Miami’s Offensive Line

As you’ve likely heard by now, a veteran Miami Dolphins guard named Richie Incognito was recently suspended after the man who had played alongside him on the offensive line, second-year tackle Jonathan Martin, left the team and went home to California in distress. Martin (black) is a Stanford-educated classics major. Incognito (white) is a well-travelled frigate of a man who has found hot water in his every football port. Last year, during a Dolphins charity golf tournament, an apparently drunken Incognito approached a woman on the course, fondled her with a golf club, rubbed himself against her, and emptied a water bottle on her head while chanting, “Let it rain.” Within pro football, Martin’s profile makes him a rara avis. At the Dolphins facility, Incognito was the team leader charged with making certain that this rare bird, whom he called “Big Weirdo,” was prepared for N.F.L. life. Incognito left a voicemail informing Martin that he was a “half-nigger piece of shit,” and concluding, “I’ll kill you.”

Amid the ensuing horrified national outcry, Incognito and others have sought to explain that while all this may appear degrading and despicable, the behavior is acceptable within an N.F.L. facility. (The remaining Dolphins players, many of them black, have been far more supportive of Incognito than of Martin.)

For N.F.L. players and coaches, the weekly games are the brief, brightly lit public events punctuating a secluded day-after-day calendar of meetings and rehearsals at team facilities that are really the essence of the N.F.L. existence. From 2010 to 2012, while writing a book, I spent more than a year inside the N.F.L., all but living with the Jets defensive coaching staff at the team’s facility in Florham Park, New Jersey. I never saw or heard anything resembling Incognito’s conduct, but what I did encounter gives me some sense of why it might happen. Football has a culture that is wary of weakness in many forms, and even with strong leadership from coaches, it’s easy to imagine how things could, almost casually, go terribly awry.

Much about Martin’s N.F.L. experience remains a mystery, but what seems undeniable is that he earned his unflattering nickname because he was “different.” “Different” was the descriptive term I heard used at the Jets facility when there was uncertainty about how someone’s personal eccentricities might affect the ties of the group.

Conformity is prized in football. In Florham Park, I was different. It didn’t take much. I was a writer in my forties and, because I wore a purple bandana when I exercised, one day I was told there were “headband concerns.” In the S.U.V. football world, I drove a Mini Cooper. At meals, I was the only one eating beet salads. These little deviations were likewise noticed and commented on. This teasing was good-natured, and I didn’t mind at all. But I noticed that they noticed. They, in turn, saw that I enjoyed being teased, which meant that even if I were different, I was also, in another phrase I heard a lot, “one of us.”

According to Rex Ryan, the Jets head coach, “skin like an armadillo” is desirable on a football team. If you are an N.F.L. player, everything you do on a game or practice field is filmed and then bluntly critiqued by your coaches in front of your teammates. Those long facility days and nights that players and coaches spend together pass more easily when everyone gets along. Sensitivity could lead to self-defeating conflict and division. Ryan warned his players that he might levy “sensitivity fines.”

In Florham Park, I often heard people use the word “authentic” as the most admirable personal quality. The dangerous game reveals you, the thinking went, and so it was crucial to show those who would go through a season with you that you could handle emotional and physical challenges—that your core wasn’t “soft.” When I broke a finger playing around with a football after practice, I was told by one coach about the difference between “being hurt and being injured.” The next day, I went to a meeting carrying a cup of ice only to confront another coach who ordered me to get rid of it: “You’re not bringing ice into a team meeting and spreading your softness.” It occurred to me then that you never saw an N.F.L. injury report with a player listed as “Doubtful—finger.”

Football is, as Ryan liked to say, “the ultimate team game,” a group endeavor that calls for unified commitment. Like the military, the game requires virile men to achieve a level of closeness on the field and around the facility that feels very intimate. The preoccupation with muscle, strength, and manly deeds amid all that bonding could seem homoerotic, and so the aversion to difference appeared to me to have to do with the worry that the intimacy could go too far. The presence of a different sort of person might create distance and unease, infecting the team with a kind of weakness.

One day, I walked into a bathroom where there were four urinals along the wall. The first and the third were in use by players. Without really thinking about it, I walked to the closer urinal, the one between them, rather than the one on the end. Immediately I could feel I’d done the wrong thing. In such an assertive culture, it was hard not to think about your own assertiveness. When one of the players asked me if I was familiar with the “one-space rule,” I told him that I didn’t really worry about such things. But looking back, the facility made me more conscious of fitting in than at any time in my life since high school.

With the unfolding of the Martin-Incognito story, much has been made of N.F.L. locker-room culture, creating the impression that all the players on a team spend a great deal of down time together in one main space. But it’s not really like a bunch of fraternity brothers sitting around a campfire. Aside from getting changed and meeting the press, players are usually elsewhere. The offense and defense, for instance, are separate states in the same country, and many offensive and defensive players hardly know one another. Players keep the closest company with their own position units, meaning, in Martin and Incognito’s case, with the other offensive linemen.

