Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (35 page)

So when people say we’re just going for it one given year, I tell them that’s complete bull. We’re going for it every year. I’m trying to win every year with the best collection of players I can get for that
given season or set of circumstances. Did it hurt us in 2010 that we brought in Taylor or Tomlinson? Hell, no. They weren’t taking some guy’s job away or keeping some young guy on the bench. Those young guys that we had to have play, like Matt Slauson, they’re out there. They’re getting their chance. With Taylor and Tomlinson, we knew they’d help us and we knew we’d have to fill that position somewhere down the line.

When you get desperate, you’re bringing in guys you don’t care about. You’re bringing in guys to just be mercenaries. I never do that. That’s why with Edwards, Holmes, and Cromartie, I’m not hoping they leave. I’m hoping our mutual experience has been so great that they want to stay and that we can find a way to make it work. The thing I’m going to make sure they understand is I’m 100 percent behind them. However long they’re here, they’re my guys and I’m supporting them. Yeah, there are going to be some rough times along the way. Guys are going to get in trouble here and there. I don’t like it and I don’t want them to like it, but it happens and we’re going to fix it. Maybe that means that I’m going to rip somebody’s ass once in a while, but when I’m done I trust it won’t happen again and I’m letting that moment go.

My guys are professionals and I respect them. I also support them, and I do whatever I can to have their backs. That’s why I try to end everything on a positive note and keep us all together as a group.

That’s why I always say, “Let’s go snack.”

O
kay, time to get back to the rest of our 2010 season … and the
Monday Night Football
game in New England. We were flying high at 9-2—as were the Patriots—but let’s remember that no matter how well things seem to be going, in the NFL the whole mood of a team can change in a snap. It’s just like I was talking about in the beginning with blunt-force trauma. You get that first big hit, the one that can set the tone, and that moment can change everything right away.

The same thing can happen in a snap. The snap of a bone, in this case. It happened on the Friday before we were scheduled to play at New England on Monday, December 6. All week leading up to this game, I’m talking about how big this game is, how it’s the clash of the titans, the whole deal. The AFC East title is resting on this game. Both teams are 9-2. We’ve won four in a row and nine of 10. Yeah, we’ve been a little lucky, but we’re playing good football overall and, most important, we’re winning.

Likewise, New England is rolling along now. They’ve dealt with
all the distraction from trading Randy Moss earlier in the season. They bring back Deion Branch just after trading Moss and Branch is getting on a roll. They’ve won three straight coming into this game and put up 39, 31, and 45 points in those games. Tom Brady is really starting to crank it up.

Still, we had beaten them earlier in the season and we’re feeling very confident this whole week. Really, really confident. I’m putting myself out there, as usual, but that’s all part of the plan. The important part is that the players are feeling loose, prepared, really on top of what they need to do. Nobody plays the Patriots better than we do, as we showed in the playoffs, and we just felt like this was going to be the same thing. We were going to play them hard.

Then, late in practice Friday, free safety Jim Leonhard breaks his leg. When I say he broke his leg, let me tell you, you knew it right away. You could hear it. It was a compound fracture and you knew just from the sound that it was bad. It was a crazy thing. It was the end of a defensive team period. The receiver is going up to get the ball and Jim is going to challenge it, trying to make a play on the football. Well, Jim does make a great play to get the ball, and he comes down and looks like he’s landing and turning all at once. He wasn’t even hit, but his leg snaps right there.

What made it seem stranger is that in the two years I’ve been head coach of the Jets, we haven’t had an injury like that on the practice field. We’ve had them in games, but we’ve been good in practice. Nothing. We’ve had pulled hamstrings, but nothing major, so the players aren’t really expecting it in any way. Well, as soon as it happens, it’s like we’re completely deflated. It was a killer moment. All the great energy from the week was gone, and you can’t have that when you’re playing New England. You have to be all in against the Patriots, both physically and mentally, or you’re not going to beat them.

