Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (32 page)

You see, getting involved directly in a contract situation isn’t a good idea for a coach. I know some coaches are part of that deal, like Bill Belichick. He knows what’s going on with the money up in New England, because he really runs the football operations. To me, that’s our general manager’s job. Mike’s a sharp guy. He knows the salary cap backward and forward, and he knows what Mr. Johnson wants. My job is to tell those guys what I think of the players, who we have to keep and who we can probably get by without. That’s tough, because you want everybody, but that’s not how the system works. We may not have had a salary cap in the NFL in 2010 because of all the collective bargaining stuff (again, that’s way above my pay grade), but that doesn’t mean you get to keep everybody.

See, that’s where it’s a real problem for a coach. You want every good player you can get. In this sport you can’t have enough. You get too many injuries or a guy just loses it at some point. As coaches, we’re not thinking about the money part of it when it comes time to playing the season—we’re just greedy to get a good player.

If you lose one guy, it can ruin the chemistry of a whole group. Here’s a primary example: After the 2009 season, we had to make a tough decision on left guard Alan Faneca. Faneca is a veteran guy, a former Pro Bowler, and won a Super Bowl with Pittsburgh before the Jets signed him as a free agent in 2008. This guy is a true pro, knows the game, and is a great anchor to have between our younger combination of center Nick Mangold and left tackle D’Brickashaw Ferguson. In a perfect world, I would have kept Faneca, but we had to make a judgment about him. I knew Faneca could still play, but I also knew he probably was not worth the kind of money he was slotted to make. Spending that much on a guard would be tough to justify, especially since we were looking at signing some young guys in the off-season to long-term contracts.

In this situation, we were talking about redoing Revis’s contract and we also did new deals with Ferguson and Mangold. That meant we had to make a tough call and let Faneca go. We wanted to keep him for less, but that wasn’t going to work out. He signed with Arizona, which has Russ Grimm as the offensive line coach. Faneca knew Grimm from when they were in Pittsburgh together, Grimm coaching Faneca on the Steelers’ line. That made sense; it was a pretty smart move for Faneca to go work with somebody he knew. That’s what all vets should do. Familiarity and comfort go a long way in this game.

Anyway, like I said, I wanted to keep Faneca but we just couldn’t do it. If you watched HBO’s
Hard Knocks
, you know we had problems at left guard, which is where Faneca played. We had two young guys competing to take the job. The guy who ended up starting was Matt Slauson. He’s 24 years old and he’s a sixth-round pick out of Nebraska. He’s big, strong, tough, and smart, but he’s obviously a little limited athletically. That’s just reality, but he’s played great for us. Our offensive line coach, Bill Callahan, knew him from when Callahan coached at Nebraska, so we knew it would be a good fit that would hopefully develop with time. Again, that’s the familiarity thing that I talked about with Faneca. Football players are really smart when they work with coaches who know them and know how to use them properly.

The other guy we had over there was Vladimir Ducasse, a rookie—a good rookie, don’t get me wrong. Ducasse is big and strong and he has great athletic ability. That’s why we drafted him in the second round. He played left tackle at the University of Massachusetts. But he was a rookie, and if you noticed what college he went to, it wasn’t one that had him competing against teams in the toughest conference every week. I was afraid it would be like going from the JV to starting for the varsity in one week. Ducasse grew up in Haiti and didn’t move to the United States until 2002, when he was in high school. I don’t know what kind of football they play in Haiti, if they even play it at all. He didn’t start playing until he got to
high school, didn’t get recruited by any schools, and then ended up playing at UMass in the Colonial Athletic Association.

So he was jumping from the CAA to the NFL. Even if the guy had played football from the time he was in his mom’s belly, he just wasn’t ready for what he was about to see. There’s nothing like Vince Wilfork or Haloti Ngata in the CAA. I’m sure there are probably some great coaches there doing some interesting things, but any coach will tell you that you’re a little bit limited on what you can do when you don’t have that kind of talent. You can be a defensive guru like Bill Belichick or Dom Capers, but your talent limits what you draw up. No offense to the CAA, but that’s the truth.

