Jets cornerback Darrelle Revis says head coach Rex Ryan didn’t step in to fix the problems within the locker room because he didn’t know about them.
In an interview with NFL Network at Pro Bowl practice, Revis said that when he spoke with Ryan following the Jets’ season-ending loss, Ryan was unaware of all the problems within the Jets’ locker room that were building during the season and have become public since the season ended.
“After the season, we talked,” Revis said, via Manish Mehta of the New York Daily News. “Basically, he didn’t know a lot of things that were going on behind the scenes. It was just so much stuff. I’m really not going to get into it because some of the stuff is real deep. But he didn’t know a lot of the things. He wanted people to say things to him. But obviously it didn’t come out. It came out on the field.”
Ryan has often been lauded as a players’ coach who has the pulse of his team, but if all those problems existed in the Jets’ locker room and Ryan didn’t know about them, that suggests that he needs to do a better job of monitoring what’s happening on his roster. Revis says he figured the Jets’ problems would get fixed, and that in reality they worsened over the course of a season that he described as “very frustrating.”
“The season kind of spiraled late during the season,” Revis said.
Despite Ryan’s inability to keep the team united during the 2011 season, Revis says he has no doubt that Ryan is the man to lead the team in 2012. He just hopes that if Ryan is as brash as ever in his talk, the Jets are able to back it up on the field.
“We’re behind Rex,” Revis said. “If he says the Super Bowl, that’s cool. That’s why we play this game. But if we’re not winning games, then I think we need to figure out ways to win games instead of just out there talking and just saying whatever you want to say.”