. Many NFL players had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Maybin was taking ADHD to a higher level. After the game had come another first. There were always five team airport and hotel buses. Each week Maybin rode on bus three. Leaving the locker room, by mistake, he stowed his bag on bus one and boarded it. Realizing his error, he got off and boarded bus two. Wrong again. So Maybin found his way to bus three. Sinking into his seat, he remembered his bag was still back on bus one. Off the bus again to retrieve it and place it on… bus four. Back onto bus three. Oh no! Once more unto the breach. At last bag and Maybin came to rest on bus three. Sutton gazed at Mike Smith. “Coach,” he said. “There’s only one solution—wristband!”

  The film advanced and everyone cringed as Fred Jackson blindsided Marcus Dixon with a crack-back block. Later, when Jackson complained to the officials about a noncall near the Jets sideline, the Jets coaches could be seen communicating residual indignation. “We were all talking a gang of shit to him,” said Carrier. “Even Sutt was talking shit.” Proclaimed Sutton proudly, “I told him to go back to Coe College!” What probably made them happiest was that Bart Scott earned a game ball. Much as they sometimes “dog-cussed” Scott’s film, they loved the man.

  At the Monday team meeting, the players gingerly lowered themselves into their seats. They would play the Patriots Sunday night and then, on Thursday night, face Tebow and the Denver Broncos in Colorado. “Take care of your body and lay it on the line the next couple of weeks,” Ryan told them. Then, after two punishing games in succession, he announced, would come the rest and reward. They’d have Thanksgiving off, “because, quite honestly, I want some green-bean casserole!”

  Thanksgiving was a workday in the NFL. There were coaches who’d never once celebrated the holiday with their families. It was, after Super Sunday, the most prominent date on the league calendar, and if you weren’t playing, you still had the big Thursday practice prior to your Sunday game. Just like Ryan, the players said, to give them that day off and to do it far enough in advance that they could make plans for how to spend it.

  In the defensive meeting, Pettine was still chortling over Pace’s interception of Ryan Fitzpatrick. “Old Harvard,” he said. “Guess he didn’t see that coverage in the Ivy League! Now next time we play them, we line up three strong and bring them all.” Maybin was praised for his play and questioned about his wristband checking. “I was just being sure,” he said, sounding almost shy. Then he told Smitty, “This was the most fun I’ve had since high school.”

  DT said he’d heard that I’d been “jumped” by Tannenbaum in the Buffalo locker room and he was delighted by the little situation, stifling mirth and brimming with manufactured outrage. “Man, it makes no sense,” he said. “I played a lot of years in the league and everybody handles anxiety differently. If he can’t handle it, go sit his ass in a corner. You! Nick, you can’t affect anyone because what affects a game, where it can be won or lost, is in the preparation that goes on all week.” Carrier approached me with similar sentiments and others did too. I appreciated their kindness, but these overtures embarrassed me. I knew that it hadn’t been personal with Tannenbaum. It was a blunt-force-trauma world, and the boss had a lot going on in it.

  Tannenbaum was not Ryan, but he was a charismatic person himself. In the interests of winning, he was willing to cede all that to the cause, to be the authority figure while Ryan sailed on the good ship bonhomie. Yet I thought, as I had before, that it must be challenging for Tannenbaum to work with someone who was as self-confident and good at making other people love him as Ryan was. All season, it inevitably seemed to slide to Tannenbaum when trouble arose. When I asked him about this, Tannenbaum nodded and said he’d spoken of this bind with Ryan. “I told him, ‘I can’t always be the villain. You’re always recess!’ ” Tannenbaum often seemed lonely to me during road trips. He’d just won his fiftieth game as a GM. The only person who had thought to congratulate him was Michelle. That was exactly the sort of detail Tannenbaum himself would never have overlooked if the issue at hand was someone else’s success. He was the rare GM who sent notes and gifts to other GMs when their teams did extraordinary things.

  It occurred to me that it would have been easy for the Jets coaches to make me a pariah: the GM had yelled at me. They did the opposite, maybe because everybody’s against the boss in life and for sure because that’s how the team worked. People were always having at each other and then finding a way to console each other, which made the group stronger and the skin thicker. Jeff Weeks, however, seemed pleased at what had happened to me. “I’m always in trouble,” he said, explaining that it was a relief to have someone else in the chop. I felt what he was saying. I could never shake the idea that it must be painful, no matter how much money you were making, to hold a job many colleagues believed you had because your friend loved you and wanted you beside him. Or maybe it wasn’t painful. With Weeks, it was difficult to tell.

  The thirty-four-call Patriots defensive game plan took the defensive coaches twelve hours to produce, from 3:45 in the afternoon on Tuesday until 3:45 a.m. on Wednesday. Much of that time was spent re-creating established calls for personnel groups that had not previously used them. This gave the very familiar a fresh look and was more or less the defensive version of what the Patriots did every week with their offense. There were new personnel groups, including Trojan, which used only one linebacker, Bart Scott. If the Patriots ran, “Bart plays football.” If they threw, “Bart chooses somebody and hits them.” It was a long day into a long night, but not unlike other game-plan sessions.

