09/30 — It’s been nearly three years since Rex Ryan locked up in a chessmatch with Sean Payton. Both men — the defensive genius and the offensive mastermind — will surely recall that game while devising their game plans this week for Sunday’s battle of unbeatens at the Superdome.

On Oct. 29, 2006, the 4-2 Baltimore Ravens met up with the 5-1 New Orleans Saints down in the Gulf Coast two months back in the Superdome following the 2005 devastation that was Hurricane Katrina.

The Saints were a feelgood story under Payton, their first-year head coach, and QB Drew Brees, in the first year of a six-year deal he signed that March. They’d go on to capture 10 games and claim the NFC South division championship before seeing their dream season end in Chicago one step short of the Super Bowl. The Saints finished the regular season ranked No. 1 in the NFL in offense and tied a team mark by scoring 49 touchdowns as Brees passed for 4,418 yards, 26 TDs and just 11 interceptions.

And the Ravens were led by Ryan, a second-year defensive coordinator, and a unit featuring the likes of Ray Lewis, Terrell Suggs, Adalius Thomas, Haloti Ngata, Chris McAlister, Ed Reed and even a young Bart Scott. They were loaded for bear and would finish ranked first overall in defense (264 yards per game) and yield only 12.6 points per game. After the Ravens won 13 regular-season games, Ryan was named Assistant Coach of the Year by Pro Football Weekly and the Pro Football Writers Association.

So what happened that fall when the unstoppable force met the immovable object?

Brees passed for 383 yards and three touchdowns on the Ravens’ vaunted defense, but Payton’s Saints were no match for Ryan and company. Brees, who completed 24 of 45 passes, was intercepted three times, and two of those picks were returned for touchdowns. The 6’0” passer also had 13 passes knocked down, including a number at the line as Ryan had his men clog up the accurate passer's lanes.

The final was 35-22, Ravens, but the contest was a blowout. It was 35-7 by the middle of the third quarter and the Ravens even knocked Reggie Bush out of the game in the fourth with an ankle injury. Brees fumbled the ball away on the Saints’ opening possession and Bush threw an errant halfback pass to Ray Lewis, ending the home club’s second drive. Then Brees was victimized by a Ronnie Prude interception and 12-yard scoring runback and it was 21-0 midway through the second quarter. The Ravens scored 28 points off five Saints turnovers.

"When you make mistakes on your end of the field, they result in points." Payton said following the one-sided affair. "In this case, if you look at the turnovers, that's what happened. It's not any magic formula.”

“He may have thrown for 350 yards but a lot of that was overkill,” Bart Scott remembered of Brees this week. “We went up early. A lot of the scores came when the game was said and done and we had some backups in and moved out. A lot of those yards probably came in the second half because we scored 21 points early, so we jumped on them pretty early and kind of geared it down.”

So much has changed in the three years since Ryan and Payton matched wits in the Superdome. But there are parallels as Ryan will once again be taking a bruising, unrelenting defense down to see another electric, dynamic Payton-led offense.

“I always think I'm the best in calling a game on defense, so there is that chessmatch. When I was a coordinator, I used to love these opportunities,” Ryan said. “Now when you step back and you're the head man, you're just like, ‘Oh, I don't know, our schedulemaker wasn't real happy when they put our schedule together.’ ”

The Saints lead the league in both scoring (40 points per game) and total offense (438 ypg), but the Jets’ “D” is second overall in yielding 11.0 points an outing (8.7 if you don't include the Houston TD off Mark Sanchez's interception) and third in allowing 256 yards per game. Brees was deadly in September, completing 69.1 percent of his passes for 841 yards with nine touchdowns and two interceptions. But the Jets are first in yards allowed per pass play and have limited three pretty good offenses to an NFL-low five red zone opportunities.

You can go on and on with stats, but this is a game everyone in the NFL will pay close attention to. Sure, both teams are off to impressive 3-0 starts, but Ryan and Payton going at it is a special coaching matchup that you just don’t see too often.

“It's going to be a great challenge to us," Ryan said. "It's who is in front of us. I know our guys will be prepared and we'll go down there and give them everything we have and we'll see if that's good enough."