Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (19 page)

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Now, I could go on and on with all the little things we changed with the Jets, but that’s not really the answer. Again, it’s not always about what you change. It’s about having the guts and the knowledge to leave certain things the same—to keep people who can help you—even if those people wanted your job.

As I said, when the Jets interviewed me, they also interviewed three guys from the staff: offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer; offensive line and assistant head coach Bill Callahan; and
special-teams coach Mike Westhoff. You could have made a really good argument for any one of those three guys if the Jets had wanted to hire them. Schottenheimer is going to be a head coach in this league one day very soon, and I’m pushing for him. He’s a great offensive mind and his demeanor is great. You can see how much he soaked up from his dad, Marty Schottenheimer. Schottie doesn’t ever overreact when things are going extremely well or extremely bad. He completely keeps his composure.

Callahan was the head coach in Oakland the year they went to the Super Bowl against Tampa Bay. Before that, he had been the offensive coordinator for the Raiders under Jon Gruden, running Gruden’s version of the West Coast Offense. He made it to the title game in his first season. The next year, things fell apart, but that’s because that team was so old and all the leaders got hurt, guys like Rich Gannon, Bill Romanowski, Jerry Rice, and Tim Brown. Look, my brother was out there for five years as the defensive coordinator. I watched that team closely and I wanted them to be good—not better than our team in Baltimore, but I wanted them to be good. That team just fell apart in a hurry, and they had some really negative guys on the roster. That’s the big reason why the Raiders struggled for years. Callahan was the first guy to take the blame for that, but after you go through coaches like him, Norv Turner, and Art Shell, you start to realize it’s not just the coach. Again, that’s part of the deal in coaching. It’s not like they’re actually ever going to fire the players. You hear owners and GMs talk about dumping the players all the time, and maybe they get rid of one or two guys, but that’s only after the coach goes first. Trust me, we all get it.

The point is that I have a chance to have a guy like Callahan on my staff and I’m going to keep him. He’s been involved with offensive football for close to 30 years. He was doing a great job running the show in Nebraska after he left the Raiders. If they had just been a little more patient in Nebraska, it would have been amazing. He came to the Jets in 2008 and started working with our young guys, like Nick Mangold and D’Brickashaw Ferguson. That’s why we have
one of the best lines in the league. I’m not messing that up. That’s the culture of the team you want to keep intact.

Finally, there’s Westhoff and he’s a beauty. Everybody should get a chance to know a coach like Westhoff. The man is hilarious—really sarcastic, has great one-liners in practice and, really, all the time. He’ll come up to a guy who is screwing up and say something like, “My man, a doctor told me how to cure your problem. Walk up a flight of steps, jump down, and land hard on both feet. Your head will fall right out of your ass.”

More important, Westhoff is all in. You talk to Westhoff and you know that football is his life’s work. For him, it isn’t just about money, or winning, or glory. It’s about ideas; it’s about finding different ways to do things. It’s about teaching guys how to think, not just how to run plays. It’s all that higher-level stuff that you can do in the NFL because everybody can be so focused on just doing football.

It’s also the reason we get results. Since Westhoff came to the Jets in 2001, through my first year as coach in 2009, we had 13 kickoff or punt returns for touchdowns. That’s the most in the league. Our coverage units always have ranked right at the top of the league. In today’s NFL, where everything is so tight and one or two plays can make your season, special-teams play is critical.

Westhoff has been coaching in pro football since 1982, with all but one year in the NFL (he went to the USFL for a year back in the 1980s). He spent 15 years in Miami, working for three different coaches (Don Shula, Jimmy Johnson, and Dave Wannstedt). Now, it should tell you a lot when an assistant coach spends 15 years in one place. I thought I was doing pretty good at 10 years in Baltimore.

See, we’re just scratching the surface with Westhoff. In 1988, he was diagnosed with cancer in the femur of his left leg, the section that runs from your hip to your knee. The first time he had surgery he almost died because the doctor thought it was a back problem. Not only was it misdiagnosed, the doctor accidentally cut through one of Westhoff’s arteries. After they finally found out what was wrong, Westhoff had 10 surgeries on the leg, removing cancer,
removing bone, replacing it with pins and screws, grafts, and more hardware than you find at Home Depot or Lowe’s. It’s crazy when he starts to tell you this stuff.

