Nice article on NJ.com. Disects Rex's comments
http://www.nj.com/jets/index.ssf/2015/04/truth_or_bs_how_much_of_ex-jets_coach_rex_ryans_un.html
you've surely seen what Bills coach Rex Ryan said to Sports Illustrated's Jenny Vrentas about his former employer, the Jets, and one of his former players, tight end Jace Amaro.
It was vintage, bombastic Ryan ... and then some. But how much of Ryan's unloading -- his denials, his gripes about the Jets -- is actually legitimate?
Let's take a "truth or B.S." approach and parse some of his comments.
For the sake of context, we will also include some of what Vrentas wrote leading into and out of Ryan's quotes.
OK, let's dig in:
In April 2012 the Jets hired a new team president, Neil Glat. That season the team went 6-10, and general manager Mike Tannenbaum subsequently was replaced by John Idzik. Despite having put on a good face, Ryan says he felt like a "leftover" under the new GM, half of an arranged marriage "who could be replaced at any time."
"I wasn't the boss anymore," Ryan says. "I was just a guy. Whether they want to say it or not, all of a sudden I became less important to the team."
Truth or B.S.?
Truth.
Well, sort of. He absolutely was a "leftover" from the Tannenbaum regime, but Ryan really should not have remained at all. In December, upon firing Ryan and Idzik, Jets owner Woody Johnson admitted he probably should've started fresh after the 2012 season and fired both Tannenbaum and Ryan. But Johnson didn't, so Idzik and Ryan wound up on two different timelines -- Idzik planning for the future, Ryan trying to win now to save his job.
Ryan is doing a darn fine job of playing the victim with this quote. Ryan can believe all he wants that the Jets limited his power by hiring Idzik ("I wasn't the boss anymore"). Fair enough. But an NFL head coach still has a lot of say, and sway, in how a team performs, regardless of who sits in the GM's seat.
And over Ryan's final four seasons, the Jets rarely performed. They went 26-38, with no winning records and no playoff trips. Out of those 38 losses, 24 came by double digits, including 13 by 20 points or more. At some point, that comes back to coaching.
A meeting at Jets headquarters in April 2013 troubled Ryan. The league office encouraged teams to hold organization-wide branding exercises, and the Jets' new senior vice president of marketing and fan engagement built theirs around three words: bold, electrifying, united. One of the slides during the presentation parsed the differences between brash--an adjective regularly attached to the head coach--and bold. Ryan, who was sitting in the room, says he felt singled out.
"They were trying to pull away from me," he says. "Like it was my fault, somehow, that people identified the Jets with me, and that was a bad thing and not a good thing. I was just being who I was. From that point on I knew I wasn't going to be long for that job." (A Jets spokesman told SI: "It's surprising and disappointing that Rex feels that way. There was no effort by the organization to move away from him in any way.")
Truth or B.S.?
B.S.
Credit to Ryan for saying how he really feels. He's always been a very emotional guy. Sensitive, even. But it's hard to imagine Ryan coming off any whinier here. He took a meaningless marketing meeting and turned it into a slight against him.
Maybe that "chip on shoulder" mentality is part of what makes a successful NFL coach -- and Ryan certainly has been successful at times, both as a head coach and defensive coordinator -- but it seems illogical for Ryan to draw a connection between the buzz words used at this meeting and his job security.
Ryan set the bar high when he came to the Jets, guaranteeing a Super Bowl championship. It doesn't get more brash than that. Ryan even maintained his swagger to the bitter end.
It's one thing to have lofty aspirations. It's another to state them as publicly as Ryan did. When his team fell short of those goals -- and well short in 2011 and 2012 -- Ryan shouldn't have been the least bit surprised that the Jets wanted to step back from his big-talking ways, from a marketing standpoint.
You can't keep thumping your chest as an organization when you miss the playoffs in spectacular fashion for two straight years, following back-to-back AFC Championship Game trips. Nobody ever told Ryan he couldn't continue to speak about the Lombardi Trophy as a goal to his players. It's just that, in early 2013, the Jets were in no position to brand themselves, marketing-wise, as a swaggering franchise. That's all.
