Rex Ryan’s Push Up Challenge

Fixing what is broken is easier to do after a win.  The Jets beat the Buffalo Bills on Sunday, but there is no shortage of “things to be fixed”.  Penalties are at the top of that list, as the Jets set a team record with 20 penalties on Sunday.  It is hard to win a game after committing that many mental and physical errors.  So the Jets should consider themselves fortunate, although Vladimir Ducasse and Kyle Wilson are running out of chances; they both committed several penalties on Sunday.  Their talent level doesn’t afford them much room for error.

Rex Ryan said, “I don’t want our team to be associated with penalties. There’s no question. That’s not who we are. I want to have a physical football team, but I also want to be the least penalized team in the league, not the most penalized team, so it’s not acceptable. And we’ve already talked about things we’re going to do, that I shared with the team and we have a good plan going forward. To have 20 penalties, the amazing thing is that we won the game, but we certainly have to get better at that and we can fix it, as we talked about the other day.”

Rex is going old school, as in Pop Warner Push Up old school.

On what he is doing to help limit penalties…
The only one I’ll lay out there will be the push-ups, to challenge the entire organization to get behind it. We’ll see. I think once we realize how important it really is, and this organization in between these walls is a close group. I’m not saying that our fans need to do the push-ups and all that. I’m not saying it. But you know what? We’ll let you know. (joking) If our fans want to get in there and help us, because I think how much pressure is that? Well, you’ve got your fans doing push-ups, too. If you’re on the practice field and you’re doing whatever, 10 push-ups, go for it.

On if he made the team do push-ups in 2010…
We had them all do them and it worked. We’re never at the top of the penalties. You guys will have those exact numbers. But I think that we really improved once we really emphasized it. And I thought we were anyway. We’re one of the only teams in the league, I know our team has officials at every practice, and we work on them. There’s no doubt. It seemed like every play we were having something go wrong in the game. Again, that’s not the type of team that we are. We certainly don’t want that. We want to be an aggressive team and I’m happy with the way we’re playing physically. We’re playing a physical brand of football. But again, that doesn’t have anything to do with (playing) outside the rules. We want to play within the confinements of the rules and play as hard as we can and that’s always been our take. So we’ll see about getting better.

On if he will make Woody Johnson do push-ups if there are penalties in practice Wednesday…
Woody knocks those things out pretty good (joking). I’m the one that struggles, but I’ve got the strings for arms (joking). I want the player (who commits the penalty at practice) to stand up. He doesn’t do them. And I want him to notice who he’s affecting. He’s affecting all of us. I think that’s where it’s like, ‘Oh, okay.’ It’s not just when they see that, it’s not, ‘Oh, I’ve got to do these push-ups.’ No, no. After you’ve done a few of those you’re like, ‘Really, you got a penalty again?’ And they’ll get on each other. There’s a little bit of accountability, especially if you look and the owner’s knocking them out. ‘Oh, really?’ We don’t want to look like Jack LaLanne or somebody (joking). In all seriousness, we’ve got to get better and that’s going to be a focus of ours. We’ve done some good things as a team but obviously we’re not near where we need to be even in our execution of things. But the penalties, man, we know we can fix it and it needs to start this week.

Here are some other thoughts from our New York Jets message board.