Under Coach Rex Ryan, the New York Jets are tough, and confident

FLORHAM PARK, N.J. Rex Ryan's "Property of" the New York Jets sweatshirt is already faded and showing its seams, a sign of belonging. His white Jets cap sits comfortably on his head like a trucker's, beneath which hangs a fraying hem of gray hair. "Rex is real," his players like to say. He's real all right, two full chins worth -- and so are they.

Like him, they are burly and frank and tough talking. "The facts are the facts," Ryan says, and the facts are, the Jets lead the NFL in rushing, while their defense gives up the fewest points in the league, 10 per game. Those are hard statistics -- literally. They come from hard running, and hard tackling, by "Guys who know the difference between 'Sic 'em and 'Go get 'em," he says. Around here, they sic 'em.

The hard facts are starting to back up Ryan's mouth, which, as everyone now knows, he has a tendency to run. "If you take a swipe at one of ours, we'll take two swipes at one of yours," he says.

From his opening news conference, he has talked about taking his team to the White House to meet President Obama as Super Bowl victors. Back then, it sounded like bravado. But it turns out his much-aired confidence in the Jets was based on the physical properties of his team, on their muscle, not just a hot bragging wind. His offensive line is a block of veterans who have played together for 33 games, the longest streak in the league. His defensive line is an unyielding wall, so physically imposing that Ryan's ferociously tough father, Buddy Ryan, the legend who won a ring as a defensive coordinator with Mike Ditka and the Chicago Bears, and coached the Philadelphia Eagles, took one appraising look at them and agreed they could win it all if they stayed healthy.

A wild-card playoff victory later, with his team in the AFC semifinals against the San Diego Chargers, Ryan's starting to sound, well, real. Last week he adopted his usual attitude when told the Jets had been given the longest odds in the field, at 50-1. He shrugged his bulk and said, "To me we should be the favorites, so that's fine." This week when he was asked if he's a trash talker, he said, "If it's trash talking that I believe in our football team, then yes, I'm the biggest trash talker there is."

He's such a passionate believer in his team that when they lost five of six games in November, it reduced him to tears. Instead of being embarrassed when it made the newspapers that he broke down and wept in a team meeting, he met the media head on. He brought a box of tissues to a news conference, and said, "I'm man enough to be me."

The thing is, a lot of the stuff Ryan says happens. For instance, he predicted early on that the Jets would be the top-ranked defense, and by the end of the regular season they were just that, giving up the fewest yards per game, fewest passing yards, and fewest points of any team in the league. "The Rex factor," wide receiver Jerricho Cotchery calls it. "Everything he talks about is coming to fruition."

At the start of the season Ryan handed out a schedule to his players that outlined the team's season-long itinerary. It included four playoff victories. He not only scheduled the Super Bowl -- but also the victory parade afterward. Asked if he worried about giving bulletin board material to the Chargers, he shot back, "Don't care. That's fine and dandy. That's our agenda. They can put it up next year too, honest, because we plan on winning the Super Bowl. The only goal we have as an organization is winning the Super Bowl. So that's it. They can put it up, you can write it, you can rip it, whatever you want to do, next year, the year after, the year after, and the year after that, it's going to be the one goal.

"And again, if a team is going to get motivated about that, that's fine and dandy with me. Because you know, what we are going to do is play our best. We are going to come out and we are going to give our best every single time out. And for you to beat us, whether you need added motivation, whatever it is, you are going to have to earn that. You are going to have to beat us."

Even the rookie quarterback, Mark Sanchez, who posed so prettily for GQ last spring, has taken on some of Ryan's personality. He sat in the Jets' locker room earlier this week looking scruffy and stripped down, wearing nothing but a white bandana around his head, compression shorts and a crucifix. He was unshaven. "I think my parents hate it," he said of his new beard.

Sanchez calls Ryan "a different kind of different. That doesn't really make a lot of sense, I guess. He's so real. He doesn't hide anything. He tells us exactly what he thinks of other teams. If he thinks there is a weak link on another team, he'll tell us He doesn't blow smoke. He doesn't just try and pump you up."

Ryan's directness has been particularly on display in his handling of two players. Wide receiver Braylon Edwards has been in a slump. In their 24-14 wild-card victory over the Cincinnati Bengals, he dropped a potential 41-yard scoring pass. Ryan's opinion is that he's trying too hard, so he told him, "Quite honestly, next time you're open like that, I want you to catch the ball one-handed. Go catch it one-handed and don't worry about it."

Edwards reacted to that advice as you might expect. "He looked at me like I was crazy," Ryan says. "Which is the look that I get from you guys most of the time."

He has shown a similarly gruff belief in Sanchez, even when the rookie threw spates of interceptions, and failed to read the opposing defenses. At one point against the Bengals, a play was late reaching the huddle, Ryan called time out. Sanchez, believing Ryan called the timeout because he didn't trust him, came to the sideline furious. He had read the defense correctly and believed the play would have worked.

"I know the coverage," he told Ryan hotly.

"It's about time," Ryan said.

That a rookie head coach with a rookie quarterback can make good on his sky-is-the-limit promises this weekend is, of course, unlikely. They're still the longest of shots, and will have to beat a highly fueled Chargers team that has won 11 straight, led by quarterback Philip Rivers and a pack of towering receivers. But Ryan is starting to persuade outsiders of what he has already persuaded his team, that one of these days it would not be ridiculous to see his team riding in a victory parade.

"That's Rex," Sanchez says. "There's no hiding it. Maybe in some organizations, on some teams, that would be the big elephant in the room, 'I wonder what day the Super Bowl is?' Obviously it's going to be a Sunday, but what date is it? When is that parade? That is the kind of stuff you think about. That keeps you going through the whole process. It fires you up."