The best part is, he never quit. Westhoff used to hobble around on a cane or drive around practice in a golf cart. He said one time that he looked like a pretzel after a while because of all the surgeries. Along the way, this one doctor told him that he was going to end up in a wheelchair one day. Still, he never flinches and never quits. Think about all the chances this guy had to feel sorry for himself, to say enough is enough with all the pain and just take the benefits and go. But he never did it. Finally, a great orthopedic surgeon, Dr. John Healey of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, suggested a procedure for Westhoff. Healey specially designed a titanium rod to go in the leg and replace the femur. That was in the winter of 2008, and Westhoff had to go through some serious rehab. That was the one time he really had to quit working with the team, right after the 2007 season ended. He wasn’t going to be able to do anything for months.

This wasn’t just some three-hour routine surgery—it was 12 hours. It was so long that they had to have two different X-ray technicians. First, Healey had to take out all the screws and previous stuff. At one point, Westhoff said that the only thing keeping his leg attached to his body was the soft tissue. Brutal. Then Healey put in the rod, which Westhoff said looks like something you would jack your car up with. (On a side note, you should know that Healey has done this surgery only once before, because this is a totally unique case. You don’t get this kind of cancer situation very often.) So everything finished and Westhoff did the rehab he needed to do. Slowly, he started getting stronger and stronger so that by training camp of 2008, before I took over, he was in good enough shape to be walking and the Jets realized that they had some problems on special teams. They begged him to come back, but he still had so much healing to do so he said no. They waited awhile and asked again, and because he’s just that kind of an intense guy, he came back.

Now you watch him and, aside from a little limp, you’d never know he’s been through anything. You don’t see the scar that runs from his ribs to his left knee. The guy is amazing, and the bottom line is that I want guys like that on my side. You don’t hear him complaining about his life, and that’s an inspiration to all of us.

Here’s another interesting story about Westhoff that applies to this situation with me coming in after he didn’t get the job: He went through exactly this same kind of situation earlier in his career. Back in 2000, right after the Dolphins lost a horrible playoff game to Jacksonville 62-7 and Jimmy Johnson quit, the team hired Dave Wannstedt. Most everybody knew that the job was going to Wannstedt, because Jimmy Johnson brought him in that year after the Bears fired Wannstedt. Wannstedt and Jimmy went way back to the start of their coaching careers, basically as best friends. Wannstedt was the first defensive coordinator of those great Dallas teams that won three titles in the 1990s before the Bears hired him away. Wannstedt did a great job running Jimmy’s defense.

After Jimmy officially quit, Westhoff asked to interview for the head coach job the same way he did with the Jets. He sat down with then–Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga, but the team ended up hiring Wannstedt. Okay, that happens. Westhoff came back with the staff and Wannstedt started to believe that Westhoff was bad-mouthing him and fired him. Now, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound like the Westhoff I know to talk negative about anybody.

To me, Westhoff is the kind of guy you really want to keep around. Not only that, you give him all the responsibility he can handle. Guys like Westhoff love it. The more you give them, the more they want. Before I ever got here, Westhoff would do our scouting report on officials before every game. I wanted him to keep doing that. He would bring in officials each week and tell them how to call certain stuff to give us a better look for Sunday. I wanted him to keep doing that, too. This is on top of having a great special-teams unit. Oh yeah—did he mind if I kept him doing that?

You know what happened with Westhoff? It didn’t take long before we were completely on the same page. He told a reporter one time—before we had ever played a game in 2009: “I like Rex, I really do. And you know me, I don’t like anybody.”

Like I said, he’s a funny man.

Guys like that, like Westhoff, Callahan, and Schottenheimer, you want them around. You can’t be afraid of guys who might want your job. If you are, then you’re going to end up hiring bad people who are not motivated to do more, who aren’t going to work as hard as you need them to work, and who aren’t going to challenge you with new ideas. How are you going to get better if you don’t have good people around? The thing you do with good people is you help them out. You don’t stifle them and you don’t control them. You make sure that they know you’re doing everything you can to help them, because then they’ll fight for you. Someday, I would love to have five or six guys from this staff become head coaches in the league. It would be awesome to sit back and say, “Wow, these are guys that worked with me, and look at them now!” That would be great. I’ll find some other great coaches and we’ll be okay; but if you had that kind of success, the guys you hired after them would do anything for you because they’d know how much it helped those other guys. You want that type of culture.

