The words seemed to bleed slowly through the telephone line during a conference call with Rex Ryan yesterday.
One reporter, who must not know the Jets coach very well, innocently used the words “bend but don’t break” to describe the way the Jets defense played in their 17-3 preseason win over the Giants Monday night.
The words, which actually provided a rather spot-on assessment of how the Jets’ defense played against the Giants, are akin to saying something uncomplimentary about Ryan’s family.
They’re fighting words.
Ryan’s pride in his aggressive, attacking defensive style is probably second only to his family in the pecking order of importance.
To suggest “bend but don’t break” to Ryan is the highest order of insult.
So, almost as soon as those words were uttered, you could sense the hair on the back of Ryan’s neck raising and his stomach churning.
His immediate defense mechanism was to counter with a healthy dose of his characteristic bravado.
“Believe me,” Ryan said, “the least concern I have is about our defense. I wouldn’t trade this defense for anybody’s in the league. I think our defense is really going to be outstanding. I challenge everybody to put your negative comments out there and we’ll see what happens at the end.”
Of the Giants’ offense gaining 224 yards against the Jets’ first-team defense in the first half, Ryan reasoned, “They made some plays on us. We missed a few. You’re not going to be perfect.”
Then he added, “Will we end up being [the] best defense in football? I think so.”
The brazen Ryan has such unbridled confidence in his defense, sometimes you get the feeling he’d be comfortable putting his teenage son, Seth, in at quarterback and still win games.
There’s an ongoing debate about whether Mark Sanchez is the weak link on the Jets, and they’ve gotten to the last two AFC Championship games in spite of his turnovers and low completion percentage. That’s surely up for debate considering how well Sanchez has performed in the biggest games (he’s 4-2 in the postseason, all on the road).
But the fact is, regardless of Sanchez’s ongoing development and the addition of Plaxico Burress to play alongside Santonio Holmes and all the talk of the ground-and-pound offense, the Jets remain a defense-first team.
“We’re going to be tough to beat physically and if you can’t beat us mentally, which you shouldn’t be able to do, it’s going to be a long day for you,” Ryan said.
Ryan’s confidence comes from not only his own mind, which has helped produce some of the best defenses the game has seen in recent years, but also from the continuity of this current group. He’ll have 10 returning starters lining up for the season opener against the Cowboys on Sept. 11.
The Jets will also enter their opener with cornerback Darrelle Revis having had a full camp this year after he missed all of it in a contract dispute last summer.
They also will have linebacker Calvin Pace available to start the season for the first time in three years. Pace missed the first four games in 2009 serving a league suspension for violating the banned substance policy and was out for the first four last season with a foot injury.
“We feel like we have the same talent we had last year and are potentially even better,” said Jets safety Jim Leonhard, who has two interceptions this preseason. “That gets you excited. From the top to bottom, we have everything in place to make a strong run again.”
That strong run does not entail anything that resembles a “bend but don’t break” defense. If it’s bending — even if it’s not breaking — then, in Ryan’s mind, it’s broken.
“That’s not the type of defense we want to play,” Leonhard said. “That phrase makes our defensive coaches sick.”
mcannizzaro@nypost.com