The Post’s Steve Serby sat down with the Jets’ executive vice president and general manager in the lead-up to the AFC Championship game.
Q: What will you be like in the press box Sunday?
A: That’s an area of improvement that I need to work on; that’s not one of my strong suits (smiles).
Q: How nerve-wracking will it be?
A: Extremely, and the guy I feel terrible for is (senior director of operations) Clay Hampton. Clay is a guy that I always sit with, and he more than times than not walks away very bruised, but that’s part of Clay’s job description, and he understands that’s part of the job. I wouldn’t want to be Clay, because he’ll be getting a lot of knees and elbows from me, and hand-holding. . . . It’s exhilarating, and it’s nerve-wracking all at once, but one of the hard parts about my job is that once the ball’s teed up, there’s nothing I can do.
Q: When you look down on the field and you see Rex coaching your team, what goes through your mind?
A: I get a tremendous sense of comfort when I look at him, because I think he’s a really good coach, and I think to coach in the AFC Championship game in consecutive years — the guy is a helluva coach.
Q: In what ways are you a better GM now than you were four years ago?
A: Small problems can become big problems if you don’t deal with them. And secondly, every day I’m reminded that I’m in the ultimate people business. And no matter how much money, how much fame is involved, at the end of the day we’re talking about how you treat people in this business, and the better you treat people, the better they’re gonna produce. And it can be as small as remembering their birthday, but little things go a long way.
Q: Might this run convince skeptics you are more than strictly a salary-cap guy?
A: I can’t control what people think of me, I can only control what I do, and I’m really proud of what our organization has produced. We can’t accomplish what we’ve accomplished by (just) me. I think it’s more a referendum of my ability to evaluate people and surround myself with great people, and that’s what I probably feel best about.
Q: Your front office dream team?
A: (Assistant GM) Scott Cohen — relentless work ethic. . . . cerebral . . . detailed . . . and cares. (Director, football administration) Ari Nissim I would say is headstrong . . . stubborn in a good way . . . very opinionated and relentless in sticking to his position. (Assistant director, player personnel) JoJo Wooten, natural evaluator. JoJo has tremendous instincts about people, and 99 out of 100 times, JoJo correctly identifies people and players. (VP, college scouting) Joey Clinkscales should be a GM . . . runs a great draft room. And with (senior personnel executive) Terry (Bradway), as good and as detailed of a guy, and his production (three playoff appearances in five years as GM) speaks for itself.
Q: What is it about Woody Johnson that Jets fans should appreciate the most?
A: Unrelenting passion for the New York Jets. I hear from him four-to-five times a day, with questions, suggestions — and all he cares about is winning.
Q: In 1997 when you came to the Jets, how intimidating was Bill Parcells?
A: He was intimidating enough that I turned down the job because I was scared of him. I hung up the phone and he had to call me back an hour later to convince me to come, and he wanted to know why I didn’t want to come and I told him because I was scared of him.
Q: Why were you scared of him?
A: Because growing up in the northeast, I just saw him on TV and I thought he was a bully.
Q: So what did he tell you to convince you?
A: That I could become a GM working for him, because he wanted to know what was important to me, and I said my dream was to become a GM. And he said, “Well why can’t I help you do that?” I said, “Well, I don’t know, maybe you could, but I didn’t think you’d be interested in that.” I said no to him, then he called me back and said, “How much is it gonna take for you to get on the plane?” I said, “I’m not about that. I’m about trying to become a general manager,” and when I got here, he paid me $20,000 more than we had agreed to because I didn’t ask for more money.
Q: Best Parcells motivational ploy?
A: He used to leave me Post-It notes on my office door at 5:30 in the morning, as a way to remind me that he would get in earlier than me, even though I would get in early. In fact, and the Post-It note usually said, “Mr. T, although your bank isn’t open, the bank in the corner office has been operating for a while.”
Q: Biggest lesson you took from him?
A: It was February of 1999, I was turning 30 years old, the building was closed; my girlfriend at the time, Michelle, now my wife, took me to Atlantic City for the night. Bill calls me up and says, “I want to meet Sunday morning in the office, we got a lot more work to do to get ready for free agency.” I said, “Great, what time?” He said 7 a.m. And it was just him and I in the building, 7 a.m., that Sunday morning in the middle of February, and I loved being there with him because we were just trying to put a plan together. And it was an everyday thing — like the victory is in the struggle. It’s every day, and you have to be passionate about it.
