Shocker! Rex Ryan team can’t match hype

“We haven’t been the dominant unit that any of us anticipated,” Bills coach Rex Ryan said Wednesday, wearing his ugly Christmas sweater and reflecting on the decline of an elite defense he was expected to improve in 2015. “Maybe I set the expectations so high.”
Uh, ya think?
Ryan arrived in Western New York, fresh off a Jets divorce, spinning his typical brash rhetoric about taking a defense that ranked about the league’s leaders the previous year and transforming it into the engine of a playoff team. Instead, the Bills enter Week 15 with a mediocre 6-7 record and a defense that has slipped in every meaningful statistical category, allowing 12 more points than it did last season — with three whole games left.
Ryan seems almost stunned at how “the way I coach defense” is considered the weakness of a team. “[My defense] is clearly too complicated to play,” he said Wednesday.

The players have noticed. Star defensive tackle Marcell Dareus said Tuesday the Bills bought their own hype — Ryan’s hype — before making sure they could gel in Ryan’s system.

“Of course, the hype was there and we all saw it and we all feel it as well; we’re good team on paper,” Dareus said, according to the Buffalo News. “Getting a new head coach and stuff, his system has to get placed in and it doesn’t happen in a year. I think that we all missed that and looked at the pieces that we put in and forgot the big picture of letting it all set, seal and don’t touch it for a little bit. … I feel like we jumped the gun on certain things.”
A snapshot of the decline on defense via Pro Football Talk:
Yards allowed per game: 2014 — 4th, 2015 — 20th
Yards allowed per play: 2014 — 3rd, 2015 — 17th
Sacks: 2014 — 1st, 2015 — 30th
Defensive passer rating: 2014 — 2nd, 2015 — 10th
Opponents’ third-down conversion percentage: 2014 — 1st, 2015 — 17th
“We’ve got great players,” Ryan said. “I think I’m an above-average coach, maybe.”