Boy, is Dan Campbell going to be mad he didn’t think of this first.
As a way to combat his over-the-top amount of penalties this season, Bills coach Rex Ryan has gone back to his own over-the-top means of teaching his team discipline.
According to Mike Rodak of ESPN.com, Ryan said he was going to start punishing penalties in practice with push-ups.
“If a guy gets a penalty during the practices, then we’re gonna make sure that all of us are gonna do 10 pushups or whatever,” Ryan said. “The rest of the team will [do pushups] and that person [being penalized] will stand up, just to see how many people he is affecting.
“Penalties are still gonna happen, but we gotta eliminate them to the best of our abilities, especially the self-inflicted ones.”
The Bills lead the league with 46 accepted penalties, which is on pace to set the league record for a season. Of the 58 total flags thrown at them, 13 were for unnecessary roughness, unsportsmanlike conduct or taunting, and no other team has more than six.
But the push-up gimmick is on par with the new Dolphins interim coach running Oklahoma drills in practice as a means of instilling toughness and competitiveness into grown men — as it’s the kind of thing high school and college coaches do with players who have yet to reach “grown man” status.
Ryan has pushed this button before, with Jets teams that had the same way of making yellow flags fly.
It’s interesting, however, that Jets coach Todd Bowles and Patriots coach Bill Belichick haven’t had to go the Friday Night Lights route to modify their players’ behavior. It’s almost as if maturity and discipline already resided within their players, for some strange reason.