Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (29 page)

We put ourselves one game away from the Super Bowl.

A
s much as the game is about what happens on the field, from those blunt-force trauma hits to executing a good play, you also have to set the tone for your team in meetings. You have to express to them the plan and the emotion that goes into executing that plan. The other thing is, you have to get the message across in just the right way. If you talk too much, you lose guys. If you talk too goofy, you lose guys. If you get too emotional, you lose guys. If you start saying the same thing, you lose guys.

In other words, you had better have a sharp, focused message that works at that moment the right way. That means that sometimes you have to be serious and sometimes you have to be funny—but you had better always be on the mark and speaking from the heart.

First, there’s the serious message. One of the most important ones I ever had was when I was still the defensive coordinator of the Baltimore Ravens. It was in 2008 and it was the last regular-season game ever played in Texas Stadium, where the Cowboys had played for 38 years. When they finished that place back in 1971, it was considered
a palace. As a kid, I remember watching games from there, listening to Pat Summerall call the game, watching Tom Landry on the sideline, and cheering on all the great Cowboys players. Well, now I was going to be one of the last people to ever coach in the place. It was pretty cool, even if by that time the place was sort of a dump. You put that place next to what the league has now and it’s no comparison. Now, here’s the messed-up part: The Ravens were supposed to be the sacrificial lambs. This was some serious BS and everybody made a big deal about this one. During the previous off-season, when the league was putting together the schedule, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones asked the league to make us the team they played to close down Texas Stadium in the regular season. Jones saw that we were 5-11 in 2007, we fired Brian Billick, hired John Harbaugh, changed the quarterback, and all the rest of our shake-ups—and he figured we were the weakest ones on his schedule. We were the team he wanted for the homecoming game, the automatic win. Well, you can only imagine what I and almost everyone else with the Ravens was thinking. Actually, it doesn’t take much imagination if you know me, but I’ll just give you a couple of hints with the words “duck” and “few.”

The other thing about this game is that Jones wanted it on Saturday night to play for the NFL Network crowd, because he figured it was also going to be like a coronation. That was the only NFL game played that day. It was us and the Cowboys on center stage, although Dallas wasn’t really looking to share the spotlight. The season before, the Cowboys were 13-3 and won the NFC East, which was the best division in football that season. They had a stud squad with everybody playing great—guys like Tony Romo, Terrell Owens, Jason Witten, DeMarcus Ware, and a bunch of others. It was a total stud operation, but they lost in the playoffs to the New York Giants, who then went on to win the whole thing, beating New England in the Super Bowl. The loss to the Giants was really close, so the Cowboys thought they were
this
close to winning the whole thing themselves.

Finally, the whole plan after the game to close Texas Stadium was that all those great former Cowboys were supposed to show up and they were going to have a big party to say good-bye to the stadium. Put it all together and you can only imagine how amped up our team was to play that game. By itself, it was going to be a big challenge, because both teams were 9-5. I think the Cowboys were expecting to be a lot better, and they had lost a couple of games early in the month, so they were kind of teetering. Still, they were really good. We were kind of a surprise, especially since we were playing with a rookie quarterback in Joe Flacco, and we had just come off our second frustrating loss to Pittsburgh. Anyway, coming into the game, both teams were thinking of the playoffs, since whichever team won would be in. Obviously, both the Cowboys and Ravens were pretty excited.

Like I said, we’d been talking about all the stuff all week about how the Cowboys viewed us as their homecoming team and all they are planning for is the big dance after the game, and so on. But you can’t just keep repeating the same message all the time, so I felt like I had to come up with something new for my speech the night before the game.

Hello, Jason Garrett.

Jason Garrett was the Dallas offensive coordinator at the time and had been during the previous season. He’s a smart guy, went to Princeton, was the son of a terrific coach, and had a brother who worked for Dallas as well. He’s a good football man and I’ve got nothing personal against the guy, but during the previous off-season, while the Ravens were going through their coaching search, he was offered the Baltimore job. Well, he went back to Jones and Jones gave him a monster raise to around $3 million a year on a three-year contract. That’s the kind of money that a lot of head coaches get when they’re starting out. Garrett was still the offensive coordinator, but it’s pretty obvious to everybody in the league that he was going to take over for Wade Phillips. (Sure enough, Garrett did replace Phillips in 2010, but it’s because the Cowboys were 1-7 halfway through
that season—not exactly what Jones had planned, I think.) So, as you already know, Garrett turned down the Ravens job. That was the job I was begging for at the time, the job I dreamed of having back then—and that guy turns it down. Now, it was basically my defense and me against him and his offense that week, with all the other BS going on.

There aren’t many times in your career that you get better material than that to work with for a pregame pep talk. Bart Scott, who was playing for Baltimore that year, really understood how deep it got for me in that meeting with the defense:

The other thing Scott and the players will tell you is that these messages are delivered in a pretty coarse fashion. Some of the guys even have under-over bets on how many times I’ll drop the f-bomb during a speech. One guy is in charge of counting. I’ve heard that I’ll get to 40 or 50 in a 10-minute speech. Well, that’s me talking from the heart, and Scott and a lot of those guys will tell you it gets them
fired up. Trust me, not all coaches swear like me. They just don’t. I’m not just doing it for show, though. Scott will tell me, “If you hear a coach talking that way, saying he wants to f— up the other team, that gets you thinking as a player, ‘Damn right! Let’s go beat the hell out of them!’ ”

I can’t tell you exactly how great my speech before the Dallas game was, but I probably had more f-bombs than the Cowboys had yards for the first 54 minutes. We kicked the crap out of the Cowboys. On their first eight possessions, they punted five times, we intercepted two passes, and they scored one gimp touchdown after we fumbled at our own 4-yard line when Flacco got sacked. They gained a total of 113 yards on those possessions. This is an ass-kicking, total domination. Finally, they got a field-goal drive to open the fourth quarter, driving 51 yards on 12 plays (still not exactly awesome stuff for a team with that kind of talent). After we got a field goal, it was 19-10 with 6:30 remaining, when the game got a little wild. They had good drives, but we answered with a 77-yard run by Willis McGahee and an 82-yard run by Le’Ron McClain. Damn, McClain is almost built like me, and he went 82 yards—that’s how much the Cowboys gave up by the end. We won 33-24 and we were just laughing all the way home to Baltimore. We won the next game to close the season and ended up going to the AFC Championship Game.

