Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (12 page)

I’ll say it again: It makes me feel really good to know there are productive ways to teach dyslexic kids now. Back at Southwestern and into graduate school, I still felt like I was always struggling to get around the system, but today it’s all out in the open and kids are given a variety of ways to learn and be evaluated. Like I said, I was lucky. I had help and I took advantage of it the best I could. My mom didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I went to her to help me get through college. There are a lot of people out there who don’t have that kind of help. Either their parents aren’t around, or maybe their parents just don’t have the ability to help the way my mom did. That’s why it’s so important for people to figure out if they have dyslexia, or any other problem, and to get help with these things. It’s hard to rely on being lucky.

The funny part is that I ended up marrying an English teacher. She’s sharp, just like my mom. She can read a book in two hours, and I couldn’t do it in two years. Funny how that works. Hey, I got a master’s in marriage—I married the right one and I did that without any help at all!

D
uring the 2010 off-season I did a motivational video for a group called
Victorprime.com
. I along with four other coaches, Sean Payton, Mike Ditka, Mike Singletary, and Bobby Bowden, each picked one subject to talk about and then we broke it down in detail. The title of my section was “Give It All You Got.” This was right up my alley, because that’s what I’ve always done. Every job I’ve ever had, I’ve given it my all. I don’t think, what’s my next job? How long am I going to be here? When I’m in, I’m all in, and I’m completely devoted. It could be tarring roofs or coaching a bunch of midgets in New Mexico, regardless—I give it everything.

When my family moved to Baltimore, we bought a house right away, and we bought it in the best neighborhood we could find, with the best public schools we could find for the kids, because I wasn’t thinking we were just stopping over. I was all in with that job. I thought I was going to be in Baltimore the rest of my career. That’s what I wanted. It’s like that movie
Eat Pray Love
with Julia Roberts. Now, I know that it is a chick flick, but I get what it is about. A woman
gets divorced and understands that her life isn’t what she wanted because she is not really putting herself out there. She’s not giving it all she’s got, so she gets out there and discovers her passion and finds happiness. That’s me. I put myself out there in my job and in my life. It might be something that some people find embarrassing, like dyslexia or my weight, but I’m going to embrace whatever I’m doing.

Now, sometimes when you love your job as much as I do, when you’re in deep with football the way I am, you can get yourself in trouble before you realize what you’re doing. Yeah, this was a good one: the time I decided to write a letter to Baltimore owner Steve Bisciotti. Now, before we get too far along with this story, you have to know that Bisciotti is one great guy. He’s a self-made billionaire. He’s good to people, smart, good-looking, snazzy dresser—the whole package. The best part is that Steve isn’t one of these owners looking for all the attention. He’s like Woody Johnson, looking to help the team, not looking to take the spotlight. You don’t see Bisciotti very much, because that’s not the way he does business. He’s not ignoring the team, not by a long shot. He’s around, he knows what’s going on, and he has a great feel for what they’re doing.

He also has a really interesting, crystallized way of looking at life. He says: “Ninety percent of wealth is good and 10 percent of it is bad. However, 60 percent of fame is good and 40 percent of it is bad.” In other words, if you’re playing the percentages of what’s going to be good for your life, fame is not the percentage play. That’s why he stays out of the limelight a lot more than other owners. I think he believes in hiring good people and letting them do the job without all this interference.

So anyway, we opened the 2007 season on a Monday night at Cincinnati, which most people probably think should be a gimme. The Bengals traditionally aren’t very good, but what people don’t understand is that for a number of reasons, they’re a tough matchup for us. They’ve got a good quarterback in Carson Palmer and they have Chad Ochocinco, who’s a pain in the ass to cover and just drives you nuts with all his talk and antics when he gets going. I
love it, but you do want to shut him up. He definitely gets the juices going. At the time, they had T. J. Houshmandzadeh, who is a terrific possession guy, tough route runner, just an all-around good football player. So we went in there and lost 27-20.

