Please Shut Up, Rex Ryan

In 2007, there were a simple set of rules dictating a nascent San Diegan football fan (that isn't to say newborn, but more someone whose friends forced him into joining a fantasy football league two years prior and developed a genuine affection for the sport). These rules were:

• Tom Brady, Bill Belichick, and the entity known as the New England Patriots really kind of sucked, not so much for their play (couldn't really argue they weren't good), but how they conducted their selves so mercilessly
  
• LaDanian Tomlinson was the coolest person ever for being a nice guy and tremendously gifted athlete
• If you were a student at USC, you pretty much had to root for SC players in the NFL regardless of what team they were on.
  

• No one really had to care about the Jets, as their quarterback was either Chad Pennington or Kellen Clemens (I really don't remember), and Vernon Gholston was quickly amounting to someone whose name bloggers wouldn't remember how to spell correctly

It's funny how things change in three years. The face of villainy has transformed in the NFL, shifting from the cold and calculating Patriots to the absolutely stupid foot-in-mouth* Jets.

And you would think it would make the NFL more fun, having a buncha idiotic goofs making outlandishly stupid statements while winning, waiting for some team whom no one really pays much attention to defy odds and ruin Superbowl chances. I would vote for the Falcons to be this team, but I don't want to jinx anyone, so I politely decline taking sides. Except, I want the Jets to lose, that's about the only thing I care about this playoffs.

This is fair stance to take for two reasons: Rex Ryan is a loudmouthed idiot, and who likes loudmouthed idiots, and they ruined LT and Mark Sanchez for me. LT is now a smug shadow of his former self who revels in his old home's football woes, and Sanchez' good looks and swagger are now just douchey based solely on the fact that his team's mouthpiece is a fat man who can somehow insult Tom Brady when there is absolutely no need to. This would have been great in 2007, but now it just comes across as obnoxious.

The 2007 Patriots were the villains of Christopher Nolan's Gotham City. Nowadays, the Jets are the stuff of the Adam West world of Batman. It's a whole lot campier, and less engaging.

For example, when Rex Ryan says "it's personal" when taking on the Colts and Peyton Manning (then inexplicably praising Manning the next week), it just sounds stupid.

Imagine if Belichick said a game was personal. That'd be a little frightening; you'd think it might be possible that he would use his mind to make the opposition's quarterback's head explode, Scanners style.

It was a lot more fun when there was an unstoppable juggernaut of evil that everyone could root against. Now we have the loudmouthed, obnoxious bad guys from 80s college films that thought themselves to be smart.

It's gotten so bad that I actually sided with Tom Brady when he said he hated the Jets and wouldn't support watching "Hard Knocks".

Let's see that again: I sided with Tom Brady.

I hate Tom Brady. He's too good looking and great at things I'm terrible at.

You see what these Jets are doing to me?

For the sake of my mental health, please, shut up Rex Ryan.

*I wrote foot-in-mouth as a flow of consciousness thing. I then gasped at my inadvertent cleverness, given the recent foot fetishism of Rex Ryan, and reveled in said inadvertent cleverness for several minutes. Then I ate a sandwich. That might explain the disjointedness of this blog.