Offensive linemen have the reputation among N.F.L. personnel evaluators for being the most thoughtful players and those least likely to find trouble. The line positions ask players to protect and make way, and theirs are strenuous, self-abnegating football days. That’s because getting five or six men to the point where they can execute the intricate choreographies of protection schemes with synchronized precision is tedious labor. In the interests of cohesiveness, the Jets offensive linemen sat in the same area in both the team and the offensive meeting rooms, they ate meals and lifted weights together, and during practice they were together on the field and along the sidelines. Every position group had its own small meeting room at the facility, and ample time was passed there. That a temperamentally atypical lineman like Richie Incognito was the leader of his room would have meant that young Jonathan Martin was answerable to him just about all the time. If you really want to know what went down with Incognito and Martin, the walls of the Miami offensive-line room would tell the tale.

Martin’s troubles with Incognito seem to have begun during his rookie season, when he endured freshman hazing. With the Jets, I spent most of my time with the coaching staff, but my sense of rookie hazing was that modern players were mostly past it. There was no traditional singing of school songs in the cafeteria. Yes, some rookies were made to tote veteran’s helmets and shoulder pads into the locker room from practice, and they might be asked to provide their position group with “outside” snacks, like boxes of doughnuts or fried chicken. One rookie was required to chew tobacco for the first time until he suddenly turned Jets green and white. That was the cornerback Julian Posey, who didn’t seem to mind at all, because mostly his experience with veterans like Antonio Cromartie and Darrelle Revis had them spending extra time with him, generously helping him to improve his pass-coverage technique. Hazing seemed to me to be regarded as a football anachronism—an anodyne nod to tradition. Only among the quarterbacks did I notice even the glint of a little extra.

On early mornings during the 2011 season, four quarterbacks, including the young starter Mark Sanchez and an injured rookie named Greg McElroy, met with two coaches for morning game-plan review. I used to sit in with them. Sanchez was talented, quick-witted, and funny, bouncing with curiosity about the world. McElroy had been an excellent student at the University of Alabama, whose team he’d led to a national championship. He didn’t have Sanchez’s athletic ability, and yet something about the rookie seemed to threaten Sanchez. Perhaps it was that McElroy had scored much higher on the Wonderlic intelligence test, which all players take before the N.F.L. draft. Perhaps Sanchez believed McElroy seemed a little too sure of himself. Whatever the case, Sanchez took pleasure in riding McElroy, sending him on errands, mocking him in small, personal ways, once even pulling his shorts down as McElroy and I were talking. “Very mature,” McElroy told him, re-hoisting.

I came in for some of this myself. Sanchez and his cohort nicknamed me Bookworm, which was swiftly shortened to Worm. Nobody would enjoy that, especially someone who was in no position to reciprocate. I understood that if I was going to sit there and watch them lose, I should suffer something, too. But the name Worm was also a way of reminding me that I was different, not of them. I knew that I was fortunate to be seeing the N.F.L. for what it was, yet there were days when I forgot my armadillo skin and really disliked walking into that quarterbacks meeting. The experience was also in such contrast to the long hours I spent among the defensive coaches and players whose warm, inclusive company I came to cherish. Thinking back, I can see how constant contempt from a higher-status member of your position group could quickly become intolerable.

Not that I ever thought Sanchez was malicious. McElroy once said that he liked the other quarterbacks and wished they liked him, and I felt the same way. I saw that Sanchez was physically brave, capable of great kindnesses to others, and a little immature. As his coaches watched his inconsistent play on the field, they reached similar conclusions. He had so much going for him; they just hoped he’d grow up more quickly and become a genuine leader.

A genuine leader was Rex Ryan. Many times I heard him talk with his players about the composition of any N.F.L. team, how there would always be religious guys and faithless guys and married guys and single guys and handsome guys and ugly guys—all kinds of guys. While he now worked in an environment that valued conformity, Ryan himself was an open, fun-loving dude with a foot fetish. And, if he prized armadillo skin, he really was supportive of and interested in every kind of guy; when players betrayed sensitivity he always had their back. You didn’t have to like everyone, he’d say, but it was crucial to team success that everyone be treated with respect. Among his most-repeated phrases was “build up your teammates.”

Ryan is a singular person, but his humanity portends football’s future. That’s because the present closed culture is an increasing source of complication for those of us who watch. Revelations about concussions, bounties and pit bulls have promoted a creeping national unease that our pleasure is in something cruel and uncivilized. How to enjoy young men risking something you’d never let your own child try? That dilemma is one reason that there has been such sustained interest in the lurid narrative of the facility relationship between the two Dolphins offensive linemen. The game of football wears hard upon those who play it. The football life will soon have to go easier on them.

Above: Richie Incognito, of the Miami Dolphins warms up before a game in September, 2012. Photograph by Ron Elkman/Sports Imagery/Getty.

Nicholas Dawidoff’s most recent article for the magazine, “Quarterback Shuffle,” was published in September, 2012. His new book, “Collision Low Crossers,” comes out next week.