I know what some people are going to say: “Coach, you’re talking about Jim Leonhard, not Darrelle Revis or Bart Scott or David Harris or Antonio Cromartie.” People don’t understand what Leonhard means to our team. Look, I talked about him earlier in the book.
He was one of the guys I brought with me from Baltimore. He’s a scrappy, tough, smart guy who has worked hard to make himself into a terrific player. Leonhard is all of 5-foot-8 and about 190 pounds after a big dinner. But he’s going to hit you and he’s going to be smart.

When I mean smart, I mean quarterback smart. He was the guy who was the quarterback of our defense, the guy who made the calls and got people into the right spots all the time. So put it this way: How do you think most teams would do if they had their quarterback break his leg and had to play a game three days later? I’m not trying to say we would have won the game. We got killed 45-3. That’s the worst beatdown of my career. That was the Monday Night Massacre, the Monday Night Meltdown, the Monday Night Beatdown, whatever you want to call it. We got outplayed and outcoached in every phase of the game.

And I mean every single phase. The only thing we did right in this game was hold them to a field goal on their first drive. We didn’t tackle, we didn’t cover, we played horrible on offense, we had a punt go 12 yards, it was everything. Even the weather seemed to affect us. We were cold and couldn’t get anything going. You looked at their sideline and their guys are into it, really pumped up. That’s why I said Belichick outcoached me that night. He did, he had his guys ready to play. I didn’t. That’s why I took the heat.

But let me say this, if we’d had Leonhard, there’s no way we would have been beaten that bad. I’m telling you, we were having the best week of practice we’ve ever had. We had put in a very complicated scheme for that week against New England and Leonhard was on top of it. He had it down. As soon as he got hurt, it was total deflation. It was horrible. I could feel it with the players and I think they sensed it coming from me. As soon as Leonhard got hurt, I still thought we could win, but I know that I was confused for a little while about how we were going to do that. I think the players picked up on that confusion. It doesn’t take a lot of mental gymnastics for guys to pick up on what I’m feeling, because I’m not a phony. I didn’t know how we were going to scale back the defense and make things work.
Remember, after Friday, you really only have one more walk-through practice for the week, so we didn’t have time to work with Dwight Lowery, Leonhard’s backup, on much more than the base calls.

And, trust me, you’re not beating the Patriots with base calls and formations. You run base formation against Tom Brady and he’s going to kill you. They took it right to us. They ran up the score and they talked trash to us. Their fans were complete assholes to us. They let us have it. I’ve never had my butt kicked like that in my life, and I admitted it at the postgame press conference. But I also said I’d play them again, right now. I would have gone right back out on the field and played again. If I get decked in a fight and a guy gets the best of me, I’m fighting again. If it takes 50 times to win the fight, then I’m fighting 50 times. The other thing is—and I’m not saying it’s physically possible for a team to have gone out there and played another game right away—but I believe if I had walked in and said, “Men, let’s go out there again,” I think I have the kind of guys who would have followed me back out there.

Of course, when it got to playoff time, all of us who got our butts kicked that day were able to settle up the score. But trust me when I say that it took some rough weeks to get there. We weren’t done playing poorly that day and we still had a lot to overcome and a lot to deal with, on and off the field. The next week, we played Miami at home and we end up losing 10-6. We handed Miami 10 stupid points in the first quarter on two turnovers. Their two scoring drives go for a combined 39 yards and we hand them 10 points. The Dolphins didn’t do anything to us on offense the entire game. Nothing. They finished with 131 yards of total offense and only 55 yards passing.

Then, on top of the fact that we lost to Miami, we have our latest bit of news to follow us when the league discovers that Sal Alosi, our strength and conditioning coach, had tripped one of the Dolphins players. I’m telling you right now, I had no idea about it. Mike Westhoff, our special-teams coach, had no idea about it. I promise you that. I’d happily take a lie-detector test to prove it. I didn’t see
Alosi forming that wall with the other players and I didn’t see Alosi trip the Dolphins guy. I saw the kid on the sideline, hurt, and I’m trying to get the Miami trainers to come over and look at him. That trip was wrong, it was stupid, and it’s really a shame because Alosi is a heck of a coach. He was doing good work here.

