Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (36 page)

Here’s the other thing about that game. The Steelers went to a five-wide-receiver set to get going, and we have no defensive backs. We don’t have enough. We’re pulling guys out of the game and I’m down to like three calls on defense. That’s a pretty helpless feeling. I’m watching them drive and it comes down to the wire. They had two plays from the 8-yard line and instinctively I want to blitz. I’m fighting myself not to call a blitz because we just didn’t have the guys to do it. So on third down, we play coverage and hold them. After that play, I call all the guys over and say, “What do you think?” Remember, I believe that you don’t go down without throwing a punch. That’s just me and what I believe. But I know in my head the right call is to drop eight and play coverage. I got our secondary coach Dennis Thurman to the side of me. He said drop eight. Revis and all those guys, they are ready to do anything I ask them to do. They don’t fight me. With Baltimore, you’d have Ray Lewis saying, “Let’s do this, Rex.” Sometimes I’d say, “Yeah, okay, Ray” and sometimes I’d say, “Just do what I’m saying, here’s the call.” I don’t have that with these guys. But in my head I’m thinking, “Let’s make Roethlisberger make the play to beat us. Make him read the coverage and make the throw.” Let’s not force the issue. So we drop eight and, sure as heck, we stop them again and it’s like, “Oh my God, thank you.”

After that game, I told Pittsburgh coach Mike Tomlin, “We’re coming back.” I told the team, make your mark on the schedule, we’re coming back here. We felt that way about Pittsburgh.

We have two games left, the first one at Chicago and then the last game at Buffalo. But before we play Chicago, it wouldn’t be the Jets’ 2010 season without some weird thing happening, so this is the week that the story about me and my wife comes. Like I said at the time, this is a personal issue, so I’m not going to talk a lot about it. Unfortunately, this thing got out and it’s everywhere. All I’ll say is my wife and I have a great marriage and we love each other very much. No apologies for that.

So back to the season. We go to Chicago and we’re ready to play, but a strange thing happens. We lose the game in exactly the opposite way that we lost to Miami two weeks earlier. Our offense was great. Sanchez was terrific, and we’re scoring against a pretty good Bears defense. But our defense was just awful. I mean, we can’t stop them and it is just a joke. We’re losing jump balls in the end zone. It was just absurd. But, in a way, it was good for us, because all those defensive guys who were grousing about the offense after the Miami game really got the overall message I was selling. You win and lose as a team. It doesn’t matter what the stats look like. If it was just about stats, I could tell you that I was really satisfied with how we played all those years I was in Baltimore. Statistically, we were good enough on defense to win the Super Bowl five times. I could sit back and say that I did what I was supposed to do, but that’s not how you win. You win as a team, all the units, the coaches, everybody together, and you can’t lose sight of that or it all falls apart.

Anyway, we finish out the season with a big 38-7 win against Buffalo and we’re 11-5 on the season. And after a little sweating over how the other teams were going to finish, it’s on to the playoffs for our second straight year. And all we end up facing along the way are three quarterbacks with a combined six Super Bowl titles and nine appearances. No big deal, right? Well, to make it more interesting, we also have to go on the road for each game.

The first stop is Indianapolis to face my old friend Peyton Manning, the guy who has twice kept me from getting to the Super Bowl, in my first year with the Jets and in 2006 with Baltimore. Again, the first thing I do this week is tell everybody that this matchup is personal between me and Peyton. Really, this guy has broken my heart. The first time we faced him with the Jets, we had a lead at halftime. In 2006, Baltimore had the best team in football. It wasn’t even close, but the guy came up with all the crucial plays to beat us. So when I say it’s personal between me and Peyton, I mean that. But the other reason I do it that way is it takes the focus off my players and allows them to relax and just get prepared. Think about it; there’s 50 million people who are going to watch this game. There’s all sorts of pressure on the guys in this situation. So I’m doing what I can to deflect the attention away from my players until we get to game day. If you can be loose and confident when you’re preparing to play, you’re going to play better. If you’re nervous, you won’t do well. It’s like the guy standing over the five-foot putt. If he’s uptight and nervous, he’s going to miss it. If he’s relaxed and loose, he’s going to make it.

