http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/commentary/news/story?id=4829535
Updated: January 15, 2010, 3:22 PM ET
Rex Ryan has Super Bowl confidence
Jets rookie coach is primed to bring next championship to New York
I met Rex Ryan while doing a man-crush story last year on
Ed Reed. It was a quick meet via telephone, one he probably doesn't even remember.
I figured if anyone could back up my claim that Reed was just as (if not more) important to the Ravens than
Ray Lewis, it was the guy who took his pops' (Buddy) defensive genius and flipped it like Luther Vandross used to do with someone else's song.
Ryan was cool. And that got me. There was something very calm about his demeanor on the phone that made me like the dude. Damn, NFL coaches -- even if they are defensive coordinators -- aren't supposed to be that cool. He was Mike Tomlin cool.
So, when the news broke a few months later that Ryan had been chosen to take over the Jets, I was gassed as Chevron. I said to myself, "He's about to give them a whole new identity. The Jets have never seen cool like this!"
Then the crazy came out. Then the true Rex Ryan came out.
And that's when I began to like him even more.
The arrogance in the postgame quotes when his team opened up the season 3-0, his descent into defensive defiance when the Jets lost five of the next six games. And the crying. So ingenious! So not cool. Ryan actually pulled off a Hillary Clinton ... and it worked.
[+] Enlarge
<CITE>Al Bello/Getty Images</CITE>The lovefest will only grow stronger if the Jets are parading through New York, as scheduled according to Rex Ryan.
After 10 games I knew he was meant to be here: in the NFL playoffs, playing beyond the wild-card game, one game away from a place in the NFL's final four,
this year.
He is the anti-Norv Turner. He is so not the legendary coach he's going up against on Sunday. Ryan with all of his decorum-turned-defiance has found a way to do what no one believed possible less than a month ago. And he had the "stones" to never waver as a rookie coach from saying "his team" was going to make the playoffs, not despite of but
because it had a rookie quarterback (
Mark Sanchez).
(After a 10-7 loss to the Falcons, Ryan did break character and say, "We're obviously out of the playoffs, and that's unfortunate." That could be looked at as some "reverse Jedi mind-trick motivational tactic" because the Jets have not lost since.)
Name another coach in the league who has the nerve not only to say it, but actually believe it as it's coming out his mouth. Name another coach belligerent enough to say in his out-loud voice when mikes are surrounding him what he is supposed to say only to his coaching staff behind closed doors after film sessions.
No 4-4 coach gives his team a seven-day midseason vacation on its bye week. No coach watches -- and allows -- his rookie quarterback (even though they were playing the Raiders) to eat a hot dog in between series on the sidelines during a game. No coach gets into a verbal battle with a linebacker (
Channing Crowder) from an opposing team in the offseason. No coach of a team with the longest odds left of any team still standing to win the Super Bowl would go into his first-ever divisional playoff game as a head coach, on the road, against the Chargers, the hottest team in the NFL (winners of 11 games in a row, mind you) -- and predict, to the point of almost a guarantee, a win.
Ryan's done all that ... with the ease and confidence (or pretentiousness) of a coach who d.g.a.d. what anyone outside of the organization that employs him thinks.
Cool no more. He's on a Kanye "Can't Tell Me Nothing" roll now.
"Rex believes in our team so much," Jets tackle
Damien Woody said earlier in the season while trying to explain Ryan to the New York Post. "I can't even put it into words, and it would be a shame if we didn't capitalize on our opportunity ... He said it's all about us, that nobody believes in us and that we are the only ones who believe we can get things done. He said, 'I believe in you; I believe you get can get this thing done.'"
And that's how he got me too. He made me believe in more than just the Jets, he made me believe in him -- win or lose. He's proved -- by turning
Darrelle Revis into Ed Reed Part II, by turning the Jets' defense into the Ravens Part II, by turning
Shonn Greene (another rookie!) into
Thomas Jones Part II, etc. -- that even if his premonition of the Jets winning it all this year doesn't come true, that soon, very, very soon, he will win the final game of an NFL season as the coach of this squad. He will be Bill Parcells Part II.
On the day after he went all Dick Vermeil on us, Ryan came in to meet the press with a box of Kleenex, beating everyone to his personal punch line. Once he sat down, he said something that will carry him and the Jets far beyond Sunday, even if it happens to be their last game of the season. It was a Sugar Ray Robinson quote. "To become a champion, you have to believe in yourself when nobody else will."
Some people will say, even believe, that he took the win against the Colts as an insult, that Jim Caldwell pulling the plug during that Week 16 game was like spitting in Ryan's face. The Jets may have been the right team to rest against, but Ryan was the wrong coach.
Because to love Rex Ryan is to know that if another football miracle, like the one in 2008, happens in New York this year, he is so modest that he might send Caldwell a bottle of champagne from the Jets' locker room. It would be heartfelt and so perfectly sarcastic. So perfectly him.
Scoop Jackson is a columnist for ESPN.com.
