Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (3 page)

I said, “Heck, yeah, kid. Go for it! If that’s what you want, you go ahead.”

He was so confident, and I thought that was a great changeup for us. Mark proved more than once this year that he can lead this team to victory when we’re behind in the fourth quarter. It was cool to watch him each game as he got better and better. I know people want to rip on us for barely beating a team like Detroit, saying that we didn’t play well and we just got lucky. The way I look at it, we still won. We were 6-2 and felt like there was a lot more gas in the tank.

Sibling rivalry—there’s nothing better. Playing Cleveland, I went head-to-head against my twin brother, Rob, the defensive coordinator for the Browns. Both of us had been looking forward to this match-up all season. It was do-or-die all the way. Rob wasn’t our only connection to Cleveland, though; we were also going up against Browns head coach Eric Mangini, the head coach of the Jets just before me. The entire week leading up to this game, Rob and I did
nothing but give each other hell. It was great. Rob and I are so competitive. We would call and rip on each other’s coaches. We would put each other on speakerphone and just go at it. I even went as far as to dress up like Rob in a press conference. The media gave this a lot of attention, but to me, it was just a way to keep things light for my players and to have a little fun. As you’ll see in this book, I think it’s vitally important to have fun with what you do—especially if you’re lucky, like me, to have a job you really love. That’s why I put on that wig and stuffed my shirt with a pillow. If you need a good laugh, look for it on YouTube.

In all seriousness, though, I knew that Cleveland game was going to be a great game. Rob is among the most creative defensive minds in the league; he and Mike Pettine are about as creative as it gets. They are unbelievable in putting their players in positions where they can be most successful. Rob doesn’t worry about what a player can’t do. He focuses on what he can do.

Against the Browns, we were able to win our second overtime game of the season, this one 26-20. At the end of the day, I think it’s remarkable that Cleveland pushed us into overtime. I thought we were in total control of that game, but the scoreboard didn’t show what I was feeling. The game showed us that we couldn’t keep relying on fourth-quarter points to pull us through. We had to find a way to score in the red zone. We had the opportunity in the first three quarters, but for some reason we couldn’t make it happen. We had fallen into a bad habit of not scoring until the end of the game. Cleveland really exposed what a problem that was for us.

For the week after Cleveland, we worked in practice on becoming a more aggressive offensive team. It’s a good thing, because when we faced the Texans the following Sunday we scored 30 points—but we gave up 27! Beating the Texans put us at 8-2, a terrific start. It’s safe to say that the standout of that game was Santonio Holmes. He grabbed a six-yard scoring reception with 10 seconds left. He finished the game with seven receptions, 126 yards, and two touchdowns. He’s a stud. There’s not much more you can say.

The next week was Thanksgiving, and in the NFL nothing says “Thankful” better than a win on Thanksgiving Day in front of a massive TV audience. Cincinnati was a great win for us. That game was won because of our special teams and Brad Smith. Our defense did an awesome job, too. Although we rushed for 171 yards, our offense lagged behind a little, at least for our standards. We got off to a slow start, which like I said had been our routine those past couple weeks. But in this case, I felt during the second half that the momentum was shifting in our favor and we were about to take control of the game. Sure enough, that’s what happened. We won 26-10 and felt like things were rolling in 2010 just as we had envisioned. We were confident.

We started into that following week with a laser focus on preparing for our biggest road game of the year—our second matchup against the New England Patriots. Both teams were 9-2, and this
Monday Night Football
game was being billed nationally as an epic battle. It felt like a critical point in our season.

I’m going to take a break here and come back to this moment. So much happened in 2010 and before. Stick with me—there are a lot of details and stories I need to fill in.

I
’ve always said that one big hit can change the momentum of a game faster than anything else—faster than a turnover, faster than anything that happens on the football field. I’ve always believed that, and that’s the way we’ve built our teams. I build them with the picture that big hits are part of our game plan.

