NFL

Jets coach wrote book on stopping Tebow-style attack

COLLEGE TRY: Rex Ryan and the Jets have just a few days to prepare for the Broncos’ college-style option offense featuring unorthodox quarterback Tim Tebow, who has won his past two starts. (Getty Images)

Little did Rex Ryan know when he wrote a book about defense 12 years ago that the chapter on stopping an option offense would come in handy as an NFL coach.

Ryan’s 1999 book, “Coaching Football’s 46 Defense,” includes a 20-page section on defending the option, and the Jets coach no doubt will be thumbing through it with Tim Tebow’s Broncos next on the schedule — in a short week, no less.

Football’s most polarizing player attempted a mere eight passes and completed just two of them on Sunday, yet Tebow led the Broncos to a 17-10 road win over the Chiefs a week after doing the same against the rival Raiders.

Throwing NFL convention to the wind, Broncos coach John Fox is letting Tebow run essentially the same read-option offense he used at Florida — and so far at least, it’s working.

“With Tim Tebow at quarterback, it’s almost a throwback to the college game,” NFL Network analyst Mike Mayock said after Tebow didn’t complete his first pass against the Chiefs until late in the third quarter Sunday.

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Aside from the Dolphins and other teams dabbling with the Wildcat offense, no club has used the option as its base offense since Marv Levy briefly made himself a laughingstock by dusting off the Wing-T with Kansas City in the late 1970s.

Mayock is right: Heavy on misdirection and forcing opposing defensive ends and linebackers to show extreme patience, the option is a staple of college and especially high school football.

Fast, hard-hitting defenders and the very high chance of quarterback injuries caused the scheme to fall out of favor in the NFL decades ago, but Tebow is putting on a one-man revival in Denver. He is 4-3 as a starter in the pros despite a 47-percent career completion rate.

Considering how teams in college often struggle against option-heavy attacks like Georgia Tech’s and the military academies’ because they rarely face that tricky offense, Ryan’s Jets will have to get familiar with it again in a hurry.

And talk about night and day: Gang Green will have to find a way to shut down the option just four days after struggling (and largely failing) to combat the Patriots’ hurry-up spread passing attack in a 37-16 loss at MetLife Stadium.

If Ryan were concerned about a whiplash effect from facing two polar-opposite offenses, he didn’t show it yesterday. The coach was too busy praising Tebow.

“Just a great competitor,” Ryan said of the former Heisman Trophy winner. “You can go back and look when people asked me about him [before the 2010 draft]. I thought he was a great competitor.

“I thought he was a winner. That’s what he is showing right now. Are there prettier passers than him? Yeah, absolutely. But, again, I’ll just try to find a way to beat him.”

Even though Ryan wrote part of his instructional book on stopping the option, the Broncos’ version has something no coach can prepare for — Tebow’s intangibles.

“You can’t measure Tim Tebow by statistics because he has that ‘it’ factor,” Deion Sanders told the NFL Network yesterday. “The only thing I know is that they’re starting to believe and winning games.”