Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (8 page)

I get it. There are reasons people questioned our ability to lead. My dad had some moments that made people wonder about him, like getting into it with Kevin Gilbride or not getting along with Mike Ditka. But the worst reason I ever heard about my dad’s leadership was this one: He never won a playoff game when he was a head coach. Really, you’re going to hold that one against him? Ridiculous.

My dad went from Chicago to Philadelphia after he got his first head coaching job in 1986 and proceeded to build another truly great defense. After two losing seasons, the Eagles made the playoffs three straight years under my dad starting in 1988. They won 10 games each season, too. Now, some people might say that’s no big deal, but remember that they’re playing in the NFC East, which had the Washington Redskins and Joe Gibbs and the New York Giants and Bill Parcells. Dallas still had Tom Landry, but the Cowboys were on the decline. Still, the Cowboys were only a few years away from hiring Jimmy Johnson and drafting Troy Aikman.

Between Gibbs and Parcells, there are five Super Bowl rings. Johnson came in and created a team that won three more in the 1990s. When I tell you the NFC East was the best division in football, I mean it might be the best division in football ever. That depth was unreal. The team my dad created ended up winning 10 games or more five straight years. That’s tied for the longest streak the team
has ever had winning 10 or more. They had Reggie White and Randall Cunningham already, and then my dad drafted Jerome Brown, Keith Jackson, Seth Joyner, Eric Allen, Byron Evans, Keith Byars, and Clyde Simmons, and signed Mike Golic as a free agent.

I mean, Jackson and Byars are offensive guys and everybody said my dad didn’t know offense. I know he pushed quarterback Ron Jaworski out of there and made Cunningham the starter. Everybody loved Jaworski, and why shouldn’t they? He’s a great guy and he really knows the game. But it’s not like Cunningham wasn’t incredibly talented. He made the Pro Bowl, too, and the plan for the organization, even before my dad got there (Cunningham was drafted in the second round in 1985, the year before my dad came to the Eagles), was to make Cunningham the man. My dad just pushed it faster because he didn’t want to waste time building his team.

From there he went to Arizona as the head coach in 1994. My dad was 63 by this point and he went to one of the worst franchises in NFL history and led them to an 8-8 finish his first year there. That may not sound like much, but the Cardinals had nine straight losing seasons before that year. The following season they slipped down to 4-12 and my dad got the blame, even though the defense was great. It’s easy around the NFL to draw conclusions about a coach’s record, but it’s important to take a step back and really look at the situation. That’s why I took a moment after the win over the Bengals in the playoffs and gave my dad that ball.

I realize that my dad wasn’t perfect as a head coach. Even though he’s a great leader of players, a great leader of men, and a great strategist, you can’t deny that he had his faults. My brother Jim talked about it after my dad’s first chance as a head coach with Philadelphia, remarking: “I think Rex learned a lot from watching how my dad handled the front office in Philadelphia. My dad was abrasive. As I said before, my dad wasn’t a diplomat. He was always getting on people if they didn’t see it his way, and that wore down the front office of the Eagles after a while. It sounds funny coming out of Buddy’s mouth, but then you have to work with people you’ve just made
fools out of.” Jim then added: “I think the most important lesson Rex learned from watching my dad in Philadelphia was that you have to have everybody working together. It has to be united, the players, the coaches, the owner, the front office, everybody on the same page.”

The best example about how it went wrong for my dad, as Jim pointed out, was the whole Jim Lachey situation. People probably don’t remember a lot about Lachey, but he was a great left tackle who was drafted No. 12 overall in 1985 by San Diego. He made the Pro Bowl three times and was a first-team All-Pro. He was the whole deal. He played three years for the Chargers and then he wanted out. He said he was tired of the organization and wouldn’t play for them anymore. It was 1988 at that point and my dad was in his third season with the Eagles. The left tackle situation was a mess, just awful, and my dad knew it. Again, everybody thought my dad didn’t know offense, but he knew.