Everybody says I put too much pressure on myself by speaking brashly and making predictions. Look, I already know what’s going to happen. If we lose, the papers are going to kill me, absolutely murder me for taking it on myself this way. But that’s okay, because they’re going to kill me if we lose anyway. I get paid the big bucks because this is what I do. I know if I can take it off my team and not get the guys caught up in all of it, they don’t have to worry about all this other stuff. It’s like in the week before the Pittsburgh game, none of us talked that much. When we lost, the media was still coming down hard on me, not the players. That’s fine. I’m the guy who wrote “Soon To Be Champs.” I’m the one who said we would win the Super Bowl.

As for Manning, we came up with a plan that we just weren’t going to blitz him very much. We were going to sit in coverage and take away as much as we could. Look, if you blitz Manning a lot, eventually he’s going to kill you. He’s going to come up with an open receiver. You’re not going to fool him. Plus, their receiving corps was
banged up by then. No Dallas Clark, no Austin Collie, and Reggie Wayne was hurting. We felt like we could cover their guys. Now, they hit us on a couple of big plays to Pierre Garçon, but we basically did a great job of keeping everything in front of us. Of course, as the fourth quarter is ticking away, they end up getting the ball and driving for a go-ahead field goal with 57 seconds left. Along the way, we had to change up a little, because I didn’t want him to be able to run the clock out and then just let their kicker, the great Adam Vinatieri, send us home.

So let’s back up a few plays. We get to a second-and-9 situation with 1:10 remaining. The Colts are at our 35-yard line and we have all three time-outs remaining. I have to make sure they don’t get another first down or we’re really stuck for time. So this is when I decide it’s time to blitz. We’re going with a zero coverage (just man-to-man in the backfield, no one hanging back) and we’re going to make Manning get the ball out of his hand as fast as possible, because we know he’s not going to risk a sack at this spot of the field. He throws a short pass for a three-yard gain to the 32. The situation is pretty much the same on third-and-6, so we blitz again and force an incomplete. Perfect. Vinatieri hits the 50-yard field goal like it’s a 20-yard attempt, straight down the middle. But that’s okay, because we know we have enough time and time-outs to get a field goal. You’ve got to be confident you can do it in this situation, and I was confident in my guys. This was the money time.

On the kickoff, Cromartie does a great job to get out to our 46-yard line. Now, this is the time when Sanchez really steps up. For most of the game, he’s been a little wild, but he really started to settle down in the second half. By this point, he’s in a groove. He hits Braylon Edwards for nine and Santonio Holmes for 11. We run a dive play to catch the Colts off balance, but only get two yards and now we’re at the Indianapolis 32 with 29 seconds left. We’re in field-goal range, but we’re right on the edge of it. I’m confident Nick Folk can make it, but the offensive guys come huddle with me on the sideline and they want to take a shot.

Braylon Edwards, who has been telling me all game that he’s getting man coverage and can take his guy anytime, says he wants a long sideline route—and Sanchez is totally on page with him. So our offensive coordinator, Brian Schottenheimer, goes with the call. The guys run back in and Mark takes the snap, makes a beautiful pass down the right sideline and boom, Braylon pulls it in. We pick up 18 yards and we’re on the 14-yard line. Folk ends up nailing the field goal to win it 17-16. Man, I finally got Manning, the guy who had been my kryptonite. I give him a lot of credit—he was really classy after the game. He came over to our team bus and talked to me for about 15 minutes, congratulating our team and the job we did. My son Seth came over and Manning invited Seth to his football camp. Total class act.

Believe me, in the NFL—and particularly in the playoffs—there’s not much time to celebrate a huge win like this. We know we’re going to New England for the next game. And I promise you, we laid it on the line against Indy—offensively, defensively, special teams, every phase of the game—just so we could go back to New England where we got our ass kicked. We did that for a reason. We knew we could beat the Patriots, even though they destroyed us that last game. Nobody on the outside thought we could beat that team, and nobody wanted to acknowledge that we had beaten them in Week 2. This is the one our entire team wanted.

Going into the New England game, just like our lead-up to Indianapolis, I had to find a way to distract our players, get their minds off the last game as much as possible. So, just like with Manning, I issue the challenge against Belichick. It’s me vs. Belichick and it’s personal again. Look, we were the only team out there that could beat the Patriots. So that was why I put it on me to challenge Belichick. Everybody was saying, “Oh, you don’t challenge Belichick. You don’t mess around with Jim,” like the song goes. Well, I was his Slim that day. I respect him more than any coach in the league. He’s completely dedicated, a great coach. But I was going to get him back.