This was a tough game. We gave up nine points in the first quarter on a touchdown and a field goal. The first one ticked me off. We fumbled the ball and Ochocinco, Johnson, whatever you call him, went deep over the top of our defense for a 39-yard touchdown. Then they get a field goal. We got a touchdown in the second quarter and then we traded field goals just before the half to put the Bengals up 12-10. No biggie. Their longest drive in the first half was 48 yards. Aside from the one throw to Ochocinco, they were just dinking and dunking against us.

We made some adjustments at halftime and we were just stoning them on defense. I mean, defensively we were on the fire. They ran 25 plays in the second half and gained a total of 50 yards. Yeah, 25 plays, 50 yards—that’s two yards a freakin’ play. We were ridiculously good. The only problem was that our offense was ridiculously bad that day. Hey, it happens, but unfortunately it’s true. We had six turnovers, four fumbles, and two interceptions. As a defense, you have to pick up the offense on days like that. When Baltimore won the Super Bowl in my second year there, the defense didn’t make excuses when we couldn’t score. Never happened. We just put our heads down and battled. That’s the way it has to be.

The other thing is that we had Steve McNair at quarterback, and I give Steve a lot of credit. Unfortunately, we got him at the end of his career, but he was one tough guy. McNair took more hard shots than any quarterback I have ever seen and still managed to get back up. He was like a linebacker at quarterback. In his prime, he was one scary dude. RIP Air McNair.

The turnovers hurt us in the second half of that Cincinnati game, there’s no question about that. On our first possession of the second half, McNair got sacked, fumbled the ball, and the Bengals returned it for a touchdown to get up 19-10. Finally, we got going in
the beginning of the fourth quarter with a field goal, and we caught a break of our own when Ed Reed returned a punt 63 yards for a touchdown with about 12 minutes to go and we were up 20-19. The way our defense was rolling, all we had to do was avoid making another mistake.

We couldn’t. In fact, the last 12 minutes of the game were like a nightmare. McNair got a pass intercepted at midfield and the Bengals returned it to our 22-yard line. They caught us with a 15-yard run and then a 7-yard touchdown to Houshmandzadeh, who’s great in the red zone. They got a two-point conversion and went up 27-20 with 8:48 remaining. For the game, they’d scored 14 points on three plays where they gained 61 yards.

Still, we had time remaining and our defense even came up with a play. Haloti Ngata, our great defensive tackle, forced a fumble and Reed recovered it at the Cincy 24. Kyle Boller went in at quarterback when McNair got hurt and we eventually got down to fourth-and-goal at the 1-yard line. We just had to punch it in and we would be tied. Boller threw a touchdown pass to tight end Todd Heap, but Heap got called for offensive pass interference.

Then the Bengals got called for a penalty that gave us a first down again at the Bengals’ 6. We got back down to the 2 on second down and threw an incomplete pass. Then, on third down, Boller got intercepted when the ball deflected off Heap and a Bengals defensive guy. Talk about frustrating. This was one of those ridiculous gutwrenchers. Worse, our last three plays from the 2 or closer were all passes that went wrong. This is the kind of stuff that drives you crazy because you’re second-guessing yourself. Whether you’re a fan, a coach, or even an owner, you second-guess yourself like crazy.

After the game, head coach Brian Billick, both coordinators, and one coach from each side of the ball were going to ride back with Bisciotti on his jet. The idea was that we were going to get back faster because we didn’t have to load the plane or do all the TSA check stuff (not that it took a long time, because we had our own special gate, but it was still about a hundred people to get boarded and a lot
of stuff to get handled). As a coaching staff, we figured it was best to get a jump on the whole process. We were pissed and we wanted to break down the film. It was a short week already because we had to play the next Sunday, so we were not sleeping on that flight.

Well, the trip got off to a crappy start when the driver took us to the wrong airport. We finally got to the right place and we were sitting on the tarmac with Bisciotti. We were talking about the game, the controversial calls, the turnovers, the plays at the goal line. Then finally Bisciotti says: “Rex, what the hell? We should have run the ball. We should have done all this kind of stuff.” Now, that was tough. Here’s the owner talking, so you don’t want to argue, but you have to be loyal to your head coach. Brian Billick was our coach, and he had Jim Fassel as the offensive coordinator calling the plays. I was not about to throw those guys under the bus. I just said: “Well, you know I’m not an expert in that type of situation. Our guys study film and always do what’s in the best interest of the team. You know I’ve got to get people stops, so I can’t concern myself with that, I’ve got to stop people.” I just handled it the best I can, and then Bisciotti shrugged and said, “So you’re just along for the ride.”