—————

Now, I bet what you’re thinking right now is, so what does this have to do with Revis? Good point. Here’s what it means and why I was still stuck at my desk at that ungodly hour: I know we’re going to have to be a defensive team again this season. I’m confident our quarterback, Mark Sanchez, is going to be better, but we’re not going from averaging 22 points a game (which is what we did in 2009) to putting up 30 points a game this season. That’s great if we do, but I’m not expecting that because we shouldn’t have to. We should be getting a lead, playing defense, and then grinding the shit out of our opponents. We don’t need to be throwing the ball a ton. If we do, we’re going to expose Slauson or Ducasse, which will expose Sanchez to getting pounded.

This means we better have Revis. I know it. Tannenbaum knows it. The owner knows it. Anybody with an ounce of common sense knows it. My brother Rob—even
he
called me. He knows as well as anyone: You’ve got to have the players. He just reminded me, in his own way, don’t believe your own BS. I have to say to our guys: We’re going to win no matter who lines up. That’s my job and it’s up to me to find answers, but guys like Revis make the answers a lot easier.

Now, I spent the entire end of last season building Revis up, because he truly deserved it. He played great in 2009. Green Bay
cornerback Charles Woodson had a terrific season and I know he was named the Defensive Player of the Year, but I wouldn’t take anybody ahead of Revis. You can’t tell me that Woodson was better than Revis. You just can’t. Nobody was better than Revis. I honestly believe that, and I said it. Hey, who pumped Darrelle Revis more than me? I put him on the map, basically because I had a platform to do so. There’s no way he can doubt my sincerity on that, because I put it out there for everybody to hear. Now, in hindsight, should I have done that? Some people tell me no, that it came back to haunt us in the negotiations. I don’t buy that crap. I believe in telling it like it is with the players so everybody knows what’s going on. My players are never going to accuse me of being dishonest about them with the media or trying to play games with the media. Sometimes the players may not like what they hear, but they know what I say out there is exactly the same thing I tell them to their face. Sometimes they come in and I tell them what they don’t want to hear, but at least I tell them the truth. That’s why I have credibility; I speak from the heart. I may not always be right, but I’ll speak from the heart. I’ll tell you what I believe to be the truth.

It’s like what I went through with Revis at the end of the off-season program. On one of the last days of the off-season program (June 14, to be specific), the whole thing came to a head. We were at practice and Revis came out of a drill saying he felt “light-headed.” It was four plays of an off-season program drill and he’d been out there almost the entire time, so I wasn’t going to squawk about it. He said he didn’t eat, so I wasn’t going to question him, even if some people thought that he was faking an injury to make a point about his contract. Like I said, the kid is great and I love him. I was not getting into it.

Then, after practice, he joked about how he might get a hamstring injury the next day, like he was planning to sit out practice and make up some excuse. So the next day, Revis said in an interview: “I did feel a little light-headed, [but] I didn’t have a hamstring [injury] … The hamstring, I kind of exaggerated that.” Later on in the conversation, he said he didn’t regret doing that.

“I spoke from the heart,” Revis said. (I think he stole my line.) “Some people might not like it. Some people might not care. Some people might not know who Darrelle Revis is.… But it doesn’t matter. I spoke from the heart.… When you get to a frustrating point, other things start happening.” Then he added, “I want to be a Jet forever. I don’t want to get cut, get released, or get traded.”

Then he said he was going to talk to me about it later on. He said: “We’re going to try to see eye to eye and make sure this thing doesn’t get out of hand. I don’t want this to go negative. But negotiations do get crazy sometimes. We’re trying to stop it before it gets to that point.”

Unfortunately, I got asked about all that stuff before I got a chance to talk to him and I said: “It’s so not him. It’s uncharacteristic of him to get out of anything. I got to hear it from the horse’s mouth. I know what he told [the media].… It might just be that this is a thing that he wanted to do. And that’s fine. But he knows that’s not right … My door’s always open. He knows that. He’ll probably just get me for a couple minutes.”

Now things were getting sticky, because he knew where I was coming from. He knew I’d been totally supportive of him, telling everybody who would listen how great he was. But then he pulled the injury stunt, and I didn’t even hear about it from him but from the media. Well, he came into my office afterward and must have apologized 50 times. I told him, “You put me in a bad way. I love you but you understand I’m not going to have this. I’d rather that you just stay home instead of us going through this. You’ve got to understand something: We’re going to plan on winning either way.”

