READY TO GO! With Darrelle Revis suffering a season-ending knee injury, third-year cornerback Kyle Wilson will need to fill the void on Rex Ryan’s defense. (Jeff Zelevansky)
Monday Mourning Cornerbacking was everywhere Rex Ryan turned yesterday. He wore what Bill Parcells used to call the brook trout look as he addressed the demise this season of his great star Darrelle Revis because of a torn left ACL.
Ryan said all the things a head coach is supposed to say in these moments of truth and sounded as if someone had ripped his heart out as he did. But the season now rests on whether he can get up and coach like a great coach.
With Revis on a faraway island, the self-proclaimed best defensive coordinator in the NFL must devise a new scheme without the best cornerback in the NFL and show us, more than tell us, that he is the best defensive coordinator in the NFL.
He must also be the master motivator who can get his players — all his players — to keep believing.
Because no one around the league cares that Revis is gone. And Roger Goodell isn’t cancelling the season.
A season during which Life With Revis did little to convince the legion of naysayers that Life Without Revis will be anything but doom and gloom, and R.I.P. New York Jets.
It is up to Ryan to find a telephone booth somewhere to change and come out as Vince Lombardi. Or maybe Bill Parcells.
Lombardi and Parcells could lead a horse to water and make him drink, and Ryan’s parched horses need that type of leadership in their desert of despair desperately.
There are no guarantees he can pull this off, no guarantees he can get his first-place Jets (eye roll) to Rally ’Round Rex at a time when he himself has stopped making guarantees.
It is his fourth season as a head coach.
It is time to see some Rexcellence from him again.
Parcells lost Phil Simms toward the end of the Giants’ 1990 season and had to adapt on the fly with Jeff Hostetler. Ryan has to do that now with Kyle Wilson. I asked Parcells yesterday what he told his Giants at the time.
“I said, ‘Listen, we have a quarterback who’s going to go in and take Phil’s place,’ ” he said. “‘He’s been here seven years. I have every confidence he can do the job. It’s not going to be because of him we’re going to lose.’ ”
Hostetler and the Giants upset the Bills in Super Bowl XXV when Scott Norwood’s 47-yard field goal went Wide Right.
It was a different story in the Jets 1999 opener when Parcells lost Vinny Testaverde to a ruptured Achilles and had to turn to Rick Mirer first, and then Ray Lucas.
“What? I’m going to put up the white flag?” Parcells said that fateful day. “No, I’m not going to do that. You know what? Nobody [around the league] cares. … We just have to try and adjust and go forward.”
The Jets recovered too late and missed the playoffs.
“People lose their quarterbacks, it’s happened over the history of the game,” Parcells said yesterday. “Some of these injuries are season-affecting. You just have to pick it up and go forward. There’s a lot of football left. A lot can happen. You can’t draw any conclusions after the third week.
“That doesn’t mean the Jets are eliminated.”
Joe Klecko ruptured his patellar tendon and played only two regular season games in the 1982 strike season. The Jets made it to the AFC Championship Mud Bowl game anyway with Klecko making a brief appearance in the playoffs.
“I think Revis is much more important than I was,” Klecko told The Post. “You never had to worry about rolling coverages with Darrelle Revis. Without an extensive pass rush, it creates a lot of problems.”
A great head coach will usually solve them. Are you listening, Rex Ryan?
“He’s got to get them motivated,” Klecko said. “They got to start playing above the level they’re playing. Them guys are going to have to step up. It was almost painful to watch them play this past weekend.”
Marty Lyons was there the day Klecko was carted off. He remembers the feeling among the ’82 Jets this way: “Let’s finish this season the way Joe would want us to play.”
Now that Revis is no longer the focus of the defense, Lyons maintains there is opportunity for others to raise their hands and say: “I want to be that guy now. Focus it on me!”
No time for woe is me.
“Losing the best cover guy in the NFL is definitely going to affect the way you play defense,” Lyons said, “but you can’t use it as an excuse. You play with what you have and you have confidence in the system. Everybody has to pick it up a notch.”
Kyle Wilson, of course. Mark Sanchez, of course. Rexcellence from the head coach, first and foremost.