The Jets are a cosmic joke, but they made the right decision to keep Rex Ryan. And here's why!
Image by Doug Benz / Reuters
After going 6-10, including three straight losses to close out the 2012 season; after turning Tim Tebow into the most expensively pointless player in football; after missing the playoffs for the second straight year and turning his team into the most calamitously backbiting franchise in professional sports; after doing all these things and more, Rex Ryan has not been fired as head coach of the New York Jets. And this is a good thing.
The situation in Jetsland — a mythical crater that simultaneously exists in both New Jersey and Queens, filled completely with Natty Ice — is far from perfect, and Ryan's played a big role in that imperfection. He's boisterous to the point of parody and overly loyal, with massive blind spots when it comes to the offensive side of the game. But in the pro-con-weighing exercise that is choosing whether or not to fire your coach, Ryan doesn't deserve to lose his job. Actually, that's the wrong way to put it: there's no such thing as "deserving" to be fired, in the abstract. There's only the question of whether a different coach would be better-equipped to win the Super Bowl with your franchise.
But that's not how a lot of people in the NFL see it. If you ask the owners and multi-headed ownership conglomerates who/that run the NFL's 32 teams, they'll happily tell you that there's few things they enjoy more, aside from inheriting money and inventing new types of financial derivatives, than firing head coaches. It's soothing, it's cleansing, and it gives you at least a year where you can tell yourself, "Hey, we're rebuilding — going 3-13 and kicking 15 field goals for every touchdown is just part of the process." But firing a coach is often like using a flamethrower to melt the ice on the windshield of your Subaru: effective and super-awesome. Er, sorry: briefly effective but ultimately destructive. A proper coach-firing should ensue only if at least one of these criteria is met:
You don't believe the coach can win a championship.
Image by Bill Wippert / AP
In his first two years with the Jets, Rex Ryan's team reached the AFC Championship twice. The second time, they lost by only five points; in football, five points is a bad bounce, a dropped pass. Ryan's Jets were an infinitesimal distance from the Super Bowl. And those Jets teams weren't even all that great, either, with fantastic offensive lines and the presence of all-world corner Darelle Revis counterbalanced by young, ineffective skill-position players on offense. They succeeded exactly how Ryan said they would — through innovative, suffocating defenses. Ryan's approach worked, quite recently.