It’s funny. After our first year, when we made the AFC Championship Game, Schottenheimer was invited to interview for the Buffalo job. He declined the interview. Really, that was surprising. Again, there’s only 32 of these jobs and you don’t always get a chance, but if that’s what he wanted to do, I’m happy. I want that guy on my sideline for as long as he wants to be there.

The funny part is that Woody Johnson ran into Schottenheimer down at the Super Bowl in Miami after all that. He said to Schottie, “Those jobs don’t come around often—what made you decide to stay?” Schottenheimer told Johnson: “To be honest about it, I’ve been in this business for a long time and this is the first time I’ve ever had any fun. My wife is having fun and I’m having fun. I just don’t want it to end. It’s not worth leaving.”

That makes me proud—that I’m creating an environment where people want to work, where they want to stay. That’s important. At the same time, it takes work and it takes tough decisions sometimes. It’s not like we’re just sitting around eating Oreos all day and telling jokes. For me, I faced a tough call to fire one of the guys I brought in during my first year. It just wasn’t working and I had to fix it. The one thing you can’t do in this job is sit around denying that you made a mistake. You have to take care of things.

I had to do that halfway through my first year. I had hired Kerry Locklin, a guy I knew from my college days, to be our defensive line coach. The problem was that the guy was a negative thinker, and when our situation started to go south for a stretch, it just got worse and worse. Eventually, it got to the point that I couldn’t take it anymore. I never want to see negative things associated with us, talking negatively about a teammate or any of that junk. The day I got to the Jets’ HQ, I talked with our general manager, Mike Tannenbaum, and he gave me the pulse of the type of people we had. Anybody who was considered a negative guy—players, coaches, anybody—I said we were going to get rid of. I didn’t care whether they could help us or not—they were not going to be leading my team. No way in hell. I don’t want anybody negative around me. I can’t stand negative people, and that includes coaches.

So that meant that Locklin had to go. We were in the middle of a bad run, having just lost five of six after opening the season 3-0. We were 4-5 at the time and I made the move. The media thought I did it to get the blame off me, but that wasn’t it at all. I took the blame. I hired the guy, after all. I had known Locklin for almost 20 years and this was his first season in the NFL. Unfortunately, his mind-set didn’t fit with us. He never respected his players. That pissed me off, and I kept telling him, “You have a job here; they’re putting food on your table.” Yet he didn’t have the time for them and wouldn’t respect them. He wouldn’t listen to them; he’d talk down to them and take a negative tone. So I said, “Fine, you’re gone.” That was it. I’m not going to have that on my coaching staff. I’m not going to
have it in the locker room. We may not win every game, but I know one thing: I’m not having any form of disrespect. I want to surround myself with positive people and guys who think the glass is half full.

Players feed off the energy of the coaches. That’s just how it is. You would think that players are motivated by themselves to be great, and a lot of them are. There are plenty of guys out there who you don’t have to say two words to and they’ll get going. It’s like going to church. At church, you have all of sorts of people who want to be inspired. If the preacher gets up there and has no energy or no strength, you see people fidgeting, dozing off, and not paying attention. Coaches are the same way. They get the mood going. They turn on the engine for those players.

It’s like how I’ve been dealing with Vernon Gholston, a guy the Jets drafted No. 6 overall in the 2008 draft. That was before I got here and people were thinking it would be easy for me to just get rid of him. Truth be told, I didn’t like the kid coming out of college. He’s a good athlete and a smart guy, but I thought he was a phony. We had him come to Baltimore, and I just didn’t believe in him. I even told Mangini not to draft him. Well, suddenly he was on my team and I was going to have to work with him. I was not just going to give up on him—that’s too easy. I thought, “He’s one of my guys now, and I’ll be damned if he’s going to feel like that. He’s going to know that I’m in his corner and I’m trying like hell to get him to play better.” I want him to see everything I’m about, so all those pictures I painted of him back in 2008—you know what I’m going to do?