Much like your average football fan, former New York Jets and Buffalo Bills head coach Rex Ryan is not interested in watching the two teams play.
Always a boisterous personality, Ryan opened up to ESPN recently to indicate that he has no interest in watching the two likely bottom feeders play one another in Week 1.
“Hell, no, I’m not going to watch that game,” Rex Ryan said, via ESPN. “There’s a lot better games than that one.”
He isn’t wrong.
After moving on from multiple veterans that had in the past helped the team contend, the Jets are in full-scale rebuild mode. Here’s a team that will likely be throwing out a quarterback-wide receiver trio of Josh McCown, Robby Anderson and Jermaine Kearse. In reality, New York might be one of the least-talented teams to head into a regular season in the past two decades.
On the other hand, the Bills also shook things up in a big way during the offseason. Tyrod Taylor should remain under center if he’s able to pass the NFL’s concussion protocol.
But the team lost the likes of Sammy Watkins, Robert Woods, Stephon Gilmore and Ronald Darby over the past several months. Needless to say, this is not going to be a great Week 1 game.
Ryan was fired by the Bills towards the end of the 2016 season following a spat with the team’s front office over the status of Taylor at quarterback. That came after less than two full seasons in Western New York. The long-time head coach manned the Jets’ sideline for six seasons prior to that.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, Ryan doesn’t seem to be a fan of Jets backup quarterback Christian Hackenberg.
“They have to get a quarterback,” he said. “That kid from Penn State, we all know that’s not the answer.”
Obviously, this isn’t a case of the former Jets head coach going out on a limb. Hackenberg proved he wasn’t ready to play in the NFL as a rookie last season. And it looked like he actually regressed during the summer.
In a quarterback-driven league, neither the Bills nor the Jets have a long-term solution at that position. It seemingly mirrors how the teams operated when Ryan was their head coach.
Yeah, this thing surely has come full circle.