Football and politics are this country’s most popular public spectacles, and the similarities between the two garish sports are sufficient in number to make for a decent parlor game: the season is to the campaign as the playbook is to the, well, playbook. Draft rooms, war rooms, press conferences where nobody says anything of substance (much less what they really think); it’s all of a piece. In both, the actual contests are few, meaningful public information is sparse, and, as a consequence, their enduring popularity has less to do with any resolution than our fevered speculations along the way. That most of us have no real idea of how either game works interferes not at all with our certainties about them. That’s because the real appeal of both is visceral and personal. Emotion is a crucial part of life, and the vicissitudes of the ambitious, precarious people who populate these high-stakes public worlds provide the rest of us, nestled all snug in our opinions, a daily dose of vicarious exultation and despair.

Nobody understands this theatrical dynamic better than Rex Ryan, the head coach of the New York Jets, in whose company I spent well over a year, in the course of writing a book about the team. Of the inner lives of football players, Ryan once told me, “These are rare dudes. They’re mighty men. It’s easier to win a lottery than to play in the N.F.L. You’ll be criticized. The ole gladiators. Thumbs up! Thumbs down!” He meant that public scrutiny was part of the role, and the inability to tolerate it would hasten your departure from the N.F.L. To his players, Ryan always explained that professional football was less a profession than a brief vocational interlude; for survival in this strange and turbulent “blunt-force trauma” world, he advised them to acquire “skin like an armadillo.” (For her part, Hillary Clinton advises women in politics to grow rhinoceros skin.)

As Ryan knows better than most, the same can be said about the hides of N.F.L. head coaches, a select caucus of thirty-two. A concise description of the job might be: the ability to instill soaring confidence in others while suppressing your own perpetual vulnerability. Few Americans spend more time at work than football coaches, but it’s rare to find one who decorates the walls of his (windowless) office. The N.F.L.—Not for Long.

Among the most popular threads of N.F.L. commentary each season is the debate over which coach’s job is safe and whose seat is in play. The daily screeds on the subject, most of them ferociously indignant, are a reminder that everyone always wants the boss to go down—except when they see themselves in the boss.

Today is one of those moments of N.F.L. resolution, so-called Black Monday, when head coaches learn whether they are still one of the thirty-two. The press releases are terse and brutal—“relieved of his duties,” “will not return,” “dismissed,” “fired,” “terminated.” After that, it’s pack all your game plans in your old (Browns) garment bag, enroll in ESPN’s talent-development program, and make ready to join in the cacophony.

This year, no coach’s job security was discussed with more fervor than Ryan’s. After arriving in New York in 2009, Ryan led the Jets, football’s perennial second-class citizens, to the A.F.C. Championship game in his first two seasons. Not only that, the coach established himself as a great American character: a vivid, funny defensive impresario—in the great age of concussions and quarterbacks, no less—who was also lachrymose (he cried in team meetings, just as he had at his own wedding) and full of appetites. Among his predilections were his wife of twenty-seven years, Michelle (especially her comely feet), and enchiladas. More than three hundred pounds, he resembled a happy football, and his boasts were just as large. Super Bowl victories were promised.

While the world outside the Jets facility, in Florham Park, New Jersey, was split over whether Ryan was knight or a knave, to his players and his fellow-coaches he embodied the passion of the dangerous sport. His obvious joy in the game, and in their accomplishments, accompanied a sense of decency that’s rare in the step-up-or-step-aside N.F.L. His players, he contended, “are not a piece of meat to me,” and those men, whom Ryan, in his paternal style, always referred to as “kids,” knew that he meant it.

In a predominantly black sport, Ryan’s African-American players described his (Bill) Clintonian gift for “understanding” them in a way that, they said, made him unique among white head coaches. If the public winced at his bravado, on a football team, where confidence is everything, there were fewer such reservations. Another one of Ryan’s rare qualities, the players said approvingly, was his candor. That was also what made me most want to write about him.

Ryan is by nature curious and enthusiastic, and he has a social metabolism that matches the texting pace of the start-stop-start game. Rambling around the practice fields and meeting rooms of Florham Park, he specialized in brief, intense interactions in which he came to know the personalities of all of his players—not just the best ones. Many football players grew up in disadvantaged homes, and Ryan always wanted to hear all about it. This sympathy and concern, in turn, helped him to understand their distinct physical attributes. His defensive scheme—which the linebacker Bart Scott named Organized Chaos—was the most improvisational in the N.F.L., an antic blur of nose tackles in pass coverage, halfbacks blitzing from the defensive periphery, and a remarkable cornerback named Darrelle Revis making all of it possible by routinely covering (and eliminating) the opposition’s best receiver.

Then in 2011, Ryan’s third season, the Team of Our Time took a jolting step backward, finishing at 8-8 and missing the playoffs. A year later, a drastic diet reduced Ryan’s size by a third, and the Jets stature shrunk similarly, to a slender six wins alongside ten losses. Was it owing to coaching or to those familiar N.F.L. causes of defeat: crucial injuries (to Revis, among others); too many turnovers from a young and yet-to-mature quarterback (Mark Sanchez); and a general lack of offensive imagination and big-play potency Ryan knew little of offense. He turned over that “room” to others, and then he felt betrayed when a surfeit of three-and-outs depleted the energies of his defense.

Last December, at the close of the 2012 season, there were still two years remaining on Ryan’s contract, but word from Florham Park described a head coach so frustrated that the prospect of removing the photographs and mementos that decorated his office began to hold some appeal. These melancholy reflections leaked to the press, but seeing them in print clarified for Ryan how much he thrilled to coach—an epiphany that he was slow to explain, though not by choice. While he was not fired on Black Monday last year, he was the only still-employed head coach who did not address the press. It was a harbinger. The team had hired a new general manager, John Idzik, who, to all appearances, was cool, controlled, and a little ruthless. Appearances in this case were pretty much everything that anyone had to go on. Idzik regards interviewers and their notebooks the way you might the bicuspid man leaning over you with a jackhammer. He is a very private public figure.