Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (2 page)

But in the end this was an example of the kind of distraction you have to expect from out of the blue—these things can either derail you and your team, or you can come together and learn from them.

The Sainz story began to fade after a few more days, and our full attention was on our home opener. Obviously, if I had to choose an opponent to face while opening up our new stadium and starting our season, I never would have chosen Baltimore. They are an outstanding team with a strong defense that plays with everything they’ve got each and every time they take the field. We are the exact same team. We knew going into it that this would be a competition to see who could play more physically. I thought we would kill them, I really did. We were opening up our new stadium, our fans were so into it,
and it was supposed to be a special night; unfortunately, it just never turned out that way.

The effort we gave was tremendous, but mistakes killed us. It was tough to get beat 10-9, like taking a punch in the stomach. Offensively, we struggled. We were one for 11 on third-down conversions. When you compare that stat alone to Baltimore, who converted 58 percent on third downs, we should have been clobbered. Defensively, we played solid, but penalties cost us. We took pride in playing great, physical defense, but you can’t have 14 penalties and win. You have to play smarter than that.

Coming out of that long rainy night, the thing we tried to remember is that it was going to be a long season and we could—and would—come back. I had confidence in myself and in our coaches. I knew we were going to get better; the team just had to believe in us.

I’ve always said that every time we play New England, they’re going to think they are better at two positions: head coach and quarterback. Mark Sanchez and I like to laugh about it, because, honestly, we are matching up against Bill Belichick, one of the best coaches in NFL history and the coach I personally admire the most, and Tom Brady, a quarterback who solidified his spot in the Hall of Fame years ago. Well, that might be true, but it doesn’t stop Mark and me from looking at each other before we play the Patriots and saying, “So what? We can take ’em.” I’ve always said as long as the rest of our team can overcome me as a head coach, and Mark as a quarterback, we should be able to beat New England!

Turns out I was right in Week 2. A 28-14 victory over the Patriots was big for us, and I was so proud of the true team effort that we gave. This game definitely saved us from drowning in our loss the week before. It proved just how talented this team really is. The only negative coming out of the game was an injury to Darrelle Revis, but when he went down with a pulled hamstring on a touchdown to Randy Moss, we found a way to overcome it. We held Tom Brady to a 72.5 quarterback rating, forcing him to throw two interceptions and six incompletions in a row. Mark had a 124.3 quarterback rating
and started what I would say was the beginning of a beautiful relationship with Dustin Keller. There were no individuals on the field that night. We played like a team. That’s what I was most proud of. New England is a great team; everyone knows that. But this night, we were greater.

We couldn’t make it to our third game of the season before our
“Animal House”
image was back. On September 22, at 6
A.M
., I got a phone call from Mike Tannenbaum telling me that Braylon Edwards had been arrested near the Lincoln Tunnel for a DUI. Like anyone else would be, I was pissed. By that point, I was fed up. I told Braylon and the team that I was tired of dealing with these issues. It’s embarrassing, not just to me, but to our owner. I told the guys that it’s not just about them, that there can be no selfishness on a great football team. They represent a franchise. They wear the logo of that franchise, they wear the colors of that franchise, and every week millions of fans scream for them because they are part of that franchise.

To do something like get a DUI just blew my mind. We have a Player Protection Program available to these guys to prevent situations like this from happening. Not only did it look bad on the organization that Braylon either wasn’t aware of or chose to ignore the program, but two veteran Jets, D’Brickashaw Ferguson and Vernon Gholston, were in the car with him. I was so tired of the Jets carrying around this stigma that we’re just a group of thugs. I had worked long and hard since my first day on the job to improve what people thought about the Jets. I wasn’t going to let the carelessness of a few guys ruin it, and I made sure they knew that.

Once time passed, I was able to calm down a little from the whole thing. I am able to see now that in the long run this may have been the best thing that could have happened to Braylon. He’s really a good kid, and while it’s disappointing what happened to him, sometimes you just have to take the consequences like a man.

