tale for the Jets. The most discussed player at the current Combine was Auburn quarterback Cam Newton, and even he elicited restrained commentary from the Jets. They were detached, letting the process play out in full. The Combine was only one chapter, a bewitching spectacle that needed to be treated with skepticism. For all the reports and films and algorithms and studies and formulas and statistics inundating NFL personnel departments, there was no reliable science to predict the professional success of college football players. Gholston, the quiet man who never sacked anybody, was the team’s metaphor for the inside/outside existence of the NFL. Out there, in shorts, he was still the picture of an NFL player. Inside, the image blurred.

When the defensive coaches spent after-meetings time together atthe Combine, Ryan was never with them. Since coming to the Jets, he’d left active management of the defense to Pettine. To many, Pettine was a man of inscrutable, complicated passions, the dark order complementing Ryan’s joyful chaos. In Baltimore, he had been Ryan’s protégé, and the two had worked so well together over the years, planning the Ravens defense, that they had become “brothers,” as Ryan put it. The past two years in New York, the Jets defense had been either the best in the league or just about. Pettine had run the defensive meetings and done the majority of the defensive game-plan building, and Ryan had asked him to call some of the games from the coaching box high above the field. Now Ryan was making