Despite only giving up 10 points and holding Baltimore starting quarterback Joe Flacco to an 8 for 18 night, Rex Ryan didn't have kind things to say about his defense.
Asked if he was happy with the defense's performance, Ryan said, "Not initially, no."
Then Ryan became uncharacteristically cryptic when talking about the unit.
"I'm not going to go there much," he said. "I'm just going to say sometimes, believe what you want to believe. Sometimes you play certain things and sometimes you don't. You can ask Baltimore what I mean by that. We got two decent players that will add to the mix pretty soon and I think this defense will be right where I predict it will be -- right at the top of this league."
The one problem was that when Flacco did complete passes, there were some big gains. The big play of the night was a Derrick Mason catch against Drew Coleman, though. Would Coleman ever be in man coverage against the opponent's best receiver in a real game? He's no better than fifth on the depth chart. I do like seeing Rex pushing his defense to be better. I still thought I saw a lot of improvement over the first game and leaps and bounds over what we saw at the end of last season.