Rex Ryan and Tim Mann Reveal a Lost Clue that Cost Them 'The Amazing Race 34'

Pack your bags, because The Amazing Race is back! Every week, Parade's Mike Bloom will bring you interviews with the team most recently eliminated from the race.

Rex Ryan and Tim Mann had the endzone in sight. The former NFL coach and his golf buddy had some stoppage on the ground game, specifically in navigation. But they were still able to push through the tasks, finishing respectably in the middle of the pack in the first leg. Crossing the border into Austria, they thought a new city would be a new start. But the Music City men soon literally faced the music, much to their detriment. Rex's dyslexia gave him difficulty in the yodeling Roadblock, sending them from the front to the back of the pack. And during the handbell Detour, they failed to get a ringing endorsement from the judges, as Tim continually struggled. It was enough to put them behind Quinton Peron and Mattie Lynch, who caught up despite putting themselves incredibly behind with bad directions. In this case, the cheerleaders beat the coach, blowing the whistle on Rex and Tim's game.

Now out of the race, Rex and Tim talk with Parade.com about how they came to be partners, a lost clue that put them on the path to elimination, and how they laughed through their time on the show.

Related: Everything to Know About The Amazing Race 34

The last thing we heard you say leaving The Amazing Race is that you'll be "blasted" by your buddies back home for what happened this leg. Has that happened yet?
Tim Mann: I would say that Rex is probably getting blasted more with the yodeling. (Laughs.) But I'm getting more sympathy, I think, with the bells. Everybody is saying that, without a music background, never playing an instrument, they have a lot of sympathy when it came to the bells. But I think everybody is thoroughly enjoying seeing Rex in lederhosen yodeling. I think that may have been I may have been the icing on the cake. 

Certainly was for me! When you leave that bell task, do you feel that you're in last? Because theoretically, you hadn't seen Quinton and Mattie all day. So there's still a chance you could have survived.
Tim: We kind of knew that we were pretty much a done deal. We saw that there was one clue left after we grabbed the clue. We know that with Maddie and Quinton, we were 99% positive they would have chosen the dance, having a cheerleading background. We knew we were pressured for time. We knew that they were probably going to get the dance pretty quick. And we just kind of knew that after our 10th attempt. They showed ten on The Amazing Race. I think it was more than ten times that we had it. It seemed like it was about 30. But we knew we were on the tail end of it.
Rex Ryan: Tim was hilarious. They never showed all those the bell things. And I agree with Tim that 30 attempts was being nice. When they said ten attempts on the bells, I was like, really? (Laughs.) But maybe it just seemed like 100.

Let's go back to before the race. Rex, I know when it was announced you would be on, it was speculated why you weren't racing with your brother or your wife or one of your former players. What made you ultimately decide to race with Tim?
Rex: They reached out and wanted my brother and me to be on it together. But my brother was coaching, so he couldn't do the race. And I had mentioned it while playing golf with Tim. And I'm weighing like 300. I'm like, "Oh boy, that would be fun and crazy." And then Tim's like, "Oh my god!" He was saying it was his mother-in-law's favorite show, that she never misses one. So I go, "Well, you want to do it? Let's try to do this. Let's see if they'll have us." And so, sure enough, that's how it started out. Tim is way too humble of a guy. He was a former powerlifting champion, runs marathons, smart, all these types of things. And I'm like, "Hell, this is gonna be a hell of a partner!" (Laughs.) Much better than my brother would have been.

So we just told him that we'd be interested. Then there are all the steps that go into doing this. You take the Wonderlic test, so you're taking an intelligence test. You take like three different psychological tests. You have a psychiatrist talk to you as a team. You do videos. You've got to get an international driver's license. You submit all this type of stuff just to get on the show. But after the Wonderlic test for intelligence and the psychological tests, we really didn't think we'd be on there! (Laughs.) But they actually put us on for some reason.

You clearly put some prep into this, with Rex losing 50 pounds in the process. How did that compare with actually getting out there on the race course?
Tim: I would say that we planned pretty well. Did a lot of navigation, a lot of maps. Going to work and being in law enforcement, we're on the road a lot. So we'll be practicing with maps while on the road, trying not to use the GPS, just little things like that trying to get used to it. And then, on the first leg, we plotted out the three different spots we wanted to go to. They showed that we were maybe one step ahead of Aastha and Nina. But after we planned our route out, we just caught up to everybody.