The Cowboys? After that game, they lost the final game of the season at Philadelphia 44-6 and the Eagles got the last spot in the playoffs over the Cowboys. How funny is that? Call it coincidence if you want, but that loss to the Eagles was the most lopsided for Dallas since that famous 44-0 game they lost to my dad when he was in Chicago in 1985. Thank you, Jason Garrett. All it took was a little extra motivation.

Of course, meetings can’t all be about emotion. Trust me, you can go to that George Patton speech only so many times before guys get tired of hearing it. Plus, you’re draining guys if you do that too much. Football is a sport where you have to get amped up to a controlled frenzy (how about that for an oxymoron?) at just the right
time. Do that too early or too late and you blow it. Do it too often and it gets harder and harder to get there. This isn’t like baseball or basketball, where you play so many games that you have to control your emotion. Football is that rush like being shot out of a cannon after gulping 20 energy drinks.

Sometimes when you’re coaching, you have to bring it down just a little, cut the mood. Trust me, I’m always talking about winning the next game, dominating, doing whatever it takes—but you have to have some fun along the way, too.

Even if that fun isn’t exactly the stuff from an after-school special.

Now, before I go too much further, you have to understand some things. First off, not everything I do completely translates to the corporate world. Not that I’ve ever been a part of that world, but I can’t imagine you can always do these things in front of a mixed crowd. In football, there are 53 young, testosterone-laced men who aren’t exactly training to wear a suit and tie for their career. As I said before, we have rough guys from rough backgrounds … and that’s just some of the coaches.

Anyway, it was Week 14 of the 2009 season and we were playing at Tampa Bay. By this time in the season, the Bucs had Josh Freeman playing. He was a rookie and he was also the other guy we thought about taking if we didn’t get Mark Sanchez. Freeman is a great kid and a big, strong athlete. We just liked Sanchez a little better; we had a conviction about him. Freeman didn’t start the year, but the Bucs had Byron Leftwich get hurt and then another backup named Josh Johnson played awhile until Freeman was ready, which was about midseason. By that time, though, none of those guys would have been ready for us. We just crushed them. Through the first half, the Bucs gained zero yards once you throw in their penalties. That’s not a typo. I mean zero yards. They didn’t get a first down and they didn’t have a drive of longer than three plays. One interception, six punts, and a kneel-down at the end of the half is all they got against us.

In the second half, it was more of the same. On their first possession, they went three and out after gaining five yards. The second
possession was the same thing: three and out after we fumbled to give them the ball at their own 45-yard line. On third-and-9, Scott sacked Freeman but got called for unnecessary roughness. They got 15 yards and another first down. They finally cobbled together a first down on their own (it only took them 38 minutes of game time to do it) after going for it on fourth down, and then settled for a field goal after they got to our 25. They gained all of 15 yards on their own after Scott gave them 15 yards. With all of that, we blew the shutout. We ended up winning 26-3 and gave up a total of six first downs for the whole game.

Well, Scott is my guy, but I have to give him hell. That is part of breaking the ice with your players and keeping things loose. So I have to come up with something special for him and finally settled on the Dumb Dick Award. Now, with awards like this, it’s not enough to just say he’s earned it—it has to be like the Oscars. You have to do the presentation, the whole award performance. I even thought about having an orchestra come in and play that music you hear when they announce the winners. It was going to be a real special event.

The trophy was … how should I put this … a seriously impressive phallic statue. It was the biggest one I could possibly find. I called a meeting with my coordinators, Mike Pettine and Brian Schottenheimer, plus a couple of other coaches and our special-teams coach, Mike Westhoff. Laura Young, my great assistant who loves a practical joke, was in there too, taking notes with me for my presentation to the team. I told them all about the statue and my idea, but made sure to do it before Westhoff arrived.

Westhoff came in and then, after a couple of minutes, Laura said, “Mike, can you throw me that towel?” He didn’t know what was there and he damn near had a heart attack. It was hysterical, and was a good warm-up for what I wanted to do when I awarded it to Scott. Again, I know this stuff wouldn’t go over in some boardrooms, but that’s not who I am. If you heard me on
Hard Knocks
, this isn’t exactly news to you.

Now, the other thing I did is I gave Scott the heads-up before I gave this thing to him. That is part of the deal—that I wanted him in on it. You can’t just embarrass a great athlete like him with a surprise like that, and it is never my goal to humiliate someone. Scott is an important guy on this team. He has to be part of the joke. So after I cleared it with him, I stood up in front of the team and said, “Guys, we had a great game, but I got an award to give. It’s a bad one to get. It’s the Dumb Dick Award.” The “trophy” had a wrapper on it, but everybody knew what it was. They were all laughing and having a great time as Scott came up and grabbed the thing, then he used it to hit people and we were all cracking up—but let me tell you, that’s one award you don’t want to win. We don’t give that out every week, and you only give it to guys who can handle it. You have to do something really dumb to win it.