For Jets general manager Mike Tannenbaum, it was love at first sight — even before Rex Ryan walked into the room.
Tannenbaum and owner Woody Johnson were looking for the right head coach to replace Eric Mangini. Ryan was looking for a team to call his own for the first time.
It has turned out to be a marriage made in heaven.
Tannenbaum detailed exclusively for The Post exactly how and why Ryan bowled the Jets’ power brokers over and blew away the other candidates even before he started talking about shaking hands with President Obama.
“Can I just show you something?” Tannenbaum asked earlier this week. He got up from a chair in his office and retrieved a thick booklet from the shelf against a wall.
“[Jets public relations chief] Bruce Speight really deserves a lot of the credit for this,” Tannenbaum said. “Everybody in our organization — video, I.T., security, P.R. — called their counterparts [to] see what they thought of each [head-coaching] candidate. Because who [you] are is how you treat the waiter? So I wanted to know how Rex treated the groundskeeper in Baltimore. It’s unbelievable what the I.T. director in Baltimore told Tom Murphy, our guy, and the operations guy, and the trainer.”
Tannenbaum began reading from the booklet on his lap.
“This is from Nick Fusee, the I.T. director of the Ravens,” he began.
The question Murphy asked of Fusee was: “What do you think of Rex?”
Fusee said: “Great guy, funny as bleep, I consider him a friend. You would get along great with him.”
The next question for Fusee: “How’s he treat you?”
Fusee said: “He treats me great. Always has, and even as he moved up the ladder he’s never changed, he’s always been the same.”
Tannenbaum turned to a passage from Bob Eller, the Ravens’ director of operations, who spoke to Jets senior director of operations Clay Hampton:
“When I first got on the phone with Bob, and got to the reason for my call,” according to Hampton, “there was a brief silence, followed by the quote, ‘I hope you don’t get him. Players love him and go through brick walls for him. Able to keep defense together and playing at high levels, even through injuries — next-man-up-type philosophy.’ ”
The best feedback, Tannenbaum said, was from Ravens’ P.R. director Kevin Byrne to Speight, his Jets counterpart.
“[Byrne] said, ‘Trevor Pryce is a different, no-nonsense type of player, and it’s difficult to earn his trust. Pryce doesn’t care whether Rex coaches in Russia, Alaska or anywhere else. He wants to be coached by Rex.’ ”
Once Ryan interviewed with Johnson and Tannenbaum, it became a first-round knockout. Talk about Rex appeal.
“So, to me, it was really twofold — this guy had a 10-year run of tremendous football accomplishment, and he had people skills that were second to none in terms of how he treated people when no one was looking,” Tannenbaum said. “Forty-six years old, and the only hesitancy I had, I turned to Woody and said, ‘I don’t understand why this guy hasn’t been a head coach yet. This is an opportunity that has fallen in our lap and we gotta take advantage of it.’ ”
Tannenbaum was impressed by Ryan’s emphasis on team.
“All he wanted was build up your teammates,” Tannenbaum said. “Like his media policy — he goes, ‘This will take me about 30 seconds to install. We’re gonna treat you like a man, you can say anything you want — just mention two teammates and one coach. That’s our media policy.’ He talked about we want to go away for training camp [to Cortland], one of his goals would be if we have 40 players in the building, [he wouldn’t want] 40 cars in the parking lot. He said, ‘Mike, if I’m doing my job as head coach, there’ll be 40 players in the building, and 20 cars in the parking lot.”
Asked if that has come to fruition, with the Jets 60 minutes from the Super Bowl, Tannenbaum’s answer was simple, but spoke volumes.
“No question about it,” he said.