I mean, The Amazing Race is difficult because you really can't prepare for everything that they throw at you. I mean, we obviously were not ready to dance and sing. But the first episode definitely played into our strengths, the iceblock challenge, and sawing and working together, or rolling the keg. Those were our strengths. And then also throw a haymaker, which is your weakness, and you figure out your weaknesses. There's really no way you can prepare for your weaknesses without knowing what your weaknesses are.

You mention the navigation. And despite that preparation, you guys seemed to struggle with that, specifically in the first leg. How difficult did that end up being?
Tim: Well, we followed Michael and Marcus. (Laughs.) That was definitely our strength, following them. And when we saw them finish the yodeling, Rex and I thought to ourselves, "Well, there goes our ride! We've got to figure this out with just ourselves." And then you also throw in the pressure factor, thinking, "Okay, these teams are coming up behind us." So you gotta you got to really try to focus, and it's really hard. It's really easy to lose your focus when trying to navigate and just make sure that you're out of the pack.
Rex: Now, I'll also say this. So I'm doing the yodeling, and I'm doing this for an hour and a half or whatever. So we go to the car. I'm like, "Alright. So where are we now?" Tim had no idea! He's sitting there hanging out and talking to all the other teams. (Laughs.) I go, "Dude, you had an hour and a half!" But what they don't show is we actually go in the wrong direction. We saw Abby and Will go by, and we should have just jumped on behind him. The bells killed us, but the navigating also killed us. i

It's easy to navigate in your own language. But when you're seeing things in a different language, we had no idea. It was brutal. So we start heading in the wrong direction. And finally, I go, "Tim, you're good at the directions and the compass and all that. We've got to be going in one direction." And we finally figured it out and turned around. But the other thing was we lost a clue.

Oh, really?!
Yeah, so we actually lost a clue. We were trying to get out to get directions. So we park, and now we get out. We have no idea where this thing is. So we went running around looking for where the hell that clue was. We somehow found the box. So when we get there, we're tied for second to last. And then we make the epic mistake of doing the bells.

When Tim talked about the pressure, and pressure's nothing for me. Hell, I've faced fourth and one a million times with a game on the line. But when it's you trying to compete, and you know you're struggling. We knew the cheerleaders were behind us, but they were right behind us. And we knew that they were going to do the dance. So I felt the pressure big time when we were doing the bells. I was like, "We've got to get this dang thing right." You can't be prepared to see a map in a totally different language. And every word looks the same to me. So I was zero help in navigating.

Rex, your reputation as an NFL coach precedes you, to the point where Phil brought it up at the starting line. Was your celebrity status something that distanced you from the other teams?
Rex: We knew that would be our strength. Unfortunately, they don't allow you to really mingle with the team until you're racing. So you're not allowed to really talk until you're in a race event. That's the only time you can talk. Even after the race, they don't let you talk. So you had to kind of build relationships quickly. And we did! We knew Marcus and Michael were our guys; there was no question about that. We hit it off with them. And then some of the other groups, they're all really nice, super friendly. I was by far and away the oldest person there. So there was a little generational gap. But it really didn't matter. Everybody was really nice.

Finally, what did you each learn about the other person racing around the world?
Tim: Rex does not like any white sauces. (Laughs.) He does not like sour cream. He does not like cream cheese. He does not like ranch. He does not like blue cheese. Anything like a white sauce he will not touch.
Rex: It's funny. We know each other really well anyway. And then when you're locked up in a hotel room for five days, and you're not allowed to come out, then you know different things. The relationship even develops more. He and I can talk about anything with each other. We're like brothers that way. It was just fun. We'd strategize,  we watched German TV. We're doing our own play-by-play and color [commentary], if you will, with the volume down. We're watching the Animal Channel, and we're talking, "Oh, man, check out this hippo. This hippo is gonna go crazy."

It was super fun that way. I'm glad we did it together. Because it really was a blast. And look, we have fun going, "Tim, you were bad this stretch." We don't care. We were just having a great time together. And we laughed our way through the whole thing, really. There's the competitive part. But we're having a great time. And quite honestly, when we were finally eliminated, we were okay with that, too, because we were going to get beer after that. (Laughs.) We were like, "To hell with that! Le's get some beer."

Next, read our interview with Aastha Lal and Nina Duong, who were eliminated in The Amazing Race 34 premiere.