Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (21 page)

—————

It should come as no surprise that Sanchez’s family helped prepare him to be a success on and off the field. Mark’s father, Nick Sr., a fireman and former army sergeant and junior college quarterback, taught his three sons the importance of leadership and put them through a rigorous workout routine to prepare them for sports. Mark’s mother, Olga, focused on teaching them the importance of manners and generosity. As an infant, Mark attended the football games of his oldest brother, Nick, in a stroller. He was the water boy when his brother Brandon played. Mark’s parents made it a point to make sure their sons could be best friends for life.

Sanchez is what our quarterbacks coach Matt Cavanaugh calls a “people pleaser”—an engaging, but maybe sometimes naïve, person who wants to help everyone and make everyone happy. In an interview, Cavanaugh once very correctly told Greg Bishop of the
New York Times
: “Quite honestly, I tell him sometimes you better learn how to say no. Sometimes, he gets distracted, and we’ve got to pull the reins in. You’re known and admired because of the game you play. You don’t want to forget that.”

—————

Mark also has openly embraced being a role model for children, especially those who share his Mexican-American heritage. At USC, he had a rabid following, with fans often wearing Mexican
luchador
wrestling masks and sombreros, and chanting “Viva Sanchez.” As Ohm Youngmisuk of the
New York Daily News
wrote, “Sanchez represents so much more than the latest Hollywood quarterback from Southern Cal who likes to surf, play the guitar and sing James Taylor songs to his mother.”

Other quarterbacks of Mexican descent have played in the NFL, including Tony Romo, Jeff Garcia, J. P. Losman, Joe Kapp, and Jim Plunkett. Yet Sanchez is the only person of Mexican-American heritage who has started at quarterback in the history of the NFL.

It’s still about winning, though.

Look what he did for us during his first two years. Twice he helped lead us to one win away from the Super Bowl. He has shown the competitive fire, the pocket presence, and the awareness that, in my opinion, make quarterbacks special. Yes, he has occasionally been mistake prone, but I could see steady progress in his ability to read defenses, to put himself in the right positions to make plays, and to trust his receivers. Mark is mature enough to take the praise with the criticism.

Mark is also a well-rounded guy. He has lots of interests outside of football, including theater. He loves attending Broadway plays—he was even a presenter at the 2010 Tony Awards.

And I’m here to tell you his character is top-notch. I’ve never seen a young man who always puts his teammates and team personnel first. He took D’Brickashaw Ferguson to the White House and equipment manager Vito Contento to watch the Mets. Sanchez bought shoes for each player he tossed a touchdown to during his rookie season.

During the off-season in July 2010, Sanchez took the initiative to work with his offense in a setting away from the team’s practice
facilities in Florham Park, New Jersey. The workouts were called “Jets Camp West” and were held in Mission Viejo, California, at Sanchez’s high school. A number of players, including receivers Santonio Holmes, Jerricho Cotchery, Larry Taylor, and David Clowney, tight end Dustin Keller, and quarterback Kevin O’Connell, participated.

Sanchez used the video cutups of each receiver from the 2009 season, and they’d meet for an hour or so to discuss how they could all improve. Mark also ordered all the equipment for the players, from their shoes to their pants to their specially designed jerseys that said “Jets West.” It looked like a crayon drawing of an airplane. Mark arranged for the players to stay at this phenomenal place.

I took my son Seth out to California to visit Mark during that time. He ran routes and even won a quarterback challenge over Sanchez in one of the little contests Mark had set up for the guys to work on to sharpen their skills. They’d throw up Gatorade bottles and had to hit them with the ball on the way down. It takes a perfect throw. They also had to hit the goalpost crossbar. Seth hit it two times in a row to win it. It was just hilarious to watch.

Mark made sure all the players also enjoyed some good leisure time together, playing golf and attending Major League Baseball’s All-Star festivities in nearby Anaheim and the Espy Awards. You name it and Sanchez did it. He had everything arranged to help HIS team grow together.

That’s Mark—he’s all about doing the little things. And Mark knows that little things add up to big things. He’s a winner.