During the week, we modified some of the things we did against
Indianapolis. Our plan was pretty much the same in terms of philosophy. We were going to play mostly coverage. We were going to mix in a few more blitzes, but it was really going to be a lot of loaded zones. We were going to make Tom Brady work his ass off. We were going to make him have to be perfect. And we were going to make him make mistakes. Without Randy Moss, the Patriots didn’t have the same vertical threat in their offense, and we planned to show them how much that hurt their offense by constantly challenging the short stuff.

A couple of other things happened during the week. Of course, there was the stuff that New England wide receiver Wes Welker said about me and my wife. Look, it didn’t bother me, I’m not going to let that affect me. But it did get Welker benched for the first series by Belichick, so I was fine with that. With Welker, there’s a lot of good-natured talk that goes back and forth. I know that. He talks to us, and we talk to him about how we’re going to knock him around all game. When I went to Hawaii, the kid came up and apologized to me and my wife. No hard feelings.

The other thing that happens is that, out of the blue, we get a jersey delivered to our offices. It’s from former Jet defensive lineman Dennis Byrd, along with a letter from him. I get it on Friday and I read the letter and it’s amazing. Turns out this is the jersey he was paralyzed in. I’m thinking to myself, “Why me? Why’d he pick me for this?” But it was amazing, about how proud he was of our team. Here’s a guy who was paralyzed and taught himself to walk again. What a spirit that guy has. As soon as I see this stuff, I say, we gotta bring him to see the team. It’s late Friday afternoon and he’s in Oklahoma, but we have to get him here. His message was so humbling and so emotional. I had no idea how good he was going to be, but I had to have him.

So we get him to the team hotel on Saturday and I meet him like an hour before he’s going to talk to the team. He looks at me and says, “Rex, what do you want me to say?” I said, “I want you to say what’s in your heart, nothing else. I’m not telling you what to say.” So he got up there and he talked about how much he’d like to play
just one more play and how he had never gotten a chance to speak to a group of men who could be world champions before, but we had that kind of ability. He was apologizing because he couldn’t walk so well. I’m like, please, this guy shouldn’t even be walking, but his faith and determination got him back on his feet.

We played a little clip of Dennis from when he was a Jet. The room was dead quiet, totally silent. His message got through so strong. The next day, we wanted him to lead us out onto the field, but the league wouldn’t go along with it. So instead we had a special Byrd jersey made up—an authentic game jersey exactly like the ones our guys were wearing that day—and our captains carried it out to midfield for the coin toss. It was deep, really emotional.

Then, of course, the battle begins, and we played great. We were so jacked to play that game. Our defensive game plan was so strong. I wasn’t going to get outcoached again. I owed Belichick on this one. We got embarrassed the last time. We got humiliated. Don’t think for a second that wasn’t what they were trying to do before. I’m the wrong guy to do that to. That’s why I challenged Belichick. Nobody does that. He’s the greatest coach ever, and people don’t normally call him out. You slip at all, he’ll beat you. It’s true. But I said from day one, I came here to kick his ass, not to kiss it, and that’s what I’m going to do.

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I knew the Patriots were concerned about me and this football team. I’m the guy and we’re the team they didn’t want to face. As I said, we were the only ones who could beat them. Trust me, Pittsburgh was the happiest team in the world when we beat New England, because the Patriots would have spread them out and beat the crap out of the Steelers. Of course, everybody saw how happy I was after that touchdown by Shonn Greene. He scored and I took off after him into the end zone, showing off the speed that turned me into a coach. I’d like to call that running, but whatever. Actually, I had slipped on the ice
earlier that week and banged up my leg, which is why I was limping so much. But the speed? No, I have none of that.

After the game, Belichick was great. He came up to me and said, “That was an unbelievable coaching job; you deserve it and I hope you win the whole thing.” He really said that, and I could tell he was sincere. People get the wrong message sometimes when I talk about Belichick. I really do respect him. I admire the guy. He has his way of doing things and he stays true to it every single week. I do the same thing, although we’re different types of people in a lot of ways. I may be loud and over-the-top, but we do have similarities. You’re not going to find two more competitive people.