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Ryan hopes to figure out how to win after bye
FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan will have to wait at least another year to tell the world what he’s doing after he wins the Super Bowl. But he didn’t waste any time declaring what the Jets wouldn’t do upon returning from their bye week and heading to Buffalo to resume their season on Nov. 23.
“I don’t think we’re going to Dave & Buster’s,” Ryan said.
The otherwise harmless chain of arcades/restaurants became the symbol for the Jets’ post-bye week struggles under Ryan last season, when the Jets went to a Dave & Buster’s the night before getting blown out by the Bills, 37-14, in Buffalo.
That loss dropped the Jets to 1-4 following a bye under Ryan. It also began a three-game losing streak that dropped the Jets, who were 5-4 and the AFC’s second wild card upon entering their bye, out of playoff contention.
There’s no playoff contention to worry about this season for the 2-8 Jets, whose upset of the Steelers ended an eight-game losing streak that all but basically ensured Ryan will be fired at season’s end.
But Ryan still changed up the Jets’ routine this week, when he held practices Tuesday and Wednesday before the Jets dispersed for four days off.
“We definitely were looking at different ways of doing things,” Ryan said Monday. “We’re 1-5 or 1-4 off the bye, so we were going to try anything. We even went with the Andy Reid approach once where we let them go the entire time and then came back and laid an egg.”
That was in 2010, when the Jets entered the bye week on a five-game winning streak. Upon returning, they lost to the Green Bay Packers, 9-0.
“If we would’ve won that, we would’ve gone right back to that schedule,” Ryan said.
Instead, the second of the Jets’ post-bye losses under Ryan began a disturbing pattern in which each post-bye defeat is by a larger margin than the last.
Following the bye in Ryan’s first season in 2009, the Jets lost to the Jacksonville Jaguars, 24-22. The Jets notched a 27-11 win over the Bills — in Buffalo, no less — following the 2011 bye but lost to the Seattle Seahawks, 28-7, in 2012.
So even if mixing up the bye week routine will have little impact on the Jets’ bottom line this season — Ryan acknowledged Wednesday that the bulk of the first-team reps were taken by backups and practice squadders — it’ll provide a barometer for how to do things in the future for Ryan, whether that’s in Florham Park or somewhere else.
“I thought the practices were good,” Ryan said. “I think the big thing is to see how we come off the bye and see if we can change our ways off the bye. Hopefully this is something that we will be doing for a while.”
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