So my dad told the Eagles’ front office to go get Lachey. I don’t know how hard they tried, but partway through the season, Lachey first got dealt to the Raiders and then he got sent to Washington. Not only did the Eagles not get Lachey, but one of their fiercest rivals in the NFC East got him instead. In the 1989 playoffs, the Eagles lost to the Los Angeles Rams 21-7. Why? The Rams outside linebacker Kevin Greene just went crazy that day putting pressure on Cunningham. Greene was so good that the Rams didn’t blitz one time. NOT ONE SINGLE TIME. They played zone defense the entire game, bottling up the Eagles’ passing game. Philly didn’t score until the fourth quarter.

If that’s not bad enough, here’s the topper: My dad got fired the next year after losing his first playoff game again. Who did he lose to? The Washington Redskins, with Lachey at tackle. The Redskins went on to win the Super Bowl that year.

I’m not trying to rehash a bunch of history. There’s a point here and I learned it. I’m not happy I learned it through watching my dad suffer, but I’m not going to ignore it either. My brother Jim said it best: You have to work together. The organization has to be united.
That’s what we have with the Jets. We have a great coaching staff—the kind of guys who are willing to put in the time and the effort. We have owner Woody Johnson, who cooperated with the Giants to build a new stadium that’s a palace. He moved the team to a new facility in Florham Park, New Jersey, where we have everything we could possibly need. He helped in the effort to bring a Super Bowl to New York for 2014, which is the first time the league is bringing the game to a cold-weather, outdoor venue. We have General Manager Mike Tannenbaum and his front-office staff, and we have players working hard to be ready.

You have to have everybody pulling the same direction in this game. It’s just too hard to have it any other way. There are a thousand things that go into winning a Super Bowl—literally, a thousand things. You can have great players, but if they don’t work, it’s not going to happen. You can have great coaches, but if one guy isn’t doing everything he can, you can fall short. If you don’t have people handling the finance side, whether you have a salary cap or not, the whole thing can get out of control. Then, on top of all that, you’ve got to be a little lucky. I believe in the saying that you create your own luck, but you still have to have some things bounce your way, whether it’s the ball or being lucky enough to stay healthy.

What my dad did was aggravate the people above him too much. It got to the point that it was unhealthy. My dad is not one to tolerate fools, or at least the people he thinks are fools. He expects results when he asks for something. Sometimes you have to massage people and work with them to keep them with you. You can’t be ripping into them, pretending like you know their job better than they do. It’s like with the negotiations we had with cornerback Darrelle Revis when he was holding out. I don’t understand that stuff. I poked my head into it at one point, but I wasn’t telling anybody how to do what they do. More on that later.

Anyway, while all this was going on with my dad in Philadelphia, I was just getting started in the business. My brother and I graduated from Southwest Oklahoma in 1986. We graduated
summa cum
laude
, too. Okay, not really, but here’s a good one: My brother and I had a little fun with our graduation cards and typed in
“summa cum laude”
at the bottom. We ended up being called on stage with all the graduates who made high honors. We were standing up there with all the brains, smiling these big, shit-eating grins, and my dad was in the audience laughing along with a bunch of people. It was a pretty good joke. Both Rob and I planned to get through college and land in the family business of football.

Now, obviously, we weren’t the Ryan & Sons Coaching Firm. It doesn’t really work that way. There are some sons who have followed their dads into coaching and have gotten a pretty good boost in the process. David and Mike Shula both got to be head coaches pretty fast at the NFL and college levels because they were Don’s sons. David didn’t last, but Mike is still working in the business, and he’s a good quarterback coach from what I’ve seen. Brian Schottenheimer works for me and I’m sure it helped him being Marty Schottenheimer’s son, but Brian is a damn good coach in his own right. The fact is, he’s an offense guy and his dad was more of a defense guy, so whatever Brian learned for his specialty wasn’t just from watching his dad work. I think Brian is going to make a great head coach someday, and I hope he will be with me until that day comes. Kyle Shanahan is working for his dad, Mike, in Washington. I can tell you that Kyle is a terrific offensive coordinator, just like his dad is a great offensive coach. Those guys know how to call plays.

