Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (22 page)

But the thing I really appreciated is what he said when he signed with us, explaining why he wanted to come to this team rather than go back to Baltimore, even though the money was pretty much the same:

That’s powerful for me to hear. It means that my message is getting through and that’s exactly the kind of enthusiasm for the team that I’m trying to create. I want people like that to be around the program I’m building, because they know I’m going to do everything I can to help them and I’m going to pull in other people—assistant coaches, trainers, and so on—to do the same. This is a total team
approach. I’m not just about making sure we take care of the stars or the headline-grabbers.

Now, some people might think that some of Scott’s statements are negative, but they don’t get it. First of all, the positive stuff always outweighs anything else; he’s such a joyful guy at every moment. Second, the stuff he’s saying stops short of being really personal. What he’s doing is testing a guy, but he’s not going to humiliate a guy. It’s just competitive stuff.

During the entire off-season and into training camp in 2009, Scott was on Mark Sanchez’s case, our rookie quarterback, every day—just pushing the kid’s buttons to see how competitive Sanchez would be. Again, it wasn’t ever personal or mean. He would just say stuff to challenge Sanchez like: “Rookie, what you got? You gonna make a play or you gonna fold?” And what happened? One day in practice, Sanchez looked across the line, told Scott to shut the hell up, and hit a big pass in a situational drill. Everybody was laughing; it was great! That was when we all knew that Sanchez wasn’t going to get scared. He might struggle a bit as he learned the ropes, but he wasn’t going to fold just because some veteran was talking trash to him. I talked to Scott about that one after the practice and he was grinning as he told me how much he loved it. That’s what he was trying to get out of Sanchez, and it worked. Nobody will fight for a teammate more than Bart Scott. That’s why I wanted him so badly. Our team needed that more than they needed Ray Lewis’s intensity. Trust me, Ray Lewis is great, but like I said, he represents the Ravens. He doesn’t represent the Jets. We needed guys who would represent us—who would bring out the best not just in themselves but in the other guys in the locker room.

The other thing you’ll notice about the guys we brought in early—Scott, Leonhard, Douglas, and Green—is that they’re all guys who were either undrafted or were late-round picks who bounced around. Green was a sixth-round pick in 2002 who didn’t make it as a rookie and didn’t play for anybody in 2006. Scott, Leonhard, and Douglas were never drafted. They all had some big defect in the view
of scouts, but the bottom line was that they could all play football. When I brought them in, I wasn’t thinking about our similarities, but when somebody pointed out our parallels, I sat back and really thought about it: Maybe I was drawn to them as players because I’m a guy like that, a guy who has been passed over a bunch of times and then finally got a chance to prove himself.

Those guys made it the hard way into this league. Scott’s story is a great one—you may have heard it. During his junior year at Southern Illinois, he got into this argument with the defensive coordinator, a guy named Mike Vite. Vite got on Scott for eating an apple during a meeting. It might have even been during a game. That’s a new one on me. In fact, during games, you want your players to have a piece of fruit so they don’t get dehydrated. Whatever the case, Vite went nuts over it and suspended Scott for the final six games of the season. Seriously. After that season, the whole staff was fired and the school brought in Jerry Kill, who ignored all those stupid warnings about Scott, instead calling him a leader and a great player. Kill really promoted the heck out of the kid, Scott made all-conference, and we eventually signed him in Baltimore as an undrafted guy. It was a sweet move for us, and (just so you know what Scott is like) every game day he puts an apple in his locker to remind him of that whole incident from his college days. This is another thing you should know about Scott: After he got to the NFL and was in the league for three years, he went back to Southern Illinois and ended up getting his degree in economics. And that was from a kid who didn’t even qualify academically coming out of high school in Detroit. Now, that’s determination.

