The Joy Of Rex

There is something you must know from the start: The Ryan boys will bring it. They always have. If you wanted to run the football, they stuffed you. If you wanted to throw it, they hit your quarterback until he gargled blood. If you tried to fight them in a bar, they put you on your back. The Ryans are football coaches, and by god they are going to bring it like you're trying to deny them their livelihood. Because that's what they feel has happened to them, more than once. A Ryan boy gets up every day meaning to prove he belongs at the top.

First there was Buddy. He coached for 30 years, including 19 in the NFL, before a pro team, the Eagles in 1986, finally let him run the show. Buddy reinvented defensive football in the '80s, conceiving tactics that still resonate in meeting rooms around the league, yet history recalls him as a grouchy whack job who promised his players bounties for knocking opponents out of the game and who punched a fellow coach on the sideline. These days, at 75, he raises horses in the green, rolling hills of central Kentucky. One of them is named Fired For Winning.

Buddy's twin sons were born in 1962 while he was on a recruiting trip as an assistant coach at the University of Buffalo. ("He found out about the boys the next day," says their mother, Doris Ryan. "Or maybe it was two days.") Twenty-five years later Rex and Rob Ryan became coaches too, and now the family has five Super Bowl rings: Buddy's two, as a defensive assistant for the Jets' legendary Super Bowl III upset of the Colts and as the coordinator for the '85 Super Bowl Shuffle Bears; Rob's two, as a defensive assistant under Bill Belichick with the 2001 and '03 Patriots; and Rex's one, as defensive line coach for the 2000 Ravens.

It is a towering family record that speaks for itself, but the Ryans are happy to provide a visceral explanation. "If we don't tell you about it, you might not hear the truth," says Rob, now the defensive coordinator of the Browns. "That's not bragging. That's reality. We take a lot of pride in our family. We're not the most political people, but we're great football coaches."

On Jan. 19 Rex was hired as coach of the Jets, the franchise with which his father's NFL career began. At 46, he is the first Ryan to lead a team since Buddy was canned in 1995 after two seasons with the Cardinals; his twin sons were assistants on that team. "Best [assistants] I had," says Buddy. "People said it was nepotism. Bulls---." Rex is motivated by a love of the game and its players, a passion for the emotion and the intellect of teaching defense—and in no small part by past slights and omissions.

Such as when his dad was fired by the Cardinals, and not one NFL team gave him or Rob an interview. Rex took a job as the defensive coordinator at the University of Cincinnati. He would send a message to the NFL by crushing opponents, a mind-set he adopted as a response to every perceived slight: "I'm going to punish people now. I'm going back to college, and I'm going to punish people."

Such as when Ravens coach Brian Billick passed over Rex in 2002 and promoted Mike Nolan, the team's receivers coach, to replace Marvin Lewis as defensive coordinator: "Basically, I got f-----. Brian never knew me. Maybe I never fit his image. But it was a crock of s---." (Billick's take: "I felt we needed a more veteran presence. But I knew Rex had coordinator capabilities. You don't spend five minutes around Rex Ryan and not see his passion." Billick did promote Rex to coordinator three years later, when Nolan left to coach the 49ers.)

Such as two years ago, when Rex interviewed with the Falcons and the Dolphins, as well as his own team, the Ravens, and none chose him to fill their head-coaching vacancy: "I'm going to take this out on the league."

It would be another year before the Jets finally handed Rex the keys to a franchise. Replacing the stoic Eric Mangini (now the coach in Cleveland, and Rob's boss), Rex is a tornado after a deep freeze. That difference in coaching personality is palpable at Jets headquarters in New Jersey.

Kerry Rhodes noticed. In the Jets' first minicamp, the fifth-year safety tried to heed Rex's instruction to just be himself. "But every time I was ready to say something, I felt like I was biting my tongue, like I would have with Mangini," says Rhodes. "I'm going to have to get used to this."