Y
ou have to do two things after you take over an organization. First, get rid of the guys who don’t fit your system, be it mentally or physically. Second, bring in guys who do fit your system. Two guys I dumped in a hurry were tight end Chris Baker and linebacker Eric Barton. Take Barton, for example: His idea of trying to motivate Vernon Gholston was to rip the guy, yelling at him all the time about how he wasn’t giving enough effort, that he wasn’t playing hard, that he wasn’t measuring up. That’s not showing respect. Those guys never respected the guys they played with. They were negative guys, and I’m not going to have negative guys on my team. That was the message I got from the people I talked to in our organization.

When I arrived in New York I used a different tactic to learn about our players. I talked to lots of people, like our equipment guy. You’d be surprised at how much the equipment guys on a team know about the locker room and what the players are really like—and no one ever asks their opinions. It was the same concept that the Jets used when they were looking at the head coach candidates. I talked
to the people who were around the players the most. I wanted to see how the players treated other people on staff, the people who have to help them every day—whether it’s getting a pair of socks for practice or getting a DVD of some plays they want to study when they go home. If you just talk to the players you only get one view, and players have a hard time being really straight about the guys they play with—and that’s understandable. In fact, it’s kind of important for those guys to really stick together, because they’re the ones who fight together. They have to deal with the little things they don’t like about each other and still be able to work as a unit, to trust each other. That’s why I had to ask around to get the whole picture. It was hard, because when I was about to make some of the moves I knew were necessary, some guys came up to me and said, “Rex, you’ll love that guy. He’s a great player.” No, I knew what kind of leaders they were by that point and I didn’t want them on my team. Our first year, we got rid of about nine players on the defense, including three or four starters.

Clearly, those decisions didn’t hurt us, because we ended up No. 1 in the league in defense. After the 2009 season, I traded Kerry Rhodes, another guy who didn’t fit. He was a selfish-ass guy. He wouldn’t work, and he was a Hollywood type, flashy and needing attention. I don’t mind flashy, but your work ethic had better back it up. He was a talented SOB, that’s for sure, but he wasn’t one of us. So we traded him. For most of those guys I let go, I didn’t even wait to see if I could trade them; I just got rid of them. What you have to understand is that we’re not running a day-care center here with the Jets. I’m not trying to have a group of guys who sit around the camp-fire singing songs. Heck, if you saw
Hard Knocks
, then you know there probably aren’t too many day-care centers that would allow me in the front door these days. I can see it now: preschool teachers cringing as they imagine my pep talk: “Hey, kid, that’s a great f—ing finger painting.” I will say this about any preschool I might go to—I know we’d have a great time. Hit the playground and wrap things up on a positive note … “Let’s go snack!” I’d be a hero.

Anyway, my point is this: There are times you have to correct people by getting on them, really laying into them; however, you had better have a strong foundation of positive thought so they’ll be able to deal with it when you give them an earful. If you’re always telling a guy, “You suck,” how long do you think it’s going to be before he tunes you out? Really, that kind of ripping approach just doesn’t cut it unless a guy trusts you and believes you’re trying to help him.

The toughest decision I had to make coming to the Jets in 2009 was about Brett Favre. After I got the Jets job in January, I had a conversation with Favre and told him I’d be happy to have him come back. Part of me really wanted to coach Favre and I think we would have been great with him, even for the $15 million he was supposed to cost us if we kept him; but he said he was retiring, and I could just feel that he didn’t want to play here again. It was obvious he wanted to play for Minnesota so that he could try to get his revenge on Green Bay. It’s funny—when I got the job, Adalius Thomas, who played for me in Baltimore and then went up to New England as a free agent, and knows Favre really well, was telling Favre, “You’re crazy, you should want to play for Rex with the Jets.” But Favre wanted to stick it to Green Bay. I get it. He told us “No” in February and announced on February 11 that he was retiring. (Not that anybody in the media believed it.) In fact, I remember Woody Johnson joking that Favre was like that Sears commercial where he wants to buy a TV but can’t make a decision.

Anyway, we had come to the conclusion that we were going to go get a young quarterback in the draft. As long as we could do that, we’d let Favre go after the draft, and that’s what we did. Now, if we hadn’t drafted Mark Sanchez, I would have flown down to Mississippi just like Brad Childress did, and I would have brought Favre back to New York no matter what it took … but that wasn’t really our first choice.