In fact, with each of those early guys I sought out for the roster, nobody gave them much of a chance coming out of college and they made it because of their own grit. Nothing was handed to them. They had an intangible hunger that never let them give up. That’s what I’m looking for. When you get to this level, you have to have ability, but you can’t make it on ability alone. You have to really love the game. Well, I take that back. Some guys have so much ability
that they can get by without really buying in. Sam Adams, who I talked about before, he didn’t have those intangibles to get everything out of himself. You had to really work him. But trust me when I say that guys like that are the exception. At any time in the league, you might have 10 guys who are so incredibly gifted that they can get by without loving the game. But that’s it. It’s just too hard to get through all the pain and hard work without having passion for it.

That’s where you get to a guy like Leonhard, who has more passion and pride than most locker rooms full of players. Here is a guy who is all of 5-foot-8, maybe 190 pounds on a good day, but he won’t back down from anything. When we signed him in Baltimore in 2005, we already had Ed Reed, maybe the greatest free safety in the history of the game. We were pretty set at the other spot, too. We were in talks with Leonhard, and he wasn’t sure about signing with us because he didn’t know how he was going to get a job on a team with such great safeties already. I told him, “You’re going to make it, because we
keep
good football players.” That was all he needed to hear. Sure enough, one of our safeties got hurt, and Leonhard came in and played great for us, just pouring his heart into his game.

Now, with the Jets, Leonhard is a guy that the rest of the defensive backs really look up to. You see him with Darrelle Revis and Antonio Cromartie, and they’re always asking him all sorts of questions. The same goes with Brodney Pool, a free-agent safety we brought over from Cleveland. Those guys just know that Leonhard—even though he’s a little guy who doesn’t look like much—is a player who can help them. They’re loyal to him, because they know he’s going to be loyal to them and help however he can. That filters down to everything we do and everybody we hire. We have guys who want to get into coaching, like former defensive lineman Larry Webster. Webster is a great guy. He was part of the rotation of our championship team in Baltimore. He had his problems with substance-abuse issues, but he battled them. That can be a daily issue for some guys. Still, I’m going to be loyal to a guy like Larry, because he’s one of my guys and he has been loyal to me. I’ve brought him in for an
internship three times. I’m going to keep working with guys like that, developing their pride in themselves and in our program.

The most amazing part of this game is really all the different types of people you run into. There was a kid who we brought in one time, he had just a horrible personal life. The dad was never in his life; his grandmother went to jail for close to 40 years for selling drugs; then his mother went to jail for 20 years for selling drugs. He went to live with his aunt, but she ended up marrying a guy who the kid just hated and couldn’t stand to be around. Then he went to live with some other family that took him in, but there are drugs there, too, and he didn’t want to be around that. He ended up living with his uncle, who is a pastor, and he finally had a chance at something like a normal life. And then the kid ended up in college and being a first-round draft pick. I look at young men like that and just shake my head in amazement. He had an opportunity to quit or go so many different directions, but he was strong enough mentally to stay with it. Guys like that are an inspiration to me.

At the same time, you run into some very tough situations when you go through cuts, because there are guys who have fought through terrible backgrounds but who just aren’t good enough to keep on the team. That is pretty emotional. As much as you try not to get emotional about it, sometimes you can’t help but worry about what’s going to happen. Some of these guys have nothing else. I don’t just mean no team to go to; I mean they have no real prospects if they can’t play football. These are guys who have put everything they have into it, but once they’re cut they will have nothing to show for it in the long term. They’ve dropped out of school early; they’re not on track to get a degree; they have a terrible home life they were hoping to escape—all those types of things. That’s rough, because you just know the kid is going to struggle once he leaves the team. Those are the toughest cuts. Some of those guys will call you back later, and I try to talk with them whenever I can. They know I was fair with them. They might not agree with me initially, but they all know I did
what I had to do for the team, and eventually they understand that the choices I made were right.

