Rex Ryan Blames Coaches and Quarterbacks For Slide-Related Injuries

Stephen Douglas | 2 Hours Ago

Rex Ryan goes off on the quarterback slide. / ESPN / YouTube

Trevor Lawrence suffered a concussion in Week 13 when Azeez Al-Shaair hit him on a quarterback slide. The play is meant to make the quarterback off-limits, but with the speed of the game, that can sometime be impossible, which is what Al-Shaair mentioned in a social media post on Monday morning explaining his side of the story.

Whatever Al-Shaair's intentions were on the play, Lawrence is just the latest quarterback to be hurt by a defender after he'd given himself up. That point was made passionately by Rex Ryan on Get Up this morning as he blamed coaches and quarterbacks for putting defenders a position where an injury seems likely.

"You've gotta learn how to protect yourself," said Ryan. "And I'm going to tell you right now, obviously it was a dirty hit, I am so sick and tired of seeing people teach, Hey, slide. When you're running out here, you slide. The hell you do! Not when you're going full speed down the field and the defender's coming full speed at you. You don't slide. I can see this happens over and over and over again. All you have to do is watch every Saturday, college football. Two to three of these happen every single week. I'm sick and tired of it. You are not protecting your quarterback when you teach them how to slide when it's not in the open field. Open field of course. That's great. Absolutely not here. If you want to get a concussion you slide like this when contact's coming."

The rule has been around since 1985, but Lawrence's injury is all the proof you need that it doesn't protect quarterbacks the way it's intended to. Ryan's solution is to teach the quarterbacks to do something different.

"They should be taught to dive at the ankles of the defender or run the football and keep your head out of it," said Ryan. "Trust me, I would take the ankles of the defender. Run right there, dive at his ankles. Immediately the guy's going to go to protect himself. This happens all the time when the guy's just trying to make a tackle. This is a big quarterback running here. I'm so sick and tired of it. Let's put a film together and actually teach our young quarterbacks how to protect themselves. I'm sick and tired of it."

This seems like an imperfect solution, but it's also an imperfect situation.

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