Jets coach Rex Ryan isn’t done making guarantees. He’s just making his guarantees slightly less brazen.
So while Ryan isn’t going to promise that his team will be the best in the NFL, as he has in the past, he’s still guaranteeing that he’ll be the best defensive coach in the NFL. And while he won’t guarantee that the Jets will have the best defense in the NFL, he is guaranteeing that they’ll at least be among the five best defenses in the league.
“Am I confident in our defense? Absolutely,” Ryan said today, via the Star-Ledger. “Granted, I said top five. That’s a given. I don’t care who’s out there. . . . That’s how confident we are. We have a great system, we have a great group of players and we have a great group of coaches.”
But as confident as Ryan is, he’s not willing to say the Jets will have the best defense in football.
“Will we have the best defense in the league? I don’t know,” he said. “There are a lot of good defenses out there. I certainly think putting out that kind of defense is a goal of ours every year. We’ll see. I feel good. A lot of things have to happen. . . . We know that we’ve had a history here of wanting to have the best defense in the league, even though it has been only three years. That’s what we’re shooting for.”
Ryan is guaranteeing only that he’ll be the coach of one of the five best defenses in the NFL, not that he’ll be the coach of the defense that wins the Super Bowl. By Ryan’s standards, that’s modesty.