  Before I began spending time with the team, I might have expected the Jets coaches to fill the week before they played the Patriots with an unusual amount of preparation, commensurate with the importance of the game against their primary rivals. Now I’d seen that football didn’t work that way. For every game, the coaches did all they could within the context of the established schedule. They had to eat and they had to sleep a little, and other than those inconveniences, the coaches were committed to whatever was the current cause. Football fans thought of the games as infrequent and awaited them impatiently. For the coaches, it was sometimes all they could do to keep up with time’s rapid passage. To them a game, any game, was inseparable from what came before it, the actual hour of play merely the conclusion to the latest installment of the serial narrative they were creating all the time.

  “All right, men, Patriot week,” Schotty began the Wednesday-morning quarterback meeting. He said he would first show them some film because “gotta learn to swim before you go into deep water.”

  “What about swimmies?” asked Sanchez. Soon he was referring to the Patriots l
inebacker Rob Ninkovich as “my Russian friend.” The man was loose.

  Schotty played film of the Patriots defensive backs reading the quarterback’s drop, how once he took a fourth backward step, the backs fled into deep-zone coverage, willing to bend, not break. In this way, they were the opposite of the Ravens. “Expect disguise, disguise, disguise,” Schotty said, because Bill Belichick thrived on calling something different from whatever he displayed. Schotty urged Sanchez not to get caught up pre-snap when the Patriots tried to mess with him by showing dummy formations, false coverages.

  The Patriots, Schotty told his players, had cut the talented lineman Albert Haynesworth. It was just like Belichick to do that. At the beginning of the season, he’d let go Brandon Meriweather, a Pro Bowler whom Ryan had then considered Belichick’s best defensive back. Haynesworth had a history of poor conditioning and confrontational behavior. Belichick was always willing to take on a hard case, but if you didn’t reform, you were history. “Nobody picked him up?” Sanchez asked.

  “Not yet,” Schotty told him. “Lot of baggage there, brother.”

  Ryan, who lived for big games, walked into the team meeting and approached his lectern with a purpose. He carried a wooden baseball bat roughly the size of a loblolly pine. David Harris, he announced, was the AFC defensive player of the week. Then Ryan said, “This is the game! They’re pissed off. We’re pissed off. You want to know how to be successful in a big game? It’s all preparation. Do the little things.” To beat a team as good as New England on a Sunday, the head coach said, you had “to beat them every day.” Sutton leaned toward me and whispered, “Both teams will be ready. One team will be prepared.” Then Ryan said, “Both teams will be ready. One team will be prepared.” Sutton grinned. “I’m telepathic,” he said. (Sutton occasionally helped the boss with his speechwriting.) “This,” Ryan concluded, “is a bring-your-bat game.” (The flourishes were all Ryan.)

  Pettine told the defense all he cared about was that they played fast, physical football. Question: How had the Steelers defeated the Patriots two weeks ago? Answer: “It was violent.” The thirty-four-call plan might soon become twenty-four calls. Whatever it took. “Physicality,” Pettine said, echoing Ryan, “is not something you just turn on come Sunday.” He urged them not to make anything easy for Tom Brady because even when life was hard for him, he was “still fucking Tom Brady,” and he’d hurt you some.

  Pettine was methodical as he reviewed the calls, explaining not only what he wanted but also each new call’s relationship to previous iterations. Everything was a version of something they knew well. A few calls he’d been saving for weeks. One call had been created for the first New England game but never used; there’d been a pre-snap penalty, after which Pettine changed the look. To counter the Patriots’ many horizontal routes, the defensive coordinator showed precisely where along the grid the Jets linebackers could expect to intersect with the low crossers. He peppered his descriptions with what the players’ thoughts would be: “David asks, Whose helmet can I knock off? Whose ribs can I damage?” It was very exciting.

  Afterward I bumped into Sutton upstairs, where he had just hunted down a Diet Pepsi. It wasn’t yet 11:00. “Getting started early?” I asked. “Big one!” Sutt said, gesturing to his drink. “Got to do the little things.”

  At practice, to join the scout team and play Wes Welker for the week, Tannenbaum had brought in off the street Dexter Jackson, a small, quick receiver who’d once been a Tampa Bay second-round draft choice. But although Sanchez shouted “Boom!” each time he completed a pass, and although Revis made three interceptions, the play was generally ragged. Why? Nobody could say. It was one of the cryptic aspects of the sport: good practices could not be willed. Afterward, with the team circled around him at midfield, Ryan was as angry as I had ever seen him. Usually he preached the need for balance in the players’ lives. Not now. He spoke a philippic about “nothing, I mean nothing in your life this week” being more important “than this game.”

