Rex Ryan must have really made an impression with the Pegula family when he interviewed for the Buffalo Bills head coaching vacancy, because to hear Kim Pegula tell it, he wasn't exactly at the top of their list of potential candidates at the outset of the process.
"Rex almost was a candidate we put in there because obviously his name was all around as a candidate that was open and we really didn't give much thought to him," Kim Pegula said on an episode of The John Murphy Show on the team's website, per NJ.com.
After former Bills head coach Doug Marrone chose to opt out of his contract, the Pegulas and the entire Bills organization engaged in a search that included some level of contact with candidates like Dan Quinn, the Seattle Seahawks defensive coordinator, Adam Gase, the former offensive coordinator of the Denver Broncos, former NFL head coach Mike Shanahan, his son Kyle Shanahan and Ryan, among others.
But once Kim and her husband, Terry, sat down with Ryan, everything changed.
"We had obviously interviewed a lot of people before him," she said. "And he came in and I think we were just very pleasantly surprised at how very down to earth he really was in person and his love of the game and some of the things that he said on what he really wanted to do with his life and where he wanted to help us as being part of the team.
"And I think that really resounded really well with [co-owner] Terry [Pegula] and I. And it was a little bit of a surprise, I'm gonna admit, because he was not a candidate that we had really on the top of our list as, 'Wow, this is the guy we want, let's go get him.'"
Go get him they did, though it of course remains to be seen how Ryan, who seems like a perfect Buffalo fit personality-wise, fits when it comes to football.
He's a proponent of the 3-4 defensive scheme taking over a team that thrived in Jim Schwartz's 4-3 last season and he's again stepping into an unsettled quarterback situation, something he never seemed quite able to fix in his time with the Jets.
