There are some who can’t get beyond the bluster, or the swagger, or the confidence that usually borders on arrogance and sometimes spills across state lines. That is the thing about Rex Ryan: He can come across as a cartoon, a caricature, and that tends to obscure something:
He really is a hell of a coach.
“Even if we wanted to let ourselves get down,” linebacker David Harris was saying Sunday afternoon at FedEx Field, after the Jets had finished off the Redskins 34-16, “that man over there” — he pointed at Ryan, making his way through the narrow visitor’s locker room — “wouldn’t let us. He finds a way to get his message across.”
I’m going to give you a statistic now, and you can dismiss it, or you can qualify it, or you can ascribe what ever value — or lack thereof — you’d like. But after that victory in Landover, Md., two days ago, Ryan’s record with the Jets sits at 27-17. That’s a .617 winning percentage.
It also nudged him into first place on the Jets’ all-time list of winning percentage for coaches. Until Sunday at around 4:20 p.m, that distinction belonged to Bill Parcells, who was 29-19 from 1997-1999, a .604 mark.
OK: as Parcells himself would say about Ryan, we’re not going to hold off ordering an extra supply of clay to sculpt Rex’s bust for Canton just yet. And yes, being the Jets’ winningest coach is a bit akin to being the world’s tallest midget, since the only man other than Parcells and Ryan to have a career record with the Jets of better than .500 is Al Groh, who weighs in at a robust 9-7.
But whether you label the Jets a disappointment this year or not — and at 7-5, with lots of work left to secure a wildcard in a year when everyone in the organizations coveted a division title, it’s a fair label — there is little denying the Jets feel, and look, like a completely different franchise than they’ve looked at almost any other time in their history dating back to 1960.
The only other exception: The Parcells years, when it felt as if everything about the Jets had been transformed into the Giants, simply trading the blue in for green. As a result, as great as that era was, it felt transient even as it was happening, as if the Jets were merely borrowing something, like a library book.
This is something else. It would be a mistake to say that something else is something “permanent,” not after only two years, not with the looming task of sustaining what he’s built lying ahead of Ryan, a challenge that’s always lot harder than taking the first few steps out of the morass.
“We take our cue from him,” quarterback Mark Sanchez said not long ago. “He believes in us, and so we believe in us.”
It was interesting Sunday, too: On the other sideline, coaching the Redskins, was Mike Shanahan, owner of two Super Bowl rings, dubbed “Mastermind” during his glorious run in Denver.
Three years ago, Shanahan was fired by the Broncos exactly one day after Eric Mangini was let go by the Jets. Shanahan was one of three coaches rich with experience and success — Bill Cowher and Marty Schottenheimer were the other two — that a lot of Jets fans and media clamored for as a replacement.
The prevailing thought, then as now, is that certain coaches bring cachet and victory along with their names — the way Parcells did when he joined the Jets. It’s why you won’t stop hearing Cowher’s name attached to the Giants’ future until Tom Coughlin either gets a contract extension or is fired and replaced by someone else.
Now, there is risk attached to entrusting a rookie head coach. Mangini was. Herman Edwards was. Groh was. None of them worked out spectacularly for the Jets. But watching Shanahan squint and suffer through another rough Sunday in Washington — where his record is now 10-18 — it’s also obvious you might not always want to hire a coach for who he has been.
Sometimes, you hire him for what he might be. And sometimes, it even works out.