Buffalo, we understand.
We fell hard, too. We did. That, really, is Rex Ryan’s special magic (well, that, and the fact that his bully-boy defense often looked like it was playing 7-on-11 when it absolutely, positively needed to make a stop across much of the last six years … but we digress).
We’d been dulled by dullards, same as you. For us, it was three years of Eric Mangini, who could sometimes make football seem as fun as an echocardiogram, whose press conferences could have been choreographed by anesthesiologists. For you it was Doug Marrone.
Yes, from afar, we empathized, because listening to Marrone prattle on about his own subtle genius felt like public-access TV.
And into the breech — for us six years ago, for you Wednesday afternoon — stepped Rex, turning his introductory press conference into a Rockne speech, tapping into his encyclopedic football database to reference local legends expertly, and by the end, the people were ready to carry him out of One Bills Drive on their shoulders, marching from Orchard Park to Cheektowaga to Tonawanda and back again.
You can’t say the man doesn’t have charisma.
We know. And there’s a large part of us that misses that already, that dreads what we know will be Todd Bowles’ press briefings that, by comparison, will come off like a man reading the phone book into a microphone.
Again: What you saw Wednesday was someone who can do something as well as anyone ever did anything.
What you’ll discover, soon enough, is the magic stops at the interview room door. Oh, he will deliver moments, be sure of it. There will even be times when the bluster on Wednesday transfers to Sunday. He can coach up a defense.
He can inspire fierce devotion in players. He’ll coax you out to Ralph Wilson Stadium to rattle the Patriots and the Jets and the Dolphins every year. Bank on it.
It’s been 15 years since you were in the playoffs. He guaranteed you’ll taste that again. When he came here, it had been 40 years since the Jets had reached the Super Bowl.
He guaranteed — again and again and again — that he’d lead the way back. When it comes to guarantees, you should know he’s more Ewing than Namath.
More miss than Messier.
Of course, it will take you awhile to catch on to that. It’ll take awhile before you believe your own lying eyes. You will see his indifference to offense, and your first reaction will be: He trusts his assistants, as he should! You will see him wrestle with the clock at the end of either half and say: Hey, it can happen to anyone!
You’ll see the specialties of every Rex game day — somewhere between two and four inexplicably wasted timeouts, at least two flags for 12 men on the field, the occasional 15-yarder that should be retitled “the surcharge of Rex treating his players like men and not robots” — and …
Well, you’ll see enough of those, and suddenly …
Well, truthfully, it won’t matter to a lot of you, even as the seasons pass and you realize that for all the fun, all the one-liners, that you still haven’t gotten any closer to the Super Bowl.
It’s really astonishing. By the end of his run in New York, even most Yankees fans were OK seeing Joe Torre leave, and all he’d done was deliver four championships and gone 12-for-12 making the playoffs; yet there are still an awful lot of Jets fans who’d have been perfectly happy if Ryan had gotten an extension to stay here. Maybe for life.
And that underlines Ryan’s greatest gift of all, for he spent six years here portraying himself as a football-first, football-only neophyte when in truth he has long been a sly, cunning political operative, expertly navigating the tricky waters of a tabloid town and the even murkier culture of an organization ransacked by varying egos and agendas.
Do you think choosing the Bills was an accident?
Consider: Gullible owners with enormously deep pockets, charmed to the core by this big, funny galoot. An exhausted fan base, ordered to expect greatness, the message delivered right to their visceral core.
And a ready-made team, built up by unpopular predecessors — Mangini once, now Marrone — ready to be driven to glory.
Sound familiar?
And hey: Maybe this will work out better there than it did here. More likely, in four years, or six, one of your reporters will have to clear his throat the way Costello of The Post did Wednesday, and ask Rex Ryan why a mediocre 46-50 record shouldn’t render him a mediocre coach. He’s the one leaving a four-win team for a nine-win team, after all, and not the other way around.
He’ll have an answer for that, too. He always does.