We didn’t want to wait for Favre and have our whole team held hostage by his off-season routine. We needed leaders in the locker
room right away, not in a few months. I understand that Favre sits around in the off-season and doesn’t know what he wants to do about the upcoming season. Heck, I know plenty of veteran players who don’t want to be around for the off-season. Really, how much more is a guy like Ray Lewis or some other 10-year vet going to get out of the entire off-season program? But you see, the off-season is about everybody being there and working together. You develop many of the relationships between guys by having them work together. Football is a game about collective suffering. It’s about guys putting the pressure on each other to fight through the pain so they can make sure they’re ready in games. For a quarterback, there’s even more of that. You have to be in synch with your receivers and understand where they want the ball. The other thing is (and you hear this especially from the offensive coaches), the quarterback has to be your hardest worker. He has to be the guy who is first in and last out—especially a guy like Favre, who is the face of the team. If he doesn’t think he has to put in the time, what are the rest of the guys going to think?

I give Favre a lot of credit for what he ended up doing in 2009 with the Vikings, coming in a few weeks before the season and putting up a career year. Trust me, there were times I looked at that and wished we had an experienced guy like that. I love Sanchez and at the time I knew he was going to be great, but there are always going to be growing pains as a young player develops into a seasoned veteran. I mean, in 2009 Favre threw seven interceptions the entire regular season. Sanchez threw five in one game. That’s the way it is in this league for a rookie. Favre has seen everything in this league. Sanchez was four years old when Favre was first drafted. Sanchez is now well on his way with two terrific seasons under his belt, and I’ll say this: If he plays long enough and well enough that he feels like he should miss an off-season, well, then we picked a good player. I won’t agree with him and I’ll tell him to get his butt in here, but you could have worse problems with the quarterback.

Getting back to 2009, after we made the decision about Favre, I had to work on getting some leaders in here. Enter Bart Scott, Jim
Leonhard, Marques Douglas, and Howard Green. These were the guys from Baltimore who I brought to the Jets during my first year here. The next year, I got Trevor Pryce, a great veteran player who was with me in Baltimore and was a first-round pick in 1997 by Denver. Those first four guys, though, were especially important as I took over the team—and not because they were all great players. Douglas and Green were cut the second year, in fact. It was because they all have a certain toughness about them. They have the right mentality. It’s a lunch-pail mentality, like those guys who work manual labor their entire lives. They show up for work no matter how bad things are. They might not be feeling good, they might have had a big argument with the wife that morning—whatever it is, they will show up ready to work. They were a lot like Siragusa, Burnett, and McCrary in Baltimore. You have to have that work ethic on a football team. As we say around here all the time, “Your talent sets the floor, but your character sets the ceiling.”

Every team relies on its most seriously talented players. You have to have those game changers, those five or six guys on your team who can make a play. It’s hard to have a team that’s just about the stars, though; you have to have guys who are going to go to work and set that tone. It’s great if those guys are also your stars, but that doesn’t happen all the time. That’s why you have to have guys like Scott, Leonhard, Douglas, and Green. Obviously, Scott was the most important guy to bring aboard the Jets, because he’s both a star player and a grinder—which is why we spent $48 million on a six-year contract to get him and why I was at his house at midnight the second free agency started. Scott is a kind of kindred spirit for me. He’s the reflection of everything I believe a player should be and how one should act. I like to tell him he’s my brother-from-another-mother. He’s a guy who is all in every day and doesn’t hold back on anything he has to say. At one point, he said I am the Charles Barkley of the NFL. You can’t help but love someone who sees you that way!

In fact, in an interview Scott once said, “You ask us a question, be prepared for the answer. We ain’t going to bullshit nobody. I don’t
have time to live that lie or live that story by trying to be somebody who don’t want to beat the hell out of somebody, that don’t want to knock a quarterback out of the game. Why lie? That’s why I play, because it’s fun.” Man, is that ever music to my ears! My other favorite comment from him ever was during the off-season after he signed in 2009, when he told the New York media we were “swaggerlicious.” If you look it up online, you’ll find the term in the “Urban Dictionary” and Scott gets credit for it. I think
Webster’s
is putting that one in the next edition of their dictionary; if not, they should. What a great word.