DeMeco Ryans’ coaching roots grow from Alabama

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February 3, 2023

By Mark Inabinett | minabinett@al.com

Cal McNair brought DeMeco Ryans back to the Houston Texans to lead the NFL franchise out of its current doldrums. And the team owner knows the Texans got a leader because that’s what Ryans always has been.

Ryans joined Houston as a second-round linebacker from Alabama in 2006 and played the first six of his 10 NFL seasons with the Texans. On Tuesday, Houston hired the San Francisco 49ers defensive coordinator and, on Thursday, introduced Ryans as its head coach.

“As a leader, it showed up at Alabama,” McNair said. “He was the leader of their defense. The captain of the team, and they called him ‘Coach,’ so this has been in him a long time. We drafted him in ‘06. He took over the defense, stepped into the middle, called the plays, he was captain and they called him ‘Cap,’ so he’s been a leader for a long, long time.”

At Alabama, Ryans earned unanimous All-American recognition, won the SEC Defensive Player of the Year Award and received the Lott IMPACT Trophy as a senior in 2005.

Joe Kines worked as the Crimson Tide’s offensive coordinator for Ryans’ final three college seasons. Ryans credits Kines with kindling the coaching spark inside of him.

“I got inspired for coaching back in college,” Ryans said. “My college coach, coach Joe Kines, he really inspired me. One day he put me on the spot in front of the room and he asked me to make some calls, and I thought I knew what everyone around me was supposed to do, and I didn’t know. At that moment, I was like, ‘Wow, I need to make sure I know what everybody around me what their job is and how I fit into this puzzle.’

“So if he’s trusting to call on me, he believes that there’s something in me that maybe I could be in the coach’s shoes. And from that inspiration from Joe Kines, it led me to truly knowing what every position around me knowing what they had to do, all their assignments and techniques, so if a guy needed help, I could help him out. And that’s where that inspiration for coaching started.”

But the foundation for his coaching, Ryans said, started at home with his mother, Martha Ryans.

“My mother, first and foremost, she taught me to have a relationship with God,” Ryans said, “and that’s the most important thing that she could have given me and instilled in me, and I still carry with me to today.

“And then my mother taught me what hard work, what sacrifice looks like. My mother: We’re going to get it done. No matter how hard it seemed, no matter how far-fetched it may seem, we’re going to get it done. Those principles that I saw her — whether it’s working three jobs, whether it’s walking to work so I can have a car to drive to school — that sacrifice that my mother made has just taught me that if you want it, you got to go work. You got to work hard, and maybe there’s some sacrifices you have to make in life as well to make sure that the others around you are better. And that’s what my mother taught me, and that’s goes into coaching.”

Over the past three seasons, Houston has posted an 11-38-1 record – four fewer victories than San Francisco had for the 2022 campaign when its season ended in the NFC Championship Game on Sunday.

But Ryans doesn’t need that contrast to see the difference a winning mentality can make. He saw it as an All-State player at Jess Lanier High School in Bessemer.

In Willie Ford’s first season as the Purple Tigers’ coach, Jess Lanier had a 1-8 record. But a year later in Ryans’ senior season, the Tigers finished at 9-3, with the losses coming against two of the state’s best Class 6A teams that season – Hoover with quarterback John Parker Wilson in the season-opener and the third round of the playoffs and Tuscaloosa County with running back Le’Ron McClain.

During his introductory press conference, Ryans had a message for the folks back home.

“What I say to all the people back in Bessemer is whatever you dream, if you believe it, you definitely can achieve that,” Ryans said. “All dreams can come true, and that’s what you see here today. It’s a dream of mine, and it’s coming true, and whatever anybody, any of us, whatever we dream, we believe we can make it happen by putting in the work. By hard work, by sacrifice, you can make it happen.”

How Area Leaders Partnered to Protect Homes in One Birmingham Community

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Birmingham Times

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February 3, 2023

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Northside 1 (002) — From left: Mark Fowler, acting commissioner of the Alabama Department of Insurance; Rich Bielen, CEO of Protective Life Corporation; Barbara Thomas, president of the Norwood neighborhood association; Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin; City Councilor J.T. Moore and Roy Wright, president and CEO of the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. (Ryan Michaels, The Birmingham Times)

By Ryan Michaels

The Birmingham Times

Standing outside of her home in Birmingham’s Northside community on Thursday, Barbara Thomas, President of the Norwood Neighborhood Association, said she’s seen the problems some of her neighbors have experienced with their roofs.

