SHOOTING FROM THE LIP
As Jets play out string for Rex in what has been a horrible ending, let’s remember how he made the Jets matter again
THERE IS NO WAY of knowing whether Rex Ryan has already come as close to the Lombardi Trophy as he will ever come. And as his time with the Jets comes to a close, like what was once a hit show closing, as he begins to play out the string with what will be a mostly unwatchable game today against the Tennessee Titans — the Marcus Mariota Bowl! — there is no way to add it all up and really know whether he has been anything more than a loud, colorful, glorified defensive coordinator.
Who knows, maybe he will be remembered best as the guy who coached the Jets before Jim Harbaugh did; before Harbaugh became the coach who brought the Jets all the way back the way Bill Parcells brought the Giants back once.
Still: One thing we do know for sure about Rex Ryan is that someone so often treated like a stand-up comic in Florham Park has shown himself to be a stand-up guy to the end. That won’t save him and shouldn’t save him or change his record. It should still count for something.
His resume with the Jets will always be complicated. There will be those who say he did his best work with an awful lot of players he inherited from Eric Mangini, and that he got as lucky with his first run to the AFC Championship Game — even thinking the Jets were out of the playoffs at one point, remember that? — as the Giants did the second time they won the Super Bowl. And Rex’s critics will look at all the players he coached on offense and ask which ones ever really got better on his watch.
But he will have his defenders, too, you know that, including so many of the men who played for him. These people will talk about
SHOOTING FROM THE LIP the Jets going to the championship game with Mark Sanchez as a rookie quarterback and then as a second-year quarterback, and they will talk, and big, about the time Rex and the Jets went into Foxborough and beat the 14-2 Patriots in a playoff game that Tom Brady still says is one of the worst defeats he’s ever had.
But what we will all remember is how much fun it was with Rex in town, especially those first two years, when he really did look like the biggest star we had. Fun didn’t get him to the Super Bowl. Fun never beat Belichick and Brady out of first place in the AFC East and it never made the Jets a bigger deal around here, or in their own stadium, than the Giants have always been in football, both in New York and in Jersey.
It was still big fun, as big as Rex once was. It doesn’t save him from 2-11 now and whatever record the Jets end up with; doesn’t save him from what the Bills did to him twice and what the Chargers did to him in San Diego, and the fact that he was so scared of his own quarterback against the Dolphins that he had the Jets play as if the forward pass had never been invented in pro football. Doesn’t save him from the fact that the Jets were out of the playoffs more than they were in them while he was in town.
Jim Harbaugh hasn’t won a Super Bowl, either, and has made just one more championship game than Rex did. The idea that Woody Johnson shouldn’t go after him, and hard, if Harbaugh is available after this season is dumber than a butt fumble. Or signing Tim Tebow. Or Rex and everybody else in Florham Park worrying about the media as much as they do.
It is still worth remembering how Rex has conducted himself this season. You can say he looked foolish defending the general manager who didn’t want him in the first place, or defending Geno Smith, or even talking about all the pride and fight in his team when there
were times this season when we saw neither. Maybe it was just another way of auditioning for his next job, a players’ coach wanting the world to see he was a team player himself.
To the end, though, he has been himself, even the other day when he addressed some of the things Woody Johnson had said in the Daily News about how frustrated and disappointed he feels about the ’14 Jets by saying this: “I feel the same way he does.” There have been so few managers or coaches ever like him with a New York sports team. There were times when we tried too hard and the media laughed too hard at things that weren’t all that funny. It doesn’t change the fact that he did sometimes feel like a football Casey Stengel, just without the World Series. Finally this season, he turned into Casey coaching some kind of football version of the ’62 Mets.
No one knows if his ego will allow him to officially become a coordinator again. Or if his next move is into television, and becoming some kind of big John Madden 2.0. Maybe he does end up with a head job right away, even if you wonder how that happens if he ends up 2-14. He never won it all here. Over the past few years he didn’t win nearly enough to keep his job. There was still that time when he made the Jets matter again. He ought to be cheered for that at MetLife Sta
dium before he goes.