Rex Ryan Starts Season on Losing Note in Weight-Loss Contest With Players

Jets head coach Rex Ryan may have a big personality, but he has an even bigger gut.

That’s why last May, Ryan challenged himself and two of his larger players — defensive tackle Kris Jenkins and center Damien Woody — to a weight-loss contest.

The second-year head coach set forth a weight-loss challenge for him and his players that started in mid-May and ran until the start of training camp.

Well, the beginning of training camp has arrived and the results are in — with Rex Ryan in last place. Ryan was up against it from the beginning though. He underwent gastric bypass surgery before the contest when he weighed roughly 350 pounds. He had already lost 37 of those pounds when the contest started.

Jenkins won the contest while losing 33.6 pounds, beating out Woody (lost 26 pounds) with Ryan’s additional 20-pound cut down coming in third. Ryan is now weighing in at a svelte 291 pounds.

The coach has been working on losing weight for a while now, and it’s something that apparently comes from the top.

“Rex knows how I feel,” Jets owner Woody Johnson told The New York Times. “I want to have the healthiest organization — on the field and in the business side — of anybody. That’s my No. 1 goal. In a healthy organization, everybody’s good, you don’t get sick as much; we don’t smoke, we cut down on drinking. It sounds goody-two shoes but it works.”

So if the Jets can’t live up to the high expectations everyone seems to be placing on them, at least they will have one of the healthier organizations in the NFL.

Regardless, it’s going to take a lot of trimming of the waist line for Ryan to make everyone forget about this unfortunate wardrobe malfunction.