Jets coach Rex Ryan has sworn off guaranteeing anything after last year’s Super Bowl guarantee went bust. And he now says that not only did his guarantee not rally his troops like he thought it would, but it may have actually hurt his own team while simultaneously motivating the Jets’ opponents.
Ryan told Michael Kay on ESPN Radio that in hindsight, he never should have gotten into the business of predicting anything that his team would do.
“I don’t know what I accomplished out of it,” Ryan said, via SportsRadioInterviews.com. “I think if it gave an opponent fuel to the fire then obviously that was a mistake. If it put undue pressure on our team then that was a mistake. Certainly I didn’t want to do it, I wanted to put — coming off back-to-back championship games all that’s left is the Super Bowl. And I thought by guaranteeing that, it would put the arrows on me. Now granted it did, but it also put arrows on our players and I didn’t want that. If it was gonna come down, it would come down on me only. That was what I thought would happen, and that didn’t happen. It was shot on some of our players and obviously shot at me as well, where it should have been.”
Ryan will always be verbose and enthusiastic, but we may see less bravado from the Jets’ head coach going forward.
“I think that was my mistake,” Ryan now acknowledges, “saying what I said.”