—————

That was earlier in the preseason, and now, when he hasn’t shown up, I kind of figure he is taking me up on what I said he should do. I don’t like that it turned out that way, but I’m glad he isn’t around the team acting like a jerk. What he did in June, he knows the way he was acting. So if he’s going to continue like that in training
camp, I figure he is doing me a favor by not coming to camp. We’re in the middle of trying to build a team, and if everybody isn’t pulling in the same direction it can destroy everything you’re trying to do.

Still, it has gotten to a point where we have to fix this thing. We play in our final preseason game and I get home to my house in New Jersey after the game. I invited Neil Schwartz, one of Revis’s agents, over to the house. Schwartz lives in Montebello, New York, about 40 minutes from my house, and arrives there before I get home. My wife lets him in and they talk for about 20 minutes or so. At one point, she says to him, “Are you the agent who told Rex that Weeb was the longest-tenured coach in team history?” You’ve got to give her credit; she pays attention. Finally, I get there and Schwartz and I go to the kitchen to talk. I have to give Schwartz credit; he’s pretty funny. There are four chairs around the table, so he sits in one, I sit in another, and he drapes a Revis jersey over one of the other chairs. It makes me chuckle.

Over the next two hours, we talk a lot. At times, it is pretty hard for me to not want to reach across the table and just grab that skinny Schwartz and scream, “Get me my player!” But I resist. He explains his concerns over our offer and explains their proposal. Every time Schwartz talks about Darrelle, he points at the jersey. “Yeah, yeah, I get it,” I think. “Now, get me the player.” Again, I’m not negotiating anything here. That’s not my job. I’m just trying to get the communication going, because we’re not even really talking at this point. I’ve got to make something happen so we can get this done.

What I’ve always heard from people is that big deals like this are as much about relationships as anything else, and right now we’ve got no relationship. Revis is sitting in his house down in South Florida, outside of Fort Lauderdale, doing nothing but working out a little and hiding from the media. No matter how much he’s working out, I know he’s not in football shape and I know it’s getting down to the wire to get him ready. So I’m sitting here at some crazy hour of the morning talking to Schwartz. We talk baseball for a while. He
collects autographed baseballs just like I do, and we go downstairs and look at my collection. At that point, I tell him I’ve always wanted to get a Satchel Paige ball and he tells me he has one. Then he tells me, “Rex, if we get a long-term deal done, I’ll give you the Satchel Paige ball.” I laugh and think nothing of it. It’s a good conversation, but I know this is just the start. We’ve got to get to Revis. It will have to be owner Woody Johnson and me. It has to be Woody because he has to be comfortable with this. No disrespect to Mike Tannenbaum, but he doesn’t make the final decision any more than I do.

Schwartz leaves my house probably sometime around 4
A.M
. We’re both exhausted, and he offers me the jersey. I tell him, “I don’t want the jersey, I want the player.” I know what Schwartz is trying to do, but I can go get the jersey for free.

Later that morning, I am on the phone with Tannenbaum and Mr. Johnson, explaining what’s going on. We agree that we need to meet with Revis. So Mr. Johnson and I fly down to Florida later in the day and sit down with Revis and his whole family. I give Mr. Johnson a lot of credit. I have been so focused on the immediate, this season, trying like hell to win our first game against Baltimore. But Mr. Johnson changes the whole deal and talks to Revis about the Hall of Fame. That is smart, because it gets Revis thinking about the big picture, what this all means, his image. Mr. Johnson sits there explaining how much he admires Revis, how highly he thinks of him, and I think that really is when Revis starts to realize that this isn’t some short-term relationship. Mr. Johnson is thinking about the big picture. We end up leaving on better terms. There’s still no deal, but we’re making progress. We fly back to New Jersey, and now it’s up to Tannenbaum and Schwartz. We know from talking to Schwartz that there’s a way to get a short-term deal done. There’s a compromise.

Saturday night comes and goes and we get into Sunday, and I’m getting edgy—and now I’m going to let those guys know what this really means. The time for trying to get this done peacefully is over and I drop into Rex the Wrecking Crew. It’s tantrum time for me. I let everybody have a piece of my mind. Both sides get a taste of it. He
wanted to play, I wanted him to play, but it wasn’t happening, so I was letting everybody have it. These guys are talking about the right amount, and it has to be on a four-year deal versus the long-term deal and all kinds of technical, minutiae crap, and I’m trying to tell them, “I don’t care about any of that, because if we don’t win,
I’m not going to be here in four years.
”