Rob Ryan’s bid to match brother Rex’s dramatic weight loss nearly killed him.
That was just one of several revelations from a rollicking, profanity-laced interview, released Thursday, the two brothers gave to MMQB.com to discuss Rob Ryan joining Rex’s staff with the Bills as assistant head coach/defense.
While Rex Ryan’s lap-band surgery in 2012 went smoothly, Rob Ryan said his quickly went awry that same year when he went to Turks and Caicos on a family vacation shortly after he was fired as the Cowboys’ defensive coordinator.
“I put on 30 pounds in a month. Now I can’t get [the lap band] off,” Rob explained, after having dropped to 260 pounds from 320 pounds during his time in Dallas. “And then my band was so tight, I almost died. … It was so tight, my esophagus was working as my stomach.
“All you can eat is sugar, and I drink the hell out of wine. But that’s all I could really eat and drink, so I was getting enormous again.”
Rex suggested tightening it, but Rob told the site he shut that notion down immediately.
“So we go in to look at it, [and] oh my God, the stomach was going up through the band, and the esophagus was like 10 times the size it should be,” Rex said.
With his stomach completely shutting down, Rob realized that if he didn’t have the band removed within two months, he would die.
“There could have been a major, major issue, so that’s why he had to take that thing out,” Rex said. “Isn’t that crazy?”
Rob Ryan, who has reunited with his brother on a coaching staff for the first time since 1995, also took some direct shots at Saints coach Sean Payton after being fired as defensive coordinator for back-to-back last place rankings on that side of the ball.
“Oh, we are dead last in defense,” Rob Ryan told the site. “Well, yeah, you are going to be dead last playing this bull– defense. But it is my fault because I didn’t say anything. I never stood up and said, F— you, I ain’t coaching this. I promise you I’d say it now.”
Rob Ryan said Payton shared the blame for the Saints’ defensive woes because he forced Ryan to mimic the Seahawks’ scheme.
“We changed the entire style of play,” Rob Ryan said. “It was strange. But hey, I did the best job I could. And it wasn’t good enough. They should have fired me. They probably should have fired everybody that made that decision to go in that direction. Now I’m going to move my whole family over here to Buffalo for a reason: to go kick everybody’s ass, including theirs.”
Rob Ryan also laid down a challenge to his former boss, Bill Belichick, vowing Buffalo finally will end years of misery against New England now that the Ryan brothers are working together.
“I have worked for Belichick, who is the best head coach in football, in the history of the game,” Rob said. “But we’re going to beat him, and we’re going to beat him together. And it’s going to be an awesome challenge.”
The Ryans said they feel an added urgency to win soon because their father, legendary NFL defensive strategist Buddy Ryan, is in very poor health — a factor that Rex said means they’re “going for broke.”
“Because, who knows? He’s not going to be able to watch us coach for much longer, I don’t think,” Rob Ryan said. “But hopefully he can see this one, because we have got big plans. Bring Belichick on. We got him.”