I truly thought he had been embarrassed enough. My only punishment was choosing to sit him out for the first quarter against Miami. I heard every opinion possible about my decision. Some
people criticized me by saying that being benched for one quarter isn’t a punishment, that I don’t know how to discipline or control my team. Most people said they would have suspended him from the team right then. I just don’t work that way. I think we all mess up at some point in our lives. Now, I’m not going to let someone walk all over me, but I’m not going to turn my back on him either. Braylon was paying for his mistakes, whether the media knows it or not.

As we approached the next game, I decided to share my personal math formula with the team. Basically, I look at every divisional game as if it counts as a game and a half—which means our third game down in Miami could either put us up half a game or down two and a half. I know it’s not everyday math, but it works for us. My point is that the game against the Dolphins in Miami was not just a normal regular-season game. For us, it was huge. There is a history there.

The fact that we were 0-2 against them in 2009 is still a burr in my saddle. And on top of that, you may have heard about a minor issue I had with a couple of fans at the Pro Bowl last year, which of course made front-page news in Miami and New York. I’ll get back to that.

Needless to say, I wasn’t exactly expecting the stadium to give me a standing ovation when I took the field in Miami. Given our past, I wanted to play so hard and so tough that we’d absolutely kill them. In the end it was a bittersweet victory. I was excited that we walked out with a 31-23 win, but I wanted more from my guys. Our defense allowed 463 yards. That stat alone killed me. This game was sort of personal for me because of the relationship I’ve built with Jason Taylor, who had an amazing career with the Dolphins. The truth is he never wanted to leave Miami; they let him go. Fortunately for us, their loss was our gain in 2010.

Jason’s an unbelievable guy. He came to New York, into our building, and immediately became one of the guys. He had the best attitude and was so humble. Our victory over Miami was a memorable conquest for him. Knowing how special it was, at the end of
the game I dumped the Gatorade jug on him. It was the first time a coach had ever done that to a player. It was my own tribute to him, and one that he fully deserved.

After returning to New York and before heading to Buffalo for our fourth game, we made some minor adjustments to our roster. We released veteran Howard Green and signed Trevor Pryce. In the time I was with Baltimore, Trevor averaged a quarterback hit for every 10 snaps taken—not 10 passes, 10 snaps. The minute we heard the Ravens had released him, we saw it as an opportunity for us. A lot of people questioned why I would “violate” some apparent unspoken rule in the NFL not to sign a player that another team releases with the intention that it plans to make him active again. I must have been sleeping in Transactions 101, because apparently I missed this rule. To me, that’s part of the game. We released Howard Green and went after Trevor Pryce. That’s the risk you take. In my opinion, you don’t cut a guy as the Ravens did and roll the dice.

The matchup against Buffalo is what they call a classic trap game. We opened the season on
Monday Night Football
against the Ravens and got beat by a point. Then we had New England and then a huge Sunday-night game against Miami. So already we had three big games right out of the gate. In reality, they were probably the biggest games in the NFL at that stage of the season, and we were involved in all three of them. Now we are headed to play a team that we are physically and strategically better than, so people think it’s an automatic win. That’s a trap game.

We were in the same situation in 2009. We won our first three games against Houston, New England, and Tennessee and then played at New Orleans and ended up getting beaten. We threw six interceptions and lost. That’s why I made it a point to never look past ANYONE. We can’t assume we will get a victory, because it doesn’t always work out the way you plan. Fortunately, in this case it did. The 38-14 win over Buffalo was another great divisional win for us.

The second of the five prime-time games we had scheduled for the season was against the Minnesota Vikings right here at home.
The hype surrounding this game was inevitable due simply to the fact that Brett Favre played here for a year in 2008. So here he was, back to take on his former team, and the media storm began. Of course, in the days before our game the focus had shifted from his return to New York to a new scandal involving Favre and one of our former employees. When the story broke, it was like a Tiger Woods media frenzy all over again. To add to the hype, the Patriots made an unexpected change to their roster and traded Randy Moss back to the Vikings. I thought to myself, “Why did Belichick have to trade him this week? Couldn’t he have waited until after we played them?”

