Rex Ryan: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Rex Ryan. The name conjures up so many different emotions from football fans. Most Jet fans love him, me being one of them, and most other NFL fans hate him. He is brash. He is arrogant. He is cocky. However, despite all the negative press he gets, which is quite a bit, there is no denying that he is a great NFL head coach.

Rex Ryan

 
When judging Ryan as a coach, too many people focus on his bold predictions of Super Bowl championships each year, his flipping off of fans, and his foot fetish. Side distractions aside, it is only fair to judge a coach on how his team performs under him. In his first two years as a head coach in the NFL he reached the conference championship game. A feat that only four other coaches have done in this history of the NFL. The success he has had his first two years make up for the disappointment of this past season. Yes, the Jets underachieved, and yes some of that blame must go to Ryan. However, maybe other than Bill Belichick and the Patriots, I can't think of any coach and team that have not had a disappointing season together.
 
What makes so many people criticize Ryan is his bold prediction years after year and his trash talk. While guaranteeing Super Bowl victories each season he has been head coach is a little much, it is just the way he coaches. He feels the best way to motivate his players is by publicly displaying his confidence in them through the media. It is being faced with so much criticism because it has never really been done before, and it definitely has not been done in a media market as big as New York. A coach like Belichick who literally says as little as possible to the media is just different style of coach than Ryan. There is no way of saying which style is better, but Belichick should be and is considered the better coach because of the immense amount of success he has had as a coach.

And that is my point. Ryan deserves, just like any other coach, to be judged simply by how his team performs on the field. With a 27-17 record with 4 postseason wins in 3 years is impressive. He turned the Jets franchise around. As a Jet fan, I am actually grateful as to how he took the Jets from a team that nobody cared about to one of the most talked about teams in the NFL.

Where are you, Sanchez?

Mark Sanchez, the Jet's QB, is the biggest reason for the Jet's failures the past season. His inconsistent play took the Jets out of many games, and left the fans scratching their heads. Can this guy win us a Super Bowl? Is he the QB of the future? Throughout all the interceptions and mis-throws, I defended him. I claimed he was still too young to give up on and I blamed it more on the offensive coordinator, Brian Schottenheimer. 

Jets QB Mark Sanchez

However, when his own teammates started to publicly doubt him, I knew there were deeper problems. The quarterback is supposed to control the locker room and be the leader. No one should be calling him out, everyone should be behind him. 

 
Now, with all the fans calling for the Jets to get Peyton Manning to be the team's QB and even having the owner of the Jets not rule out the idea of getting Peyton, it is time for Sanchez to step up. As a diehard fan, it would be nice if Sanchez would come out and say to the media, "I am the quarterback of this team, and no one is going to take the job from me." That is the confidence that I want to see out of the quarterback of my favorite football team. Instead, he has remained quiet, not talked to the media, and for the first time in 2 seasons he did not go to the Super Bowl to talk to the media. Is he lacking confidence? Or is he just trying to stay out of the spotlight? Since Mark Sanchez joined the Jets in 2009, I have never questioned his confidence, until right now. He must do something, and do something soon, to show me and the rest of Jet Nation that he has what it takes to be the face of this franchise.