still believe that things with Ryan were as they had always been. Out at the Combine, it was clear that much was different.

In Indianapolis, as soon as Ryan was free of his long schedule of meetings, he was all over town, as he always was at the Combine. Only this time, everybody wanted to join him for a cheeseburger—or lob one at him. He’d given a press conference in which he’d guaranteed a Super Bowl victory for the Jets.

As for the Jets defensive coaches at the Combine, after hours of asking players to diagram their college base defenses and showing them cut-ups of themselves making good and poor plays on the field—clips chosen to stimulate a revealing discussion, assess the player’s football acumen, and measure his responses towith a woman before one asked her roommate out.

And then there were the ongoing adventures of young Mike Smith. Smitty had been a Ravens linebacker until a severe shoulder injury ended his career. With the Jets, he was still officially a defensive intern, but Pettine deemed him a promising enough coach to lead the Jets outside linebackers. He was a dark-haired Texan with a big, cheerful arm-around-the-shoulder manner, and in a community filled with strong, physical men, there was something sweetly unmenacing about Smitty. The others enjoyed telling Smitty stories in front of him, partly because the stories were so amusing and partly because Smitty’s policy in the face of less than flattering personal history was to smile and tell himself, You just have to take it. A