Man, could a bigger deal have been made over reports that Rex Ryan cried after Sunday’s loss to the Jaguars?

Look: I’m all in with Tom Hanks and “there’s no crying in baseball.” Baseball is a measured game, and features a 162-game season, so it’s certainly best the players and coaches not get too emotionally caught up in any one event.

Football, though? I don’t know. It’s different.

Maybe it’s something about the adrenaline that comes from the sheer physicality of the sport, the fact that 11 men on the field are, at any given time, trying their best to hurt another 11 men on the field. Or maybe it has something to do with how many fewer games there are, which renders each contest much more important.

Either way, I know this: I’m not a crier, but I’m certain that the hardest I’ve cried in the last 20 years was after my final high-school football game. That was a massively different circumstance than the one that prompted Rex to blubber, but there’s something about the sport, I think, that facilitates tears.

Heck, I even found coaching football — at the JV level, no less — to be a wildly emotional experience. Players used to joke about my sideline behavior when we watched the game films; I often tore down the sideline with on pace with the play if we had a long gain, and even more often blew up in the faces of referees.

And I’m really not a demonstrative guy.

It wasn’t about putting on a show or drawing attention to myself in any way, I was just caught up in the game. The players dug it, I think, because clearly I cared.

Sounds like the Jets felt that way about Ryan’s outburst, at least.

“It’s an emotional game and that just showed his passion,” linebacker Calvin Pace said. “If I was in that situation, I would’ve cried, too, man.”

“You want to win for a coach like that,” [Damien] Woody said. “Whatever the perception is outside is irrelevant. It means nothing. We know how Rex feels about this team and what he was saying.”

Members of the media can call it a sign of weakness or whatever, but, well, whatever. Let a dude show emotion over something he cares about.

Honestly, could this city’s media shoot itself in the collective foot with any more frequency? Does everyone really want to make it so that athletes and coaches never say or do anything interesting, just to avoid the nonsense that inevitably follows?