It made me laugh, but in all seriousness, if there is one person you don’t want to have to face twice it’s Randy Moss. He is a freak of an athlete, and we already had to prepare for him once that month. All I could think about was whether I was going to see another ridiculous one-handed catch like he made against us in Week 2.

Fortunately for us, the game went our way. We were dominating the game, yet not scoring touchdowns—just kicking field goals. Games like that you usually lose. Plus, you have Brett Favre on the other side and all you keep thinking is “Oh man, I know any second now this guy’s going to get hot.” We really seemed to drown everything out and focus on the goal, though. When we got an interception to wrap it up and the game was ours, I looked over at Matt Cavanaugh, one of our offensive assistant coaches, and he was smiling because I had predicted that exact ending. We ended up beating the Vikings 29-20 in one hell of a game.

Despite the off-field distractions—the hour-long delay of game, the brutal weather conditions, and a total change to our game plan because of Randy Moss—we still managed to beat what I considered, at that point in the season, to be one of the most talented football teams in the league. Brett Favre is as good as they get in terms of an experienced quarterback, and while he didn’t have a 2010 season anything like he expected, there’s still nothing more nerve-racking as a coach than watching him start to scramble.

Our next matchup was against the Broncos. Denver is a difficult
place to play for us. Not only is it a long trip, but the conditions are not anything like we are used to in New York. I don’t care what anyone says, it takes a while to get used to playing in high altitude like that. We left earlier than we usually would for this reason. To sum it up, we walked away with our fifth win of the season, beating the Broncos 24-20. We now had the best record in the league, at 5-1, and it sure felt good. Yes, we definitely made some mistakes against Denver, but I think Bill Parcells is right when he says, “The best record reflects that you are the best team.” I have always agreed with that; I was just waiting for other people to see it, too.

Coming off our bye week, we played Green Bay at home on Halloween night. The Packers handed us our second loss of the season, embarrassing our offense in the process, shutting us out, 9-0. I have to give Green Bay all the credit. They were unbelievable on that day, far better than we were. On a positive note, I thought our defense was outstanding. We held them to only 14 percent on third-down conversions. Overall, we just couldn’t pull it together as a team.

Mark Sanchez couldn’t throw the ball for the first half of the game, and then once he found his rhythm in the second half our receivers couldn’t catch the ball. Nick Folk missed field goals that he usually could make in his sleep. All the way around, we were a mess. It’s frustrating to watch a team you know is so damn good just throw it away like that.

My immediate reaction after a loss is to want to get that moment back. Unfortunately, in this league there are no do-overs. I can spend all day going over the things we could have done differently. We just had a ton of errors, like Steve Weatherford calling for a fake punt when we were fourth and 18 on our own 20-yard line. I love Weatherford; he’s an aggressive athlete, and by giving the guys an option to call their own plays on occasion, they can sometimes get too excited and act before they think.

All of those things contributed to our opening loss against Baltimore, and here they were again. What was disappointing was not only that we tarnished our record, it’s that we lost on our own turf.
Losing at your place, that’s never okay. It was the first time all year that we didn’t play like Jets, and the worst part was that our fans had to see it live.

Going up to Detroit after that loss, I was glad to see how we handled the game mentally. Sometimes after teams suffer a loss, they can become mentally defeated, which takes a long time to overcome. Not us. We were still there to take it all. We came away with a 23-20 victory in overtime. I thought this was a huge turnaround for us. This game was all about mixing it up. We took a different approach and ran the ball a lot more, which is something Brian Schottenheimer, our offensive coordinator, and I had been talking about for some time.

I thought Mark did a great job, especially on the last three drives. He was calling two plays in the huddle and our guys were ready to go. We executed well and had so much confidence in our two-minute offense. Going into overtime, Sanchez came up to me and said, “Coach, if we get the ball back, can we stay in that two-minute mode?”