In his three years with the team, Jets coach Rex Ryan rarely has shown restraint when it comes to the things he says about his team. He now says that, in the future, he possibly will.
Ryan told WFAN on Friday that he may tone things down when it comes to boasting, bragging, and/or guaranteeing. He fears that his big talking may have put too much pressure on his team.
“My thing about, ‘I’ll guarantee that we get it done this year,’ I thought the bull’s-eye was going on my back, and that’s fine,” Ryan said. “I was trying to put pressure on myself. So that’s something that obviously I have to learn from.”
He justified his February 2011 guarantee of a Super Bowl win by pointing to his team’s success in 2009 and 2010, both of which seasons culminated in losses in the AFC title game. “Clearly, when you have a team that went to back-to-back championship games, what else is there to go for?” Ryan said. “It’s Super Bowl or bust. Well, we busted.”
Meanwhile, the Jets seem to be bursting with sound bites as their cross-stadium rivals prepare to chase their fifth Super Bowl berth since the last time the Jets played in the game as the AFL champions. While some of the talk (including comments from owner Woody Johnson) was aimed at taking steam out of LaDainian Tomlinson’s remarks regarding the supposedly fractured relationship between quarterback Mark Sanchez and receiver Santonio Holmes, Ryan told season-ticket holders in a Friday conference call that surely could have waited until the Giants’ playoff run was over that he wasn’t involved in the offense because of the complex terminology employed by offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer.
“Quite honestly, the verbiage we had last season was probably a little much,” Ryan said.
“A little much.” That probably should be the title of the team’s 2011 highlight video.