  Reviewing the Patriots film together, Cromartie and Revis were as struck as Pettine was by the contrast between Brady under pressure and Brady with excellent protection. “He gets ready to feel the pressure,” said Cro, “and when he doesn’t, he gets calm.” Brady had, Cro thought, “that nervousness in him.” Most quarterbacks did. It was just that Brady was usually so icily poised that the vulnerability in him was more striking when you saw it. Revis was still lamenting Welker’s big catch in the first game: “I don’t know how he caught that. I saw it and thought, Pick! and then it went”—with his hand, he made a parabola. “Okay,” he said. “I’m out. I’ve already seen all this ten or twelve times.” Cro said he could understand how Rev felt. On film, the Patriots were doing “the same thing over and over. It’s not even different formations. It’s just different personnel groups. The exact same thing with different people running it.” He shook his head. As a football purist, Cro admired the effort that went into doing a few things well and here was the essence of the condition.

  Julian Posey appeared. He’d decided after walk-through he would try “creeping into that room to soak up a lot of that knowledge.” Cro welcomed him and soon was tutoring Posey as the film ran. “Watch: any time two release outside, one’s coming inside.” Then he was comparing the Patriots offense to his own. “This is what makes them so good. They put everybody in the quarterback’s vision. He can see where everybody’s gonna be. Our offense, if they run two posts, they run the other guy coming back. Mark can’t see him—it’s not in his vision.”

  Posey was fascinated by Brady’s skill. “He’s so smooth, so subtle with it,” Posey said. It seemed to Posey that Chad Ochocinco, the flashy veteran receiver the Patriots had traded for, “isn’t the same on the Patriots.”

  “He’s confused, man,” Cro said, agreeing with Posey. “He doesn’t know what to do!” Cro packed his things into his patent-leather backpack, gave Posey a hug, and left.

  Posey began talking about Revis. Revis, he felt, had “changed the game. In a game that’s all passing, in a league where passing’s deemed unstoppable, he’s the one stopper. You can’t coach a player not to feel rushed or feel beat. You feel beat and you rush yourself, but Darrelle knows there’s always time. Everybody spends money to be fast and strong. What he has are the priceless things: eyes, feet, balance, awareness. How often do you see Revis fall?” I said that, come to think of it, I never had. Posey nodded. “People say to me, ‘You just say he’s the best because you play with him.’ No! I see a simple catch made on him in practice and everybody says something. LT too.” He went on, now speaking of Tomlinson. “You can really tell what he was. It’s that great balance. I don’t know what he sees behind that visor, but he always makes the right moves. He’s got a great sense of a crowded space. And if LT was right here running and I threw a dime at his feet, he could cut off that dime.”

  We spoke for a while longer. The rookie cornerback told me about his brother in Brooklyn who worked for an artisanal pickle company and had also researched questions for the TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. His brother was in Williamsburg—hipster heaven!—a neighborhood teeming with fabulous youth, fabulous eats, fabulous hangs, fabulous kicks, and fabulous threads, a fabulous place to be young and wide open to the world, as Posey was. But Posey didn’t really plan to see the brother until after the season. All he wanted to do now was become better at football.

  Meeting with his quarterbacks on Thursday, Schotty was completely engaged. During one call discussion, he suddenly left his feet and tackled two chairs. From the rug, still riffing on the coverage, the coordinator looked up, saw a maintenance man passing by outside in the hallway, said, “There’s Juan!,” and kept going, concluding, “It’s textbook 1935 Bill Belichick football. Just sayin’, he reads a lot of books, men.”

  There was a lot of energy in the room. Sanchez called me Worm and then, mimicking my voice, he said, “That’s not my name!” Having gotten me to laugh, he then addressed Cavanaugh as Cavvy, the way Sc
hottenheimer often did, and Cavanaugh told him evenly, “You can call me Coach.” O’Connell was teased about his unmanly love for drinking low-fat chai lattes, leading him to challenge Brunell to meet him on the fifty-yard line, which led Sanchez to cry, “Show ’em your blitz eyes, Kev!”

  Pettine had told the other offensive and defensive coaches he believed he’d had an off game the last time against the Patriots and he was determined to make up for it. In the defensive meeting, Pettine had a new delayed blitz to show the players that featured so many coverage rotations, fake overloads, hesitations, and compensatory drops, it looked like severe weather on the Doppler radar report.

  Once again practice was ragged. Afterward, Ryan sternly said that everyone needed to step it up and that Marquice Cole and Donald Strickland were being counted on and needed to do better. The two singled-out defensive backs were standing beside each other, and as soon as Ryan spoke their names, David Harris went to them and put a hand on each of their shoulder pads.

  How hard was Sutton working? In the morning he made coffee, forgot that he’d made it, and made coffee again. “Big game,” he said. “It’d be a big one in a parking lot!”

  In the Friday quarterbacks’ meeting, Sanchez told of how every Thursday night he went by himself to a local restaurant to eat a late dinner and study the flashcards that he always made to memorize the week’s game plan. Last night, the waitress had come to take his order just as Sanchez flipped to a new card and discovered that—oh no!—somebody had slipped in a card decorated with an enormous red dong. So, was it Kev? Not Kev. Bru? Not Bru. Cavvy? Him neither.

  Later in the morning DT met with the defensive backs and told Posey he wasn’t moving well, saying, “You look like you’re carrying a picnic basket out there on your way to Grandmother’s house.” As a practice-squad guy, Posey wouldn’t be playing in the big game against New England, but if you were sitting in front of DT, he was going to coach your ass.