No great sports rivalry is complete without a good villain. They need to be easily hateable, of course, but also oddly compelling.
That’s a role Rex Ryan was happy to play.
For six seasons from 2009 to 2014, Ryan was the head coach of the New York Jets. From the day he was hired until the day he was let go, he remained brash, unapologetic and full-on obsessed with beating Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots.
“I never came here to kiss Bill Belichick’s rings,” Ryan said before his first season with the Jets. “I came to win. Let’s just put it that way. So we’ll see what happens. I’m certainly not intimidated by New England or anybody else.”
“As much as I respect and admire Bill Belichick,” he added a year later, “I came here to kick his ass, and that’s the truth. That’s just the way it is.”
Early in his tenure, he often succeeded.
Ryan’s Jets won three of their first five meetings with the Patriots, including a 28-21 stunner in the 2010 division round that came just a month after New England waxed them 45-3. New York made a surprise run to the AFC Championship Game in Ryan’s first season and another in his second, using dominant defense — Ryan’s specialty as a former defensive coordinator — to mask the shortcomings of young quarterback Mark Sanchez.
It was during this early run of success that Ryan became a national sensation for his goddamn-snack-loving appearance on HBO’s “Hard Knocks” and made some particularly bizarre tabloid headlines for his rumored foot fetish. Patriots wide receiver Wes Welker was benched for the first drive of the aforementioned playoff game — a playoff game! — for subtly and repeatedly referencing the latter in a news conference.
But Ryan’s success — especially against the team he so badly wanted to conquer — was short-lived. He beat the Patriots just once in his final eight tries as Jets head coach, and that lone victory came in overtime after a penalty on New England defensive tackle Chris Jones wiped out a missed Nick Folk field goal. New York lost two games by three points, one by two and another by one. But they weren’t all tight matchups. On Thanksgiving in 2012, the Patriots delivered a 49-19 beatdown at MetLife Stadium that featured perhaps the most infamously embarrassing play in NFL history: the Butt Fumble.
“I’ve had my butt kicked several times,” Ryan told ESPN years later, “but that was the worst. I coached for 30 years; that was the worst quarter in the history of my coaching career, and there’s been some bad ones. But not even close to that one. It was brutal.”
The Jets went 8-8, 6-10, 8-8 and 4-12 over Ryan’s final four seasons, the last of which resulted in his firing. But even as his team slinked back into mediocrity, Ryan never muzzled himself. He continued to both praise and needle Belichick and the Patriots at every turn. Asked in 2014 whether he was finally ready to kiss those rings, Ryan replied: “Oh, hell no, because I never came here to do that. I came here to kick his butt.”
“Obviously, I haven’t been very successful at it, but that list is long,’ he said. “I’m not just the only name on that list. I might be the only one that had the guts to say something about it, but that’s how I am. That’s how I feel this week too. No different than any other time I’ve been here.”
Ryan was fired two weeks after those comments, but he didn’t leave Patriots fans’ lives for long. He quickly was scooped up by another AFC East rival, the Buffalo Bills. Ryan didn’t find the results he was so desperately searching for there, either, shutting out the Jacoby Brissett-led Patriots in 2016 but losing his other three Patriots matchups and allowing 40-plus points in two of them.
The Bills fired him with a week left in the 2016 season, closing out an erratic but undeniably entertaining coaching career for one of New England’s greatest foils.
