Ask Rex🌱 Ryan his biggest regret in football and he won’t mention a fourth-down call, mismanaging the clock or losing in the A♋FC Championship Game.
He’ll tell you about a day in 1994 when he was in his first season as the Cardinals’ defensive line coach and he was on the practice field✃ instead of with his wife, Michelle, who was giving birth to their second son, Seth, hundreds of miles away. Ryan was coaching for his father, Buddy, and did not want to be accused of receiving preferential treatment.
“That was probably my biggest regret in coaching, t♛hat I missed my second kid being born,”꧂ Ryan said a few years ago. “It was a stupid decision, a ‘young coach’ move.”
That “kid” is now 19 and a freshman walk-on wide receiver at Clemson. Ryan saw a hole in the Jet🍃s schedule Saturday and decided to fly to South Carolina to watch his son dress for his first college game, and now people in this town are attacking him as if he turned his back on the Jets.
This was Ryan’s only👍 chance to see one of Seth’s games this season. The Tigers do not have a game the weekend after the Jets play on Thursday night this month or during their bye week in November. So Rya🐲n saw an opening last weekend. It happened to coincide with the day the Jets cut their roster to 53, which has led critics to say he was ignoring his duties or showing a detachment from his job.
This is laughable.
Ryan, general manager John Idzik and the team’s personnel and coaching staff met Friday to decide the cuts, none of which were surprising. Ryan contacted many of the players꧒ by phone and let Idzik handle the rest.
He went home late Friday night and flew t🐎o Clemson early Saturday. He spent the day talking to Idzik about last-minute decisions and possible waiver claims they would put in Sunday morning.
So he basically missed nothing. By the way, Texans c𒁏oach Gary Kubiak did the same thing, attending his sons’ game on Saturday between Rice and Texas A&M, but you won’t hear much about that because it’s not Ryan.
If you have ch𒆙ildren and a job, it’s hard not to empathize with Ryan. This has nothing to do with th♛e mythology of being an NFL coach. It is the same whether you’re coaching football, working on Wall Street or selling vacuum cleaners. The 40-hour work week has vanished and everyone with a job and a family walks that line every day trying to balance the two.
It’s easy to criticize 💃Ryan if you’ve never had to choose who to let down — your boss or your wife. It’s easy to criticize Ryan if you’ve never had to tell you kids “good night” over the♔ phone while away on business. It’s easy to criticize Ryan if you’ve never had to explain to your son or daughter why you have to miss their game or play or dance recital.
Listen to the words of former coach ꦿTony D🥃ungy, who lost his son James to suicide in 2005. Do you think when he has a quiet moment he thinks about a meeting he missed when he was coach of the Colts or do you think he wishes for one more day with his son?
“I was going to give [Ryan] a big round of applause,” said Dungy, now an analyst on NBC’s ‘Football Night in America.’ “I think it’s great. Coach Ryan is probably like any other dad, excited to see his son. When yo♐u can work the schedule out to do it, I think you should. … When you have a chance to do something special family-wise, I think it’s great that he did that. It actually made me feel good. I was proud of him.”
Ryan is devoted to his family and somehow that’s become a reason to bash him. Whether it’s getting a tattoo of his wife on his arm, fulfilling the dream of his old🔯est son, Payton, to run with the bulls in Spain or now going to see Seth play his first game.
Spend five minutes around 🃏professional sports and you’ll hear stories of guys cheating on their wives or failing to play child support. But Ryan gushes about his wife and always had Seth around the Jets practices. He also put clips of Seth’s youth football games mixed in with the team’s film study to give the guys a laugh and play the role of proud papa.
In the end, all Ryan gave up Saturday was looking guys in the eye when they were released, a small sacrifi⛄ce to see your son reali🍸ze his dream.
“In the grand scheme of things💟, what did he miss?” said former Jets linebacker Bart Scott, now an analyst for CBS Sports. “Now you take his son, what’s he thinking? He made his son feel important and he told his son that he’s the most important thing in his life. How many things do you think his son has had over his coaching career that he couldn’t make? This is one that he could make.”
Ryan is an easy target these days. The Jets are 6-13 in their last 1✱9 games and appear to be destined for the bottom of the standings this season.
So rip his decision-making. Rip his play-calling. Rip his coaching decisions. But s𓂃pare me the outrage over him failing to say goodbye to Greg McElroy.
Let’s judge Ryan on how the season goes, not what he did the week before it starts. Ryan gives his critics pl♉enty of punch lines, but this time they look like th��e clowns.