Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (13 page)

As a coach, you have to overcome that. Now, when you’re a defensive coordinator or a position coach, it’s a little easier. You can always be the good cop and the head coach is almost always the bad cop. It’s not that you’re selling the head coach out, but everybody knows the buck stops with him, so the coordinator doesn’t take all the heat. When you’re the head coach, it’s all on you—every eye is on you and every decision is on you. You’re not going to keep everybody happy in that situation. You can’t and you shouldn’t expect to. If you want everybody to like you, you’re not ready to be a head coach.

It’s like what Tennessee coach Jeff Fisher said in the 2010 season after he benched Vince Young in a game early in the season. Everybody asked Fisher if he expected Young to be happy with the decision. Fisher said no, of course not. You don’t pull a guy out of a
game because you want him to be happy. Geez, what do you think is going to happen? The key is not trying to keep everybody happy, but to keep everybody respecting you. If the players think you are being 100 percent honest and 100 percent committed, they can’t question your intention.

Let me jump to 2010 for a minute to illustrate a point. When we were chasing Jason Taylor last off-season and trying to bring him to the Jets, I knew with certainty that Jason Taylor wasn’t interested in playing for the New York Jets. Are you kidding me? Do you know the history of Taylor and Jets fans? It’s hysterical. Taylor has always been talking trash to Jets fans. He talks to them in New York; he made fun of them in Miami. I mean, the Jets were probably the last team he could have ever imagined playing for.

And I knew he really didn’t want to do it. He wanted to go back to Miami and finish his career with the Dolphins. Back in 2008, when Parcells came in, they had problems right from the start. Parcells is big on the off-season program, and he’s right about that. You need to build your team in the off-season, guys have to get in shape, and the players have to buy into what you’re doing right from the start.

That off-season, though, Taylor was scheduled to be on
Dancing with the Stars
. Okay, I’ve never had to deal with this kind of thing. We did
Hard Knocks
in 2001 when I was in Baltimore and then again this last season with the Jets, but it’s a little different. You’re in training camp, so you’re working anyway. I don’t know how I’d deal with that, but I know this: Jason Taylor did it the right way with the Dolphins. Even before Bill Parcells was hired, Taylor told the team he was going to do that show. Plus, you’re talking about a 10-year veteran. You know what Taylor is by this time in his career, and a guy like that has a lot of pride in what he does. Just look at him, you can see the pride just by his appearance. I mean, the guy looks like a movie star. He’s tall, he’s handsome, he’s a thoroughbred athlete, he’s smart, he’s well-spoken—I mean, come on, how can you deny this guy a chance to do something special, to take a shot at fame like that? He’s not going to fake it and not be in shape.

But Parcells hates that stuff. He wasn’t the coach, but that didn’t matter. He still hated it, and it made their relationship just horrible. On top of that, the team was coming off a couple of horrible seasons. They were 1-15 in 2007. Taylor wanted a trade as things got worse, and Parcells just got more and more pissed. The Dolphins were telling him they won’t trade him. Taylor wanted out. We all knew it. Heck, if we didn’t have Terrell Suggs over there, I would have been begging Ozzie Newsome to go get that guy. This was Jason-Freakin’-Taylor, one of the best pass rushers in the game. He was the 2006 Defensive Player of the Year. The Dolphins finally dealt him to Washington just before the season, but that didn’t go well. In fact, it kind of backfired, because the Redskins ended up being bad and the Dolphins went 11-5. Hey, you can never tell in this league.

Taylor did one year in Washington and then they parted company when the Redskins wanted to redo his contract. By this time I was with the Jets, but Taylor wanted to go back to Miami. I knew what was going on because I was friends with Taylor’s agent, Gary Wichard. Bill Belichick up in New England was calling him every day, leaving him messages, hoping to get him to the Patriots. Tampa Bay defensive coordinator Jim Bates, who coached Taylor in Miami, was also calling him every day. But Taylor just wanted to go back to the Dolphins. Finally, they signed him, and you’d figure that was the end of it. But then they couldn’t get along again after 2009. I don’t get it, but what the hell, it’s not my problem. I just saw a guy who probably has a couple of good years left in him, who I could use as a super backup. So I pulled out every stop. I did all my homework on everything that had happened, and I was selling Taylor hard. I wanted him to know that I
wanted
him, I
needed
him. And then, well, I’ll let Jason tell the rest of the story:

There’s another very simple, key idea I believe in: In order to succeed in the NFL, you have to have fun. You have to live by your love of this game. It’s like I tell our players: Remember back to the first time you put on the equipment, the first time you put on the uniform. That first time you put pads on, you probably had no idea how they went on, how you were supposed to wear them. You didn’t
know how to put the helmet on, how you pinch the ears out. But you went out and had a blast that first time. You were a kid and you were excited. That’s the type of team I want to have. I want to have guys be excited, where they can’t wait to come to practice, to get to the building or the stadium and enjoy playing a game. When I played, I couldn’t wait to get there. Even though this is a multimillion-dollar business, it should be the same way it was when we were kids. We have such an unbelievable opportunity here, and it’s a real blessing to get this chance. I get to be a kid every day. That’s what I want them to understand. No matter what the media says, despite all the outside pressures, this is still a game.