On April 6, Jets tight end Jace Amaro reflected on his rookie season and told Sirius XM NFL Radio that Ryan's 2014 team lacked accountability. To which Ryan says, "He's full of s--, and I'll remind him of that when we play him. Look, we weren't perfect, and I never said we were going to be perfect. But that's a f---- b.s. comment. But, hey, he's happy that he's got a different coach in place. We'll see how happy he is when I play against him."
Truth or B.S.?
B.S.
This is a he-said, he-said thing, a matter of opinion about something that's difficult to factually prove one way or the other. So it's hard to really ascertain the 100 percent truth, or lack thereof, in Amaro's statement that the Jets lack accountability last season. It's his opinion that they did. And it's Ryan's opinion that they did not.
But for Ryan to call complete B.S. on Amaro's opinion, well, that's B.S. Ryan offers only one slight admission in this quote that he could've done things differently with the Jets, an acknowledgement that some of their struggles maybe were his fault after all. But for Ryan to insinuate that Amaro essentially celebrated the coach's firing isn't fair.
He says he always believed Woody Johnson "wanted me to be his coach for 100 years." But after the four-win season in 2014, Ryan realized the Jets owner had no choice but to fire him. He says he wished he had spoken up when he first felt himself slipping into a power struggle.
"The minute I felt uncomfortable, I should have said something to Woody and made sure he knew exactly how I felt," Rex says. "But when hires are made after you're hired, I didn't want to question that. How can I preach that I'm all on board if I do that?"
Truth or B.S.?
Truth.
This is fair and reasonable from Ryan, who, despite all his bravado, can absolutely be both. Even with the Jets, he was never as cartoonish as some of his showiest sound bites made him appear.
Ryan has always been fond of Johnson, and vice versa. Of course Johnson wanted Ryan to coach the Jets forever. He didn't hire Ryan with the intention of firing him after six seasons. But even Ryan had to admit at last month's NFL meeting that Johnson made a logical move by letting him go.
Left unsaid in Ryan's "on board" quote was that he really had no room to complain about Idzik's hiring -- not after Ryan's Jets sputtered in 2011 and 2012, and Tannenbaum's mostly poor drafts from 2008-12 contributed to the GM's justified firing.
Entering 2013, the beginning of the brief Idzik era, Ryan was just fortunate to have a job. He surely realizes this. What good was he going to do himself by complaining?
Ryan had lost any right to do that by leading the Jets to records of 8-8 and 6-10 in 2011 and 2012. Though the Jets did lose a bunch of talent from Ryan's first two teams, he always remained, at heart, a defensive-minded head coach with a blind spot for offense -- and for picking capable offensive coordinators who could develop a young quarterback.
"I want success for Woody Johnson, I do. But don't kid yourself--we're gonna try to kick the s-- out of them when we bring our team in. We're going to try to whip your ass. There are people in that organization who are going to be lifelong friends to me. But this is my damn football family now."
Truth or B.S.?
Truth.
This a great, honest quote by Ryan. (Yes, it can be both.) And it sets the stage for what should be two fascinating Jets-Bills games this season. Ryan is grateful to Johnson, since the owner gave Ryan his first head coaching job.
But why should Ryan feel any other way than this? Why shouldn't he want to hammer Johnson's team on the field? If Ryan felt otherwise, he wouldn't be doing his job as the Bills' head coach.
Ryan basically said the same thing, in less salty language, on the day the Bills introduced him: "Is there a chip on your shoulder? Of course there is. Any time you get fired, there's going to be. It's like: OK, I'm going to show you. [Muhammad] Ali would always have that thing about: I'm going to show you how great I am. I'm not going to say that. I'm going to show you how great we are."
If part of Ryan's job is to talk his way through the offseason, and make a sputtering organization relevant again (at least in the public discourse), well, Ryan is earning his paycheck from the get-go, just like he did with the Jets.
In the autumn comes the harder part -- and the only part that actually matters.
Joe Caporoso 
