Rex Ryan and the Bills are currently projected to break an NFL record in committed penalties this season. At the moment, they have 58 through four games.
Ryan's solution? Push-ups!
"If a guy gets a penalty during the practices, then we're gonna make sure that all of us are gonna do 10 push-ups or whatever," Ryan said Wednesday, via ESPN.com. "The rest of the team will (do push-ups) and that person (being penalized) will stand up, just to see how many people he is affecting.
"Penalties are still gonna happen, but we gotta eliminate them to the best of our abilities, especially the self-inflicted ones."
This is not the first time Ryan implemented this solution during his coaching career. At least twice, during especially penalized stretches of the season with the Jets, Ryan had his team, staff and even owner hitting the turf to bang out push-ups.
While those Jets teams were not overly-penalized -- two top-10 finishes in total penalties between 2009 and 2014 -- they weren't squeaky clean, either. This is not the first time Ryan has had to address his team's penchant for yellow flags, and it's not the first time he's cited his old Baltimore Raven teams as an example of why it doesn't necessarily matter.
This was always going to be a side effect of "building a bully." Ryan's team has almost doubled the amount of unnecessary roughness calls as the next-closest team, the Washington Redskins, according to The Football Database. But that doesn't mean it's not having an impact on the win-loss column.
And to solve this problem, Bills players, some of the most finely-tuned athletic machines in the country, will have to do push-ups, a rudimentary exercise that nearly every average Joe can complete with some degree of efficiency.