There’s no question for my brother and me, too: It helps more than it hurts to be Buddy Ryan’s son. First of all, we fell in love with this job from the time we knew what our dad did. By age six, we were hooked. Then there’s the stuff we learned just by watching our dad. I remember seeing him with a pad of paper, watching the TV or the tapes and drawing up schemes. Sometimes he’d draw up formations on napkins at the dinner table. He was always doing all sorts of stuff like that.

It was a little different for our older brother, Jim. He’s six years older than us and he took our parents’ divorce a lot harder than
Rob and I did. I think he saw what coaching did to the relationship between Mom and Dad, and as a result, he’s a little more resentful about what the coaching job did to the family. He still loved sports. In fact, he studied journalism in college and wanted to be a sportswriter. He was a ball boy for the New York Jets in 1968, the Super Bowl season, and he got really close to Joe Namath. After he went to law school, he tried to be a sports agent, but that job is almost as hard as being a coach. Chasing college guys around all the time and trying to get them as clients—there’s nothing easy about that.

The fact is that our dad told us time and again that he didn’t want us to go into coaching. He kept telling us to do something else, that coaching is a hard life. Sure, it looks glamorous, but the truth is, it’s not an easy way of life. Don’t get me wrong—it’s fun to be on the sideline during an NFL game. I mean, that’s as great as it gets. You’re competing at the highest level of a sport. Everybody is watching you. Everybody is talking about what you do, talking about the players and talking about the team. Then there’s the Super Bowl; trust me, that’s an awesome experience. When I went to the Super Bowl with Baltimore in 2000, when we beat the snot out of the New York Giants in Tampa, my brother Rob was in the stands. He hadn’t been in one yet (he won two after he joined New England and Bill Belichick), and he told me after the game about how he started getting all choked up, all emotional that I was out there. Believe me, Rob isn’t the kind of guy to get all emotional and open about his feelings. I might do that from time to time, but that’s where these twins start to go our own directions.

But what makes coaching such a tough profession is what you don’t see on TV. What you have to understand is that no matter who you are in this profession, you have to pay your dues. You have to prove yourself at a lot of levels before you get a chance to play with the big boys. My dad wasn’t giving us a free pass into the game. He wasn’t hiring us straight out of college. He understood the importance of having to suffer to prove yourself. Even after he broke into the NFL in 1968 with the Jets, it wasn’t so glamorous then. He
was living at the YMCA for a while, splitting a room with another coach. Here he was in his thirties, and he had to do that to chase his dream.

Sure, we were ball boys with the Bears when we were kids and that was a blast. In fact, we probably deserve credit for a forced fumble in one game against the Seahawks. It was a rainy day and we had this one ball that was still all soaked. As the Seahawks were getting ready to score again, we threw this sopping wet ball to the ref and he puts it down. The snap goes through the quarterback’s hands and the Bears recovered. One of their guys started chasing us down the sideline. Man, that was great. That kind of thing doesn’t really happen today.

My brother and I did have real jobs in high school and college. By real, I mean actual work. It’s not like we just showed up at the Bears’ offices and our dad handed us a bunch of money to go out all of the time. When we were kids, we had a paper route. Later, we worked at a Pepsi factory in Chicago, and one summer we worked with hot tar as roofers. Man, that stuff was hot and sticky. We used to get it all over us. We’d get up at 3
A.M
. and drive all the way down to some part of south Illinois to tar a school roof or something. We got to the point we could run up the ladders and slide down them.

Whatever job I did, I loved it. I worked as hard as I could to be the best at it. My brother was the same way. When we were working as roofers, the company laid everybody off at one point, but the guy who ran the company ended up calling us and said he wanted to hire us back because we were the best guys he had.

When we started coaching, it wasn’t going to be that cushy. There was no such thing as being a special defensive breakdown assistant for an NFL team. Our dad helped us find positions where we could start, but it was getting graduate assistant jobs. I got one at Eastern Kentucky and Rob got one at Western Kentucky, both NCAA Division I-AA schools. Rob almost got a job at Kentucky State, a “real job,” as we used to say, but that fell through at the last minute. In fact, during spring break of our senior year in college is when we
went out to start working on our careers. Most kids take spring break to go somewhere fun, like to the beach to stare at girls and drink beer. We went to some smaller college to be around sweaty guys.