We had one young man in training camp in 2010, Kevin Basped—a big, strong kid with a great-looking upper body. He was 6-foot-4 and 254 pounds, just an ideal project as an outside linebacker in our system. And he could play. We talked about him a lot in
Hard Knocks
, because he was such an interesting player. But beyond that, he has an amazing story. When he was 14, his older brother (who was basically standing in for his dad) was shot in the face and died. When he was 19, his sister died of diabetes. He grew up in this terrible neighborhood in Sacramento, with every bad story you can imagine. When he was being recruited by Arizona State, the coaches were visiting his home and had to duck and hide inside because gangs started shooting outside. When you think about all the odds he beat, it just tugs at your heart. The problem was that he probably had more fluid drained from his knees than a ship taking on water. It was clear to all of us that his body was not going to make it on the field. As it was, he went undrafted because his knees were bad. Then he got here and everything that the doctors said could be the worst-case scenario happened. In a case like that, you’re not just telling a guy he’s not good enough—which is not exactly the case with him, since he had some ability—you’re really having to tell him that it’s over. His dreams are shot—he can’t play in the league. We let him go, as much as we hated to do it, and he ended up playing for a team in the United Football League. He loves it, but part of me wants to say, “Son, what are you doing? You’re going to need a knee replacement at 30!” And now he’s playing for a league where he’s not going to get that kind of stuff covered by insurance.

You get guys like that and they keep coming back, thinking they’re going to make it, that they’re going to be the one who finally breaks in. And every once in a while, you get one who does make it, like Pittsburgh outside linebacker James Harrison. From 2002 to 2004, he got cut four times—three times by Pittsburgh, then once
by us in Baltimore after we brought him in late in the season and then sent him to play in the World League for Germany. After we let him go, the Steelers signed him again. He makes their team, finally, and helps them win two Super Bowls, wins the Defensive Player of the Year in 2008, and returns an interception 100 yards for a touchdown in the Super Bowl that season. And, of course, he was a formidable piece of the Steelers defense we just played in the 2010 AFC Championship Game. You want to know the reason we cut him in Baltimore? Our special-teams coach never liked him. The guy never made it into one of our defensive meetings. That will make you shake your head and ask “What if?”

That’s part of the nightmare of building the roster.

O
nce we filled out our 2009 roster, I knew our defense was going to be great. Now we had to figure out offensively how we were going to play the game. How were we going to play to win? Even though I brought in Brian Schottenheimer (who’s known for wanting to throw the ball) as my offensive coordinator, I wanted to create an all-weather offense.

It’s funny, because I think most people look at me as anti-offense, that I make fun of the offensive guys for being too soft; but you have to understand that as a defensive coordinator that was my job. I was going to crush you. That’s what I was paid to do. I was going to build a unit with a goal of being so dominant and believing in each other so much that they were going to go out and pummel an opponent’s offense.

Now that I’m a head coach, I get to build a whole team around that philosophy—offense, defense, and special teams. That’s the beauty of it. It’s not about me. Yet I know that this is what we’re building and I know we have the players and the coaches who are
going to give us the opportunity to build this team, to build this model. My coaches, my players, the entire organization—they all know that I believe it so much and they know what my heart says. It might not be 100 percent accurate, but they’re going to know that it’s from my heart. Maybe that’s why I get the respect that I get in the locker rooms. It’s because they know that I’m telling it the way it is. Believe it or not, I don’t ignore our offense. I like those guys. I actually talk to them and I’m as nice as I can be, too, regardless of what you might hear. I installed our defense during my first year in 2009, so I was involved with that unit from the beginning. Once we got to training camp, I turned the defense over to Mike Pettine so I could sit in on the offensive meetings. One day I just said to Brian Schottenheimer and the offensive staff, “Okay, I’m going to let you know what I think and just go from the heart about what wins in the NFL. This is how we’re going to build our team.” I told them point-blank, “We are going to run the football. We will have a ground-and-pound philosophy and we’re going to lead the league in rushing. I want to lead the league in rushing attempts and pass completions.”