Q: Do you think Bill would have drafted Peyton Manning if Manning had come out for the 1997 draft?
A: The team, before we had gotten there, had invested so much into [Neil] O’Donnell, that we really had to get as much volume as possible.
Q: So if Peyton had announced he would come out, you still would have traded down?
A: I think there was a reasonable chance we would have — again, I don’t know — but because there was so much money (five years, $25 million) committed to O’Donnell the year before, and there were so many holes on the team — the team only had won one game.
Q: One adjective to describe the day Bill Belichick resigned as HC of the NYJ.
A: Surreal.
Q: Your philosophy of building a football team.
A: It starts up front. If you can’t block ’em, you have no hope.
Q: Is there more pressure on you as GM in this market?
A: I think the most pressure is what I put on myself, because we’re in this to win a championship. I know there’s a lot of pressure that comes with this job, but I embrace it. . . . I love the passion of the fans. . . . That’s what drives our industry.
Q: What drives you?
A: Fear of failure. When I was trying to get into sports, every rejection I ever got I put on the wall, so it just reminded me that I wasn’t good enough yet. When the Patriots won the Super Bowl in 2001, the parade route that the Patriots were taking was in the Boston Globe. I took that article and I framed it, and I put it in my drawer, as a way of saying like, “That’s the standard that we want.”
Q: The 1998 AFC Championship Game?
A: When it was 10-0, I was thinking like, “We really got a shot at doing this.” The thing that I’ll always remember was shaking Mr. Hess’ hand at whatever time it was, three or four in the morning, he wasn’t well enough to fly to Denver, but he stood there and shook everyone’s hand as they got off the plane, and thanked them for the year.
Q: The flight home?
A: You could have heard a pin drop.
Q: How devastated was Bill the night Vinny Testaverde ruptured his Achilles’ in the 1999 opener?
A: He was devastated. Publicly, I thought he handled it great, but when we had sat down — he sat down with Scott Pioli and myself — you could see despondency all over him.
Q: Top three exhilarating moments in the war room?
A: Mark Sanchez, I would have to put up there, just because to trade three players, two picks, in 10 minutes, and get that done, was hard. Getting David Harris (in 2007) in the second round was definitely up there, because we didn’t think there was any way he’d be at 47. D’Brickashaw (Ferguson) at 4 (in 2006), because I felt like not sexy, but losing two quarterbacks in seven snaps (in 2005), getting an athletic left tackle that could go block Jason Taylor was a really good day at the office.
Q: Plan B if Sanchez was off the board?
A: We would have felt really good about moving forward with Brett Ratliff and Kellen (Clemens) from a standpoint of we were gonna try to be a run-oriented offense, so we were gonna try to take the pressure off the quarterback position.
Q: Would Josh Freeman have been an option?
A: Sure.
Q: So you could have drafted him?
A: Absolutely. . . . I don’t know if we would have, there were other guys we were interested in.
Q: Does Shonn Greene remind you of anyone?
A: Maybe Barry Foster a little bit.
Q: Why was Dustin Keller so intriguing to you?
A: Run after the catch.
Q: What convinced you that Damien Woody could play right tackle?
A: He played against three premier pass rushers — it was only three games with Detroit — but he had the feet of a tackle.
Q: GMs in other sports you admire?
A: Lou Lamoriello.
Q: What do you hope Jet fans are saying about you?
A: That I understand the privilege of this job, and every day I work my (butt) off, to do anything in my power to make this team better, and that’s all I care about. And all I have in life is two things — the Jets and my family. That’s all I got.
Q: If Rex wasn’t a head coach, what do you think he would have been?
A: An eternal optimist (smiles).
Q: What is so much fun about your job?
A: Winning. And the fulfillment of seeing young guys get better.
Q: Do you feel you’ve built this team maybe the way Parcells would have built it?
A: Yeah, I think a lot of my football acumen comes from Bill. We’re gonna be a big, strong, tough team, and he used to tell me, “If we’re gonna be a big, strong, tough team, Mike, we gotta go get big, strong, tough guys.” A lot of what I believe in philosophically comes from him. Being around him every day for four years, you heard it a lot.