Rex Ryan on Jets: ‘We’re gonna try to kick the s— out of them’
Rex Ryan has come out guns blazing with his new team, the Buffalo Bills. What, you expected something different?
Ryan believes he has a winner brewing in Buffalo, but he allowed himself — in an excellent piece from MMQB’s Jenny Vrentas, for this week’s Sports Illustrated — to vent a bit on his exit from the New York Jets.
It wasn’t pretty.
In the long, grueling, slow death of last season, when the free world knew that Ryan (and GM John Idzik) would go down at the end of what would be a 4-12 campaign, the former Jets head coach said he felt neutered and undercut by management, which had been brewing since the year prior.
“I wasn’t the boss anymore, I was just a guy,” Ryan told MMQB. “Whether they want to say it or not, all of a sudden I became less important to the team.
“They were trying to pull away from me. 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.”
Dennis Thurman, Ryan’s defensive coordinator with the Jets, added his own sobering realization on what was happening last year.
“Everybody knew then we weren’t going to make it [as a staff,” Thurman said. “We could have gone and packed our houses, apartments, whatever, and moved, because we knew we were done. We tried to put a good face on, and we coached our butts off. But they didn’t want us. We weren’t their guys. We played out the string, and it was frustrating. And I think the players felt our frustration. Because toward the end I think they knew too.”
But Ryan regrouped quickly after he was done in by the Jets, landing upstate with the rival Bills, allowing him two chances per year to not only go after his longtime foil, the New England Patriots’ Bill Belichick, but also his newly sworn enemy — the Jets.
How badly does he want to stick it to them?
“I want success for [Jets owner] Woody Johnson, I do,” Ryan said. “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.”
And that family appears to be buying into Rex far, far more than the Bills did with former head coach Doug Marrone. In the same story, Bills legend Thurman Thomas, who still lives in Buffalo and is active with the team, said he’s more than happy there was a change at coach.
“I don’t think it was a good fit,” Thomas said of Marrone. “It got to the point where I didn’t want to come around because he was the head coach, but I still came around because I know a lot of the players.
“Hell, we love being around Rex. You can just feel like a big cloud has been relieved from the pressure players were going through. It’s a fun atmosphere now.”
Fun. And loud. It will be a very interesting season in Buffalo, and in the AFC East at large. You can bet this won’t be the last shot fired between Ryan and his former team.
