I try not to be overly reactionary in my takes on this site. The easiest thing in the world is to give some scorching hot take about how the coach should be fired when the Jets are playing poorly, and the fanbase is angry. There are some realities to the current Jets situation: The team […]
I try not to be overly reactionary in my takes on this site. The easiest thing in the world is to give some scorching hot take about how the coach should be fired when the Jets are playing poorly, and the fanbase is angry.
There are some realities to the current Jets situation:
The team was never expected to be good this season.
Making the Playoffs was not a realistic expectation.
The season could not be judged solely on wins and losses.
And perhaps most significantly:
None of this is Aaron Glenn’s fault.
Glenn inherited a team trying to climb out of the wreckage of a disastrous bet that the Jets were close to winning a Super Bowl and that Aaron Rodgers and big name veterans were the last pieces of the puzzle to get there.
Entering his first year, the Jets had holes all over the roster. They also had a quarter of their salary cap dedicated to players who were no longer on the roster. Former general manager Joe Douglas put a lot of cap hits on the credit card trying to maximize the last two years, and the bill came due.
The quality of the roster has deteriorated over the course of the season. This was in part due to the team trading two of its star players for Draft picks. Injuries have also created attrition for a team that didn’t have much depth to begin with.
That’s a long way to preface everything I’m about to say, but I think it’s important to say. This team’s issues in 2025 go far beyond Aaron Glenn. Any coach would be dealing with them, and the results would likely not be good.
So please know that I am aware of the challenges Glenn faces.
With that said, it cuts both ways. We can say it isn’t only about wins and losses. That means a hard fought loss where the other team’s superior talent takes over in the fourth quarter can’t be treated the same as the catastrophic December the Jets have suffered.
I know the Jets have a bad roster, but they aren’t the first team in NFL history to be stuck playing practice squad level players in December.
It’s important for a young team to play its best football late in the season. Early in the year, inexperience shows. After a season full of reps, this should be the point where we start to see progress. Instead, we got what was objectively the worst December performance in the century plus history of the league.
At times like this we have to ask ourselves a question. Do the roster challenges mean that Aaron Glenn cannot be judged in any way shape or form? Can we just accept the Jets playing some of the worst football the NFL has ever seen?
I would say the answer is no. I don’t think it’s fair to expect a lot of wins at this point. In fact, I’d even say we have to accept that the Jets will be blown out in some games. But we should also see some weeks where the team overperforms its talent level.
A good coach can’t turn a terrible roster into a good team, but coaching should make things better than they would be otherwise. Let me ask this. Is there any aspect of this Jets team that is currently better than it would be if Aaron Glenn was not the head coach? It’s tough to build a case for a yes answer.
Say what you will about the current talent deficit. These are still NFL players for a reason. This isn’t an SEC powerhouse playing an FCS school on the college level. Anybody in the NFL, even on a practice squad, has a great deal of talent. You should at least see some degree of professionalism from them.
Back in 2020 the Jets had a disastrous season under head coach Adam Gase. With an 0-13 record in December, the team upset a Rams squad that eventually made the Divisional Round of the NFL players. A partial list of players from that game who got 30+ snaps for the Jets includes the following names: Josh Andrews, Pat Elflein, Breshad Perriman, Denzel Mims, Chris Herndon, Javelin Guidry, Neville Hewitt, Bless Austin, Arthur Maulet, Harvey Langi, Bryce Hall, Nathan Shepherd, and Tarrell Basham.
Bad teams win games all the time. The Browns just beat the Steelers yesterday. More to the point, every team in the NFL can be expected to play competitive football consistently. A year ago the Tennessee Titans earned the top pick in the NFL Draft by posting the league’s worst record. Over half of their games were decided by single digits. Do you think the Titans didn’t have a terrible roster?
The Titans are once again one of the league’s worst teams. They lost to the Saints yesterday but only by an 8 point margin after leading portions of the game. But the Jets couldn’t be competitive with that same Saints team a week ago?
The talent might be the source of the losses, but the issues go beyond the mere fact the Jets are losing games. If I was looking for one play to summarize this month of Jets football, it would be tough to top this one from yesterday’s game.
Jordan Clark is an undrafted rookie who has spent most of the practice squad. You would think that he would do everything in his power to take advantage of an opportunity to get NFL regular season snaps. Clark had a rough start to the game. He was the primary culprit on a number of big plays for the Patriots. Finally he made something happen…and this was how he acted. He taunted with his team down by four scores in the second quarter and cost his team 15 yards and an automatic first down after a third down stop. If this isn’t a team that lacks any sort of standards or accountability, I don’t know what is.
I think firing a coach after one year is a really damaging thing for a franchise. There are exceptions, but coaches need some time to reshape a bad team into a winner. There are also bumps in the road in any career. Coaches can get better as they learn how to do the job. You frequently see bad franchises change coach year after year. Those franchises never really have a chance of becoming good. If you are constantly changing systems, the rosters are always turned over rapidly, making it difficult to develop and uncover under the radar talent.
All of these and more are real costs to moving on from a coach after one year. For that reason, I think quick changes should be reserved for extreme situations where the coach is clearly in over his head and there is little realistic hope it can be turned around. I am talking about situations like Jerrod Mayo with the Patriots last year or Urban Meyer with the Jaguars.
The costs of a rapid coaching change are real. But they have to be balanced with one reality. If a coach clearly isn’t the right man for the job, keeping him in place for another year is more costly than any of the legitimate drawbacks to firing someone after year one. The Jets learned that the hard way when they gave Adam Gase a second season.
Even after all of this, I’m not today going to definitively say that Aaron Glenn should not get a second season. I will say this, however. This season has