Just along for the ride? What, are you freakin’ kidding me? I’m
just along for the ride
? I was shocked, stunned, and pretty soon I was pissed, thinking: “I sleep at the office three days a week. I’ve been loyal to Brian. Some of the stuff I put a stop to could have really bit our team in the ass.” I didn’t know what to say, but I was not happy. So the first thing I did after we landed was to write Steve a letter and put it under his door. In that letter I told him, “I’m not even watching my kids growing up. Nobody is committed to this team as much as I am. Nobody. Along for the ride? That’s friggin’ bullshit.”

I told Mike Pettine, the Ravens’ linebackers coach and one of the guys I brought with me to the Jets when I got hired (he’s our defensive coordinator), about it and he said, “Oh, Rex, don’t do it, just go get the letter.”

I said, “Hell no, I’m not going to go get the letter. That’s how I feel.” I knew that Bisciotti got it, because the next day his secretary
came running down to my office. Steve wasn’t in yet, but she had read the letter to him over the phone when he called in. And when Bisciotti arrived, he came in to see me and he said, “Rex, I said, ‘Are you along for the ride?’ Like, are you going home with us on the jet?”

Oh. Well, that’s a little different. My head was spinning as I thought, “Oh my God, I just told off the owner of the team because I didn’t understand what he was saying.” I was pretty much a dumbass on that one, so all I could do was laugh at myself. I said, “Oh, sorry, Steve.” What do you say after something like that? We still laugh every time we think about that one. I don’t know if he was laughing at the time, because it kind of challenged him a little, but I did what I felt at the time was right.

Was I too emotional about what Bisciotti said? Sure, I could have taken a step back, but that’s not what you get with a Ryan. Like I said, I love what I do. I loved doing every job I’ve ever done. I truly mean that. You have to have a joy with everything you do in life. You can’t half-ass it and expect to get the most out of it. When I was growing up, my dad couldn’t wait to go to work. He loved his job and you could feel his passion for the job. My mom loved her job. Think about it: She was taking trips all over Ontario to these little towns in the middle of nowhere to find out how to teach kids. You don’t do that to get rich. You do that because you love it.

It’s like my brother Rob said: “If you hire a Ryan, we’re going to have emotion. We’re going to have fire. It’s not political and maybe it’s not the most politically right thing to do, but we care. Every once in a while you get a screwup, but it’s like I tell my players, ‘Look, guys, you’ve got to have my back on this, you’ve got to play your ass off, you’re going to have to do it.’ ”

This is why people connect with us. It’s over the top sometimes, it’s emotional, but it’s totally honest. You want to know something really great about how we do business? After everything Mike Ditka went through with my dad in Chicago—the fights, the screaming, the pushing—he tried to hire my brother at one point in time. Man, you have to respect Ditka for that. Ditka was in New Orleans in the
late 1990s and he had my brother come in for a talk. He told Rob, “I want an aggressive, kick-ass defense just like I had with your dad.” You see, Ditka knew that my dad wasn’t just a self-promoter, some guy just trying to make a name for himself. My brother and I aren’t, either.

Players see that what we’re talking about is totally honest. We’re putting it on the line. Players know the difference. They figure it out pretty fast if you’re not giving it everything you can. The other important thing about our approach is it gets everybody on the same page. That’s not easy in sports. Think about it this way: When you’re a head coach, you’re always going to have about half your team that isn’t exactly happy with you. It’s just reality. It’s the guys who aren’t starting. Every guy thinks he should be starting. Yeah, some of them get the logic of how it works, especially the veterans who have been around long enough to understand a role, but in their heart of hearts, every guy thinks he should be a starting player. You wouldn’t want a guy who didn’t want to be starting, who didn’t want to be out there trying to make a play. These guys have been starting forever. When they were in high school, they were the big stars. In college, they were either stars or they were certainly playing a lot. There aren’t too many guys who have made it to the NFL without being pretty prominent players along the way.