I want 11 guys who will run to the football, bottom line. Actually, they better haul ass to the football. That’s what I want on every single play, every single down. Make a statement. Knock the snot out of somebody. Not only do I want big hits, which set the tone, but I also want turnovers that are generated from those big hits. We know how to take advantage of turnovers, too. Not only will we get an interception or a fumble recovery, we want to score off our opponent’s mistakes. I create plays off turnovers. Everyone looks at me like I am a dumbass: “Oh, how is this going to work?” It does work.

Midway into the 2010 season, we led the NFL with a plus-10 turnover differential. Our cornerback, Dwight Lowery, iced consecutive wins over Minnesota and Denver when he made good with
turnovers. He returned a Brett Favre interception for a touchdown to foil a possible Minnesota Vikings comeback in Week 5 and recovered a bad Denver Broncos snap to stuff a potential game-winning drive in Week 6. We also had recovered nine fumbles at that point, tied for the league lead.

We’ve got players who know exactly what they are going to do with the football when turnovers happen. Take an interception, for example. There are a series of events that automatically happen. We block the intended receiver, and that guy becomes the trailer for the pitch. If you want to pitch the ball there needs to be a trailer, and the trailer needs to be four yards wider and behind the guy carrying the football. That way when you turn and pitch it, you know who you are pitching it to. You could pitch it blind, and that guy would still be there. That’s a relationship you want to keep when you are trailing a play. Then we set edges as fast as we can to give more room for the returner. These are designed plays that we practice. Not a lot of defensive coaches approach the game this way. For us, it’s not enough just to stop our opponent; we want to “traumatize” them from both ends. Ultimately, you have to score.

I remember we blocked a field goal while I was with Baltimore. Our cornerback Ed Reed picked it up and started to return it upfield, and then pitched it back to Chris McAlister. Ed probably could have scored if he hadn’t pitched the football, but he turned and pitched it to Chris anyway. The officials ruled it a forward lateral, but it really wasn’t. We had it schemed perfectly. The point is we will always want to score off a turnover. Our first objective on defense is not to let them score—to keep their points to a minimum. Our second one is to create turnovers off big hits. And our third objective is to score off those turnovers. When a defense scores off a turnover, it is extremely difficult for an opponent to overcome it. It can squeeze the life out of a team and demoralize it. You can see it in an opponent’s body language. That’s why it’s so important for us to try to score when we create turnovers.

Each game we might also designate an opposing player with a
dot. Players don’t want to be dotted by the New York Jets, because that means we want that dude knocked out of the game. Of course, it has to be legal and by the rule book. We don’t play dirty, and no way will we intentionally hurt a player with an illegal, cheap shot. We dot players fair and square. There are players out there who think they are badasses, and you just might see two of our players knock the hell out of him.
Pow! Pow!
That’s our mentality. Everything we do is aggressive and, hey, we may make a mistake, but we will go one hundred miles per hour and we will knock the hell out of you. Big hits create turnovers. You haven’t been Punked—you’ve been Dotted!

I know when people read about dotting players that they will immediately think of my father. It has been written that where Buddy Ryan led, trouble often followed. He coached the Eagles in the so-called Bounty Bowl in 1989, when he was accused of offering a reward to any Philadelphia player who injured Cowboys kicker Luis Zendejas. “I wouldn’t want to hurt him,” my father told the media. “He couldn’t kick. I wanted to be sure he was in there.” (Zendejas left the game with a concussion after being tackled.)

Michael McCrary, a former Ravens defensive lineman, told
The New York Times Magazine:
“I loved that Buddy was strictly a defensive guy. I heard from some Cardinals that offensive players hated him. If defensive players got fines, he’d pay them. Offensive guys, he wouldn’t even talk to them. Hated them. Rex used to be the same way. Don’t let him fool you. But he wasn’t as blatant as his father was. Now the whole team’s going to love him; he’s there for everybody.”

That’s right. I am there for everybody, and everybody knows how I want to play the game. We are going to try to intimidate opponents—and how do you intimidate them? You do it with big, vicious hits in your pursuit of the football. Again, that’s part of our game plan. We want our guys and our opponents to know each Sunday will be a double-chinstrap game. Fifty percent of all NFL games are decided by eight points or fewer, which means big hits can change the game’s momentum. That’s an edge I want each week.

