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'Has anyone ever kissed your Super Bowl rings?'

This offseason, Shutdown Corner will travel down memory lane with a series of stories presenting some interesting and sometimes forgotten stories from the NFL's past. Join us as we relive some of the greatest and craziest moments in the sport's history.

In January 2009, the New York Jets hired Rex Ryan to become the 18th head coach in the franchise's history, and Ryan arrived with a roar. A proclamation that the team would be winning the Super Bowl and visiting the President as well as announcing that his squad would be "the most physical" team in the NFL were part of his introductory press conference.

And he didn't stop there.

Ryan didn't wait long to take aim at Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots, the kings of the AFC East, Ryan's new division after several years with the Baltimore Ravens in the AFC North.

During a radio interview just a few months after he was hired, Ryan threw a little gas on the ever-smoldering Jets-Patriots border war, telling WFAN, "I never came here to kiss Bill Belichick's, you know, rings. I came to win. Let's just put it that way. So we'll see what happens. I'm certainly not intimidated by New England or anybody else. . . ."

At the time, Belichick had five rings: two from his days as New York Giants defensive coordinator, and three as Patriots head coach. So that's a lot of bling to pucker up for. (For the record, Ryan has one.)

New England and New York met for the first time that season in Week 2, so the days leading up to the game offered the perfect opportunity to re-kindle Ryan's comment - and ask Belichick about it.

The reporter who asked during a Tuesday conference call with the coach was current NFL Network newsman Ian Rapoport. But in 2009, Rapoport was a newbie on the Patriots' beat, hired by the Boston Herald just before the start of training camp after covering the Univeristy of Alabama football team and coach Nick Saban for three years.

Rapoport recalled recently that he was hoping to get a good answer from the normally taciturn Belichick, and really mulled how best to bring up Ryan's rings comment.

"I had just come from covering Alabama and I was a little bit of a lightning rod in Alabama because I sat in the middle, up front [during press conferences] and whenever there was a situation, I would ask Saban about it. At that time, that atmosphere, some people were afraid to ask him certain things. And maybe a little I liked the attention," Rapoport said with a laugh.

"I had only been in New England about a month and a half and I could already tell the whole week would be about Rex and that comment, and I went into the conference call thinking, 'how can I get [Belichick] to say anything about it?' I convinced myself to ask him, forced myself through the awkward question.

"On a call, you ask and there's a moment of silence as he considers his answer and I was thinking, 'wow, this could be really, really awkward."

In typical Belichick fashion, it wasn't exactly an expansive answer:

Excerpt from Bill Belichick conference call, Sept. 15, 2009
Excerpt from Bill Belichick conference call, Sept. 15, 2009

But while the transcript is correct, there was a little more to it. As Rapoport recalled, Belichick seemed more amused by the question and situation than annoyed, and he was right. On the conference call, you could hear Belichick chuckle, and his reaction was confirmed when "A Football Life: Bill Belichick" aired two years later.

When the Jets and Patriots finally met on the field that Sunday at the old Meadowlands, it was Ryan who walked away victorious, with New York winning 16-9. But while Ryan's Jets won three of their first five games against Belichick's Patriots, including a memorable wild card game at the end of the 2010 season, the run didn't last: they went 1-7 over the next four years, before Ryan was fired after the 2014 season.