Bill Parcells measured his quarterbacks not on days when they went 22-of-25 in the Super Bowl, but on days when their nose was bloodied and they kept getting knocked to the ground and whether they would keep getting up.
“It’s funny that you say that,” David Garrard said, “because I said that same thing to Geno [Smith] on the sideline after he was pulled out. I said, ‘This game is over, so it’s all about how you’re going to respond to it next week. Everybody sees your performance today, everybody has a tough day at the office. How are you going to respond to it?’
“How are you going to come back the next week and put all that criticism to rest and just come out and play ball and do exactly what your team needs you to do to get the win?”
How Geno Smith responds to the latest unforgiving education he received from the Bengals Sunday will go a long way toward defining what kind of quarterback he might be and what kind of season this will be for his team. Smith has gotten off the deck before this season. He will again.
“Everything that I was saying, he was just, ‘Yes sir, yes sir,’ which feels funny to me [laugh], but that’s a sign of respect, and also a sign of a kid that really wants to learn and get better,” the 35-year-old Garrard said. “He doesn’t see me as a threat. He doesn’t see me as anything more than just somebody that’s here trying to help him. … I just try to give little nuggets to him so that he can chew on ’em, and then, when he needs them, he can bring them back up and use them at that time.”
SNY analyst Ray Lucas played quarterback for the Parcells Jets in 1999. I asked him what Parcells used to tell him after a rough game.
“Amnesia,” Lucas said.
Lucas became one of Parcells’ favorite players. He was a fighter. A Parcells disciple.
“You don’t find out about a quarterback until you throw four picks in a game, and see what happens the week after,” Lucas said. “When you’re a quarterback for Parcells, there’s certain things that he expects, and he would call it, ‘You’re the mailman.’ Even if it’s raining, it’s sleeting, it’s hail, snow, you have to deliver the mail. And the other part of that was, sometimes you have to stand in and take a shot in the face to get the ball out to one of the wide receivers.
“You didn’t really get to be a Parcells guy until you showed him that you could take a beating and you get back up. They used to say, ‘What does it take to become a Parcells guy?’ and the only way I could explain it was, he’ll take you to a cliff, make you hang off, then step on one of your hands. If you hold on, he’ll put you behind him.”
Lucas recalled a costly interception he threw in the fourth quarter of a game against the Colts.
“We’re beating Peyton Manning, and then I [soiled] the bed, so to speak,” Lucas said.
His veteran teammates — Curtis Martin, for one — formed a comforting support system.
“I really didn’t have anything to worry about ’cause I always had them around me,” Lucas said.
Smith reviewed the Bengals disaster with quarterbacks coach David Lee Monday and moved on to the Saints.
“I’m the type of guy that’s always going to put it behind me because you can’t get it back,” Smith said. “It’s come and gone. As bad as I want to take some of those throws back, to have some of those plays back, you can’t get them back, so you’ve got to move on from it.”
In fairness, the rookie had no chance playing catchup on the road against those Bengals.
“He didn’t come in last week all giddy and flying high and all that kind of stuff,” Garrard said. “He really is the same person all the time, which is a great thing, ’cause that’s what you want to be as a quarterback, you want to be even keel.”
Garrard smiled when asked to recall his worst experience as a young Jaguars quarterback.
“It’s funny,” he said. “I saw Pacman [Jones] before the game, he came over and gave me five and everything, I said, ‘You know I still have some nightmares from the last time I played you in Tennessee,’ because he picked me off twice, one of ’em was for a touchdown, I fumbled in that game, that was returned for a touchdown, so that was definitely my worst one. I think it was in ’06. It was just a bad day. But the next week I came out and had a great game.”
Ironically, one of Smith’s two pick-sixes would belong to Pacman.
“That is another lesson that Geno will learn from — you don’t throw the ball outside late at all,” Garrard said. “He even said that right afterwards. So he understands, he’s learning, and sometimes there’s some bumps and bruises that come along with that.”
Garrard can be the kind of mentor for Smith that Mark Brunell was for Mark Sanchez.
“Don’t think that you need to come out and start spraying the ball all over the field to prove everybody wrong,” Garrard said.
Up one week, down the next. Get back.
“I think he can give defensive coordinators fits with his legs,” Lucas said. “I think he has a high ceiling.”