Nearly a year ago, Rex Ryan arrived as the head coach of the Bills, and he instantly guaranteed an end to the team’s long playoff drought.
The run of futility continues, and on Monday the head coach expressed regret regarding his decision to make a guarantee on which his team failed to deliver.
“We just didn’t produce the wins I thought we would,” Ryan told WGR 550 radio in Buffalo, via Mike Rodak of ESPN.com. “The thing that kind of gives this team a black eye when we’re looking at it, is that I let my mouth get ahead of everything. And I think if I would have come in there and just said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna compete’ and do all that stuff, maybe we wouldn’t have such a bad feeling about this team.”
PFT recently brought back some of the comments from Ryan’s introductory press conference, which created expectations that the team was unable to satisfy.
“I know it’s been 15 years since the Bills made the playoffs,” Ryan said. “Well get ready, man, we’re going. We are going. . . . My message to our team is to get ready. Start preparing now. Start preparing that we’re going to be playing games in January.”
He also called the team’s defensive performance in 2014 (fourth overall) “disappointing,” and he vowed that the Bills would have the best defense in the league.
He was wrong on both counts, and he has proven once again the importance of managing expectations.
The next question becomes whether Ryan will simply say, “Hey, we’re gonna compete” when it’s time to start talking about 2016 — or whether he’ll once again yield to the temptation to grab a bat and point to the fence before inevitably hitting a popup that barely clears the infield.