I think every team in the NFL preaches about running to the football. We talk about it one time and we don’t talk about it again. We don’t coach effort. If you don’t play with effort on the New York Jets, we will not coach you for long. You might be good enough to play in this league, but it won’t be for us. We run to the football as hard as anyone in the league. If a player doesn’t run hard, he sticks out like a sore thumb when we review game film. We only have one speed—full speed. The Jets don’t have “thud” drills in practice, where defensive players wrap up the offensive player with the ball. It’s always at full speed. We always go at full speed. As far as I see it, there is no point in practicing at half speed. If you want to get better, the only way to do it is full out, every single time—so that’s the way we work.

Big hits happen, but they are coached, too. My defensive coordinator, Mike Pettine, and I are like two peas in a pod. We know each other’s thoughts at all times during a game. We don’t dance around each other, either, because there’s not enough time. If you ever heard us on the headsets during games and what was said to each other, it’s stuff that might end friendships. Not ours. We are shoulder-to-shoulder after wins, smoking cigars, drinking a beer, laughing. We are like brothers. We both get it and see the same things on the football field. We might fill an entire white board in our office with schemes and formations, all great stuff, but the key is to condense it into a plan that makes sense to the players. Mike takes all that information, organizes it, and then we implement it into our game plans.

My defenses when I coached in Baltimore—and in New York, for that matter—were a force of relentless, unpredictable mayhem founded on my premise that “whatever you do best, we’re going to take away from you.” There are six basic defensive fronts in football, and teams usually play one of them. The two most popular are the 4-3, with four down linemen and three linebackers, and the 3-4, with three linemen and four linebackers. We might use all six, each packaged with dozens of variations. We might often line up the defense in one front and then shift to another before the snap. We are going to get to the player with the football and knock him silly.

Even so, we have stayed traditional in our approach. That means we won’t ever get away from fundamentals and proper technique. We are extremely creative on defense, but it is never at the expense of fundamentals and technique. We always want to make sure our defensive players get into a good stance—let’s make sure we get off the ball, let’s make sure we can beat a block. Coaches can have the greatest playbook in the world, but if your technique and fundamentals are not very good, it won’t work. My defensive coaches and I are both very old school in that approach. We constantly preach fundamentals and technique in team meetings and in our daily walk-through with players. We might have the most creative blitz package, but if a player takes a wrong step or he doesn’t release from a block properly, we’re all over it. We have so many schemes and formations that our cutting-edge stuff, our opponents will look at it and say, “My God, I would never do that with 11 guys at the same time.” But it’s important to us that we cover the basics. That will never change, because we have one goal: We need every one of our players to pull the rope in the same direction.

I always use myself as an example when it comes to teaching the proper technique. I can only bench 225 pounds. But this guy over here can bench 500 pounds. Yet I can teach the guy like myself who can bench-press 225 pounds that by just playing with proper technique, I can use a stronger guy’s momentum against him. I teach players to release off blocks. There’s no question it works. Maybe it’s because I was a limited player during my playing days. But I functioned and was successful because my technique was better than most other guys’. Any little thing that I learned I have applied to my players. Even when you have great players, if you teach the proper technique, it’s unbelievable how much better they can be.

Trevor Pryce is a perfect example. He’s a 14-year veteran from Clemson—a great defensive end and a quick learner. One time against Pittburgh, we are lined up and I have him slide across the line and I tell him he has one shot at the quarterback, and this is the technique we will use to do it. It’s a passing down and we expect a
pass. Our defensive backs expect the ball to be thrown quickly. So Trevor has one shot and, sure as shit, he slides over, beats the offensive lineman like he was standing still, and sacks the quarterback before he can throw the football. It’s little things like that that just make coaching great. It’s a blast when you pull it off and you see somebody that you’re coaching have success. It makes you feel like King Kong.