“We had residents, that it was literally raining in their home. They were displaced. They either had to stay on another part of their home, or had to stay with other family members,” Thomas said.

Many of those neighbors have now had their roofs replaced under a program, called “Protecting Good: Strengthen, Repair and Protect” (SRP), where anyone in the Northside neighborhoods of Druid Hills, Evergreen, Fountain Heights, Norwood and Central City can receive up to $10,000 for a roof replacement, with potentially more money in repairs.

“This program gave [neighbors] the opportunity to stay in their home,” said Thomas. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been able to replace their roof,” she added.

Inside the Fountain Heights Recreation Center, Mayor Randall Woodfin said more than 65 homeowners in the Northside community have had their homes repaired or their roofs restored and that community revitalization is not limited to building new homes and “removing blight.”

A total of 171 homeowners are currently set to receive home improvements under a partnership that includes the city, Protective Life Corporation, Neighborhood Housing Services and Habitat for Humanity Greater Birmingham, according to the mayor.

“We need to make sure that as a program, we can support existing homeowners, particularly our seniors … who’ve been living in our neighborhoods, historic neighborhoods, for 20, 30, 40 years,” Woodfin said.

Homeowners in the Northside neighborhoods can also receive further repair services related to wind and water damage that may have come as the result of a worn roof.

Woodfin said the program worked on a number of level, starting with Protective CEO Rich Bielen doing something “different.”

“Oftentimes, a corporate partner can come into an area and say, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’ That did not happen. Rich got out of his office and got out of his suitcoat, and we walked the streets of this footprint, took the time to listen to neighborhood officers. We took the time to listen to neighborhood residents,” Woodfin said.

Bielen said he’s a “big believer in relationships and collaboration and communication.”

“And it was that communication, the effort to talk to people, to see and hear, [which] allowed this program to work,” Bielen said.

The initiative began in 2021, the same year that Protective Stadium opened in the Druid Hills neighborhood.

Roy Wright, president and CEO of the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) said the work done through the SRP initiative is good for homeowners in multiple ways.

“What’s happened is we have changed the trajectory of families by making that investment on the front side. Our research leads us down the path [that says] the most important part of the home is the roof. If you don’t have a roof over your head, you don’t have a home, and as those corrode over time, you put yourself in vulnerability,” Wright said.

Public-private partnerships like Protecting Good serve as the consistent “blueprint” for how successful cities “accelerate growth and progress for the citizens they serve,” Woodfin said.

Republicans Oust Rep. Ilhan Omar from Foreign Affairs Committee

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Birmingham Times

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February 3, 2023

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By Stacy M. Brown
NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent

In what many political watchers called hypocritical, vengeful, and a show of strength by the new Republican majority, the House voted to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar from the House Foreign Affairs committee, citing her past comments about Israel.

The resolution to remove the Minnesota Democrat from the panel was approved 218-211 along party lines with one Republican member voting “present.”

The GOP cited Omar’s tweets and comments from 2019 and 2021 in which she criticized pro-Israel politicians as being “all about the Benjamins” and her comparison of the U.S. and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban. Both Democrats and Republicans, expressed outrage over the remarks. The resolution stated that Omar’s remarks had brought dishonor to the House of Representatives and that she had “disqualified herself” from serving on the Committee on Foreign Affairs, which is seen by nations around the world as speaking for Congress on matters of international importance and national security.

Since 2021, when Democrats controlled the House and voted to remove far-right GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar from committee assignments over their own controversial comments, Republicans have promised to take action against Omar and other Democrats.

After McCarthy became speaker last month, he reinstated both members to their previous committee assignments. Omar admitted this week that she “may have used words” that she later learned were “trafficking in antisemitism.”

She said when others brought the transgression to her attention, she apologized. “I owned up to it,” Omar, 40, asserted. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York pledged to appoint Omar to the House Budget Committee.