We heard all the cliches in the lead-up to the Colts game. “This is a passing league – you live and die by your quarterback,” they all said. Presumably, they were expecting Mark Sanchez to blow the game, as he had done so many times prior that year. No rookie quarterback had ever played in a Super Bowl, and there was no way a kid with 21 interceptions and a passer rating of 63 was going to be the first. The game came and went, and true to the cynics’ words, the Jets were eliminated from the postseason. Yet, to the surprise of most, it wasn’t Sanchez’s fault. His 56.7% completion percentage for 257 yards may not have been the stuff of legends, but his touchdown bomb to Braylon Edwards might well have been, had Lito Shepperd and Dwight Lowery not decided to take the weekend off.

In a schizophrenic season, Sanchez may have been the most erratic Jet of all. He began the year a three time Pepsi “Rookie of the Week” winner, and looked every bit the future superstar he was touted to be. The media lauded his intangibles, constantly referring to his poise and “It” factor, something they still on occasion do when they want to praise him for his good looks, but struggle to find a way to make that relevant to football. Then things went to Hell, and fast. Over the next three weeks, Sanchez was a Browning Nagle level disaster, throwing eight interceptions to only three touchdowns, with an average QB rating of 44.5. Rex Ryan even weighed the option of benching him against the Bills, following his fifth (!) pick of the night. The home crowd fans would not have been so hesitant to do so. Four more picks would follow in the Week 11 matchup against New England, with three of the four going to the same defensive back: the Patriots’ Leigh Bodden. He would throw three against Atlanta in a crucial late season contest, and start off Week 10 with a pick on the very first play against Jacksonville. The early season star had fallen, and hard.

Rex Ryan has been the coach of the New York Jets for little more than a year now, hardly enough time even for the little particles of food in his gravitational pull to complete a full revolution around his waistline, and already an autobiography appears to be in the works. Premature? Perhaps, but when you consider the proximity of the book’s release date to next year’s Super Bowl…well, it’s not necessarily a bad marketing idea. The book, called a “nontraditional” autobiography, as though anything about Rex Ryan is traditional, will be produced via a partnership with former Sports Illustrated editor and current motivational speaker Don Yaeger, who tweeted the news early yesterday afternoon. It is already being called 2011′s biggest beach read, and a spiritual successor to Moby Dick, if only because it too centers around a mad pursuit of glory and a white whale.

Personally, I don’t think it’s too soon for Rex’s book at all. The man is more than a football coach, he’s a sports sensation, and I’d rather read a single chapter about the Ryan family vacation to Disneyland than an entire book of Bill Walsh’s inspirational anecdotes about life and leadership. He’s already due to become a reality TV star next month, when Hard Knocks changes its format to become HBO’s “Rex Ryan Variety Hour,” so conquering the printed word is a logical next step. But where to go from there? If “REX: Story of a Man” is a big enough success, isn’t a film adaptation bound to follow? Couldn’t you just imagine it? After hundreds of bland and hackneyed sports flicks about overcoming adversity and winning as an underdog, we’d at last get a film about kicking people’s faces in and get sloshed afterward.

There are exactly 78 days remaining until the Jets crack open their season at home on Monday Night Football against the Ravens. A tough game to be sure, and one that every Jets fan ought to place special emphasis on. We do not want to lose that game. No, not because it marks our debut at New Meadowlands Stadium, or because we badly want for Rex to tear down his old team, although those two plotlines do sweeten the pot a bit, but rather because we almost sort of have to. After all the talking, all the bravado and letting the world know of our unshakable conviction that THIS. IS. THE. YEAR. we can not afford to blow it in the very first game under favorable conditions against a fellow contender. It’s very easy for us right now to say that pressure won’t be a factor. The weight of our Super Bowl expectations isn’t likely to pull anyone down during OTAs or Training Camp, but once the regular season begins, and fans come to realize just how difficult it will be, even for a team as great as ours, to return to even the conference championship game, well, we may just drown in it.

In most lines of work, a man like Rex Ryan wouldn’t get very far. Comically overweight and intense to the point of caricature, he virtually seethes with emotion, sobbing after big losses and swearing up a storm when the team does what it does best. He’s cocky, stubborn, confrontational and maybe even unhinged, the loudmouthed defensive prodigy a pole away from the tightlipped Bill Belichick and the “quietly strong” Tony Dungy. In his aggression and uncouth nature, we see the inverse of almost every quality our parents sought to imbue in us. Socialization has failed this man; he has chosen to live outside of simple human etiquette, ignorant of five millenia of basic customs and norms. Considering that of our previous two coaches, the first was a Dungy clone with the demeanor of an overly polite choir boy, and the second was a Baby Belichick who considered minor knee injuries to be confidential information, Rex hasn’t just changed the culture in Florham Park, he’s imploded it with 75 tons of C4 and taken a dump all over the ashes.
Rex Ryan is our competitive edge. His coaching gives our players the skills they need to win…his attitude makes them winners. He doesn’t believe in being second best, or earning moral victories. None of that “It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose” junk. WINNING IS THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS, AND YOU MEN ARE WINNERS. He’s like a hefty, bipedal Courage Wolf, a super-ego to-go, always looking ahead to the glory of the next victory. I don’t blame outsiders for hating him, but I don’t understand it either. Rex is the solution to the “No Fun League” you always complain about, a coach finally willing to speak his mind, and not just regurgitate press releases in front of a camera. He’s our Ozzie Guillen and Mark Cuban, only a thousand times better, and moreover, he’s one of the finest coaches in this league.

Now that the NBA Finals are over (and have produced, for the second year in a row, the most grating outcome possible), we enter the dog days of football nothingness, a largely sport-free zone populated only by the abomination that is baseball, even if the pain is somewhat assuaged this year by the presence of the World Cup. In the next month, NFL news will be sparse and conjectural, and while it is about time to begin formulating your fantasy plans, all the diehards started doing that back in March. It seems the Revis contract saga is about the only headline maker out there, and we Jets fans would prefer to stay away from that one until it cools off. So what is there for the lethargic Jets lover to do, other than actually going outside? I hear NFL Network is reairing Super Bowl XXVII all this week. That’s pretty cool. Suicide is also always an option.

Or we could enjoy a round of…WHO’S THAT PLAYER!?