It’s funny, he really didn’t want to be here at first. When I came to the Jets after the 2008 season, and I met him to see if he wanted to stay on staff, he acted kind of aloof. He was tight with Eric Mangini and I felt that he wanted to get let go from his contract so he could go to Cleveland. That’s fine, if you want to leave, you can go. It’s always a little awkward for the assistant coaches who were part of an old regime when a new head coach arrives. But before Sal walked out of the room, I said: “Let me tell you something. Whoever gets this job is going to have the best strength and conditioning job in the NFL, because I’m going to let you do what you want. I don’t know anything about strength and conditioning, so I’m going to trust you to do the job the way you want to do it. I’m not going to interfere.” So as we’re talking, he’s coming around and by the end of the conversation, he’s telling me he wants to stay and he ends up being great for us. He really worked hard. He had great ideas. He had motivational stuff, too. It’s a shame this all happened. The guy made a stupid mistake. Everybody makes mistakes. But I think he’s a hell of a coach.

Anyway, that story goes on in the news for a while. We had to suspend Alosi (later on, after the season, he eventually resigned) and fine him, and the league fined us. We got all these questions from the league and from the media. But the other issue that’s going on, the one that’s really more important to the whole team at this point, is that our quarterback was struggling. When I say that Mark Sanchez was struggling, I mean he was shitty. For the past two games, we couldn’t move the ball at all.

Now remember, as I said before, Sanchez has done some amazing things so far in his young career. He has four road playoff victories in his first two seasons—which actually ties him for the NFL record. You have no idea how great an accomplishment that is in this
league. But that doesn’t mean he’s a finished product. He has his ups and his downs. In 2010, he reduced the ups and downs significantly, so that was great progress. But he still had them, and this two-game stretch was a prime example of what the downs can look like. We go two games and all we scored were three field goals. It was terrible.

The worst part is that when you struggle so much like that, it can tug at guys in the locker room. In this case, we had some defensive guys complaining about the offense. Never mind that we got torched by New England the game before, the defense started grousing about the offense. That happens and you have to deal with it.

The way I had to deal with it was first talking to Sanchez, because you have to be honest about it. I called him into my office and I told him. Also, that week, I started giving our backup quarterback, Mark Brunell, more snaps in practice just to let Sanchez know I wasn’t kidding around. Now, it got Sanchez’s ass going sideways a little bit. He wasn’t happy at all. When he was in my office, he was pouting a little about it, but I could give less than two shits about that. I’m in the win business. The rest of that week, Sanchez is still getting killed in the papers, so I just let him deal with it. Now we have to get ready to play at Pittsburgh and I need to have him on top of his game, keyed up.

But by the end of the week, on Saturday night, I shifted it. The night before we play the Steelers, I put the burden on everyone BUT Sanchez. I called out our defense. I called out our offensive line. Sanchez had already taken his heat. Those guys had to hear it now. Those are the two groups that I know can handle it. Why, the night before a big game after a week where he’s been taking heat from everybody, would I put it on the quarterback now? The kid is 24 years old. At that point, it was up to the veterans on the defense and the offensive line to set the tone.

To begin with, I was pissed at the offensive line. We’re a well-coached, tough offensive line. There’s a reason that we have the highest-paid offensive line in the league. They’re good. But I’m watching the tape against Miami and it’s like, we’re doing okay. The
guys they’re blocking aren’t making tackles, the guys are in the right spots, it’s all technically right. But nobody is knocking anybody off the football. Nobody is really kicking ass. That’s why I challenged them.

The other thing I said the night before we played Pittsburgh? I told the whole team that everything I said before the season, I truly believed. I said I thought we had the best team in football and I still believed it. I said I thought we’d be the champs and I still believed it. I thought we had the talent and the men to do it, to rally in any situation. But I told them I didn’t think they believed it. I challenged them to be the team I believed we could be, but I wasn’t seeing. I was emotional about it and we came out and bullied the Pittsburgh Steelers. We beat them up at their place.