Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game Read Online Free PDF Page A

every time.
    We put in a brand-new defense in Baltimore and the funny thing is Mike Nolan, the defensive coordinator at the time, couldn’t tell me how to coach a D-line because he had never coached it. I was the D-line coach, but I had never coached these certain techniques that we used—head up on a guy—so I established what we still call the knock ’em backs. To get my point across to my players, I found this video of a guy who was branding a horse. As he is applying the iron, the horse lifts his leg and kicks this dude right in the chest and he goes flying. I thought the horse had killed him. It was an unbelievable hit, I mean the horse kicked the shit out of him. I thought, “That’s exactly what I wanted to establish—the knock ’em back—and that’s how we would play.” I showed the video to our players and asked them, “You get the idea? We want to beat the offensive linemen to the punch. We want to knock them back.” We spent hours on the practice field. We’drun our feet, and I wanted my defensive linemen to lock their eyes on the player across the line of scrimmage. I wanted my guy to look straight through him and I wanted my guy to bust his ass and make the tackle.
    Bob Sutton, our linebackers coach, has coached football for nearly 40 years, including 17 seasons guiding officers at West Point. He told
The New York Times Magazine
, “Around the league, my friends who are coaches are studying what we do. But they can’t see what Rex is doing.” Sutton picked up our defensive playbook and said, “You could take this and give it to somebody else, and it wouldn’t work. It’s the other things he gives you besides phrases and diagrams in a playbook that make the playbook effective. Some say he’s too brash. But he’s just telling you what he really believes. This guy has some tremendous leadership skills. To me, he’s the hard-charging general who doesn’t do everything by the book but wins. He gets other people to buy in.”
    I think it’s important not to do everything by the book—that’s what makes it work. I still have a lot of little kid in me, but I also don’t bullshit people. Never have, never will. I won’t piss on you and tell you it’s raining. I expect our players to be prepared, too, and we are fortunate with the Jets because we have a smart team. I am serious. Every one of our players has the responsibility to learn our defense. We give them a playbook over the summer to study and it might just be four or five of our basic installations. But if they don’t open that playbook, they will be in trouble when training camp starts. They will be behind, because that first day of camp Mike Pettine sounds like an auctioneer. He will review nearly 30 defensive packages in rapid-fire succession. This is not the first grade. We don’t ease into training camp. We want to fire bullets from our gun in that first meeting, and it’s the players’ responsibility to learn that defense. I give our owner, Woody Johnson, and general manager, Mike Tannenbaum, credit because they built a Jets team with intelligent players. Our guys are book smart and football smart, and we want them to be working at their full capacity intellectually.
    Of course, a coach might have a roster filled with smart players, but you can’t coach with a broad stroke of a brush. Each player is different. There’s a psychology to motivating and teaching players, and it’s the cornerstone of what we do. We have a saying that everyone is treated fairly but everybody’s not going to be treated the same. Players who have been in the league and have played at the highest level and have put together a résumé of experience, they will be treated differently than a rookie or a player who is wet behind the ears and has been in the league just a few years. We do treat everyone fairly, but just not the same in every situation. I think our veteran players appreciate our approach.
    Even with veterans, however, you still have to