It’s like my mom told me after I didn’t get the head coaching job in Baltimore and I was so disappointed. She looked at me and said, “Are you going to let it bother you or are you going to go out and work as hard as you always have?” She was asking me a question, but she was making a point. This is a job I love—I couldn’t let something like that get me down. It’s good advice for anyone: Don’t let anything take away from what you’re doing. These days, everybody talks about how I have to get that next contract or get the next deal. That’s not the reason I’m doing this, that’s not what motivates me. It’s not for the contract, it’s because I love doing it. I come to work every day with a smile on my face. If you do what you love, then the money will follow.

It’s just like with Steve Bisciotti. That letter may have been a big mistake, but it was saying how much my heart is in what I do and how much joy I got out of it. People tell me that I was Bisciotti’s favorite coach on the staff and that’s the reason he made sure I stayed even when they hired John Harbaugh. If you look at it that way, maybe that letter helped. I didn’t get the exact job I wanted, but the people there respected me and knew what I was about. I can’t ask for more than that.

T
he path to becoming a successful NFL football coach is long and arduous. It’s a test to see how much you want it. Over the first 12 years of my coaching career, I worked in six different places back and forth across the country. I started in Kentucky, then moved to New Mexico, back to Kentucky, back west to Arizona, then to Cincinnati, followed by a one-year stopover in Oklahoma. The whole thing at Oklahoma was unfortunate. John Blake was the coach there and he recruited some great players, but he didn’t have a winning record in three years, so they fired him and the whole staff.

Right after that, I took a job at Kansas State, knowing that I desperately wanted to eventually get into the NFL. Then, out of the blue, I got a call from Baltimore Ravens coach Brian Billick, who I knew a little bit. Billick was calling to interview me for the Baltimore defensive line coach job, and little did I know that I’d already interviewed for it. In Billick’s words:

Billick offered me the job, and I was back in the NFL, this time on my own. My wife and my two great boys moved to Baltimore, and life was sweet.

Now, this was in 1999, and when I first arrived in Baltimore there was a lot to work with. I mean, we had some terrific guys on defense, and in my first few years we would get a handful more. I also learned a few things about not only coaching a lot of talent, but about managing a variety of personalities. As our terrific general manager (and Pro Football Hall of Fame tight end) Ozzie Newsome put it: “That defensive line room was a strong room with a lot of strong personalities. It could have gone a lot of different ways. It’s a credit to Rex and all of them that it was so successful.”

As I recall, by my second year in Baltimore, we had this great nucleus of tough-ass guys in that room and throughout our defense. Ray Lewis had already been in the league for four years, and he was the man. He was already becoming the face of the Ravens. As a
coach, you’re looking at your typical players and checking if they’re dedicated. You want to see if a player can handle the pressure, if he likes the contact, if he’s willing to hit and be hit. With Ray Lewis it’s totally different, because
he’s
looking at you—because there’s no question about his dedication; he wants to know if you like being a coach, if you’re buying into the long hours.

Now, Ray wasn’t the only guy like that, he was just the loudest and most obvious. When I got to Baltimore in 1999, that team was loaded with great pros, from Rob Burnett to Tony Siragusa to Michael McCrary. I’m not even talking about offensive guys like Jonathan Ogden and Jamal Lewis. Later, we got Ed Reed, maybe the greatest safety in the history of the game.

But when you coach guys like Ray Lewis, you’re not really coaching. With guys like that, it’s a partnership; it’s a joyful and ridiculously easy process. You show up every day and you can’t wait to work with them, because they’re going to take your ideas and go further with them than even you could imagine. The only thing you have to do with players like Lewis, Burnett, Siragusa, and McCrary is show them that you know what you’re doing and that you’re as committed as they are. If you do that, they’re with you 100 percent.

Burnett was from Long Island, a smart guy from a really great family who was also wise about people; he had street sense and intelligence. He had been in Cleveland and gone through all the crap when the Browns left there, and had come to Baltimore and become a Raven. He got the whole picture of how the league worked, how the team worked, how the coaches are supposed to handle players and how the players should carry themselves. Plus, he was just a grinder of a player. He didn’t do anything flashy as an athlete, which is why he was a fifth-round pick. But he did everything very well. There was no weakness in his game. If you have six or seven guys in your lineup like Burnett, your team is going a long way.

Then we had McCrary, who was one of these former seventh-round picks who came out of nowhere to make it. McCrary was from Virginia, and, like Burnett, he was from a great family, too. In
the 1970s, his mother had sued a nearby day-care center that refused to let McCrary attend because he was black. It ended up being a major case about race in the United States, going all the way to the Supreme Court. As a kid and a teen, McCrary was pushed hard by his parents, even to stick with football when he wanted to quit in high school. Eventually, it all came together for him. Think about what a serious kind of kid you’re talking about—this is a guy who was taught from an early age that you don’t back down from
anything
.