So I felt for Schottenheimer. He had a young quarterback who wasn't much better than during his rookie year. He also had three temperamental playmaking veteran receivers in Plaxico Burress, Derrick Mason, and Santonio Holmes, who all wanted the ball a good thing, except that if Schotty played them all, as Ryan had asked him to, that meant fewer running plays and also no extra lineman to buttress his injured line. That line was a broken fence, meaning you couldn't throw deep, and if the defense knew that there was no risk of verticals, they cheated on short-route coverage. So now the receivers were feeling resentful.
....
Ryan, who lived for big games, walked into the team meeting and approached his lectern with purpose. He carried a wooden baseball bat roughly the size of a loblolly pine. "Bring your bat!" he told the team. "This is the game! They're pissed off. We're pissed off." Everything about Ryan was big. His voice flat, stentorian, tinged with the one-horse-Oklahoma inflections of his forebears was an instrument whose design predated the age of microphones. Standing beneath the media kliegs, which emphasized the astonishing whiteness of his teeth, the smooth flush of his face, the convexity of his configuration, Ryan brought to mind a Coca-Cola Belt politician planted atop the back of a flatbed truck, suit jacket flung at his feet, imparting jubilant election-week promises to the little guy.
"You want to know how to be successful in a big game?" Ryan continued. "It's all preparation. Do the little things." Bob Sutton, the linebackers' coach, leaned toward me and whispered, "Both teams will be ready. One team will be prepared." Then Ryan said, "Both teams will be ready. One team will be prepared." Sutton grinned. "I'm telepathic," he said. (Sutton occasionally helped the boss with his speechwriting.) "This," Ryan concluded, "is a bring-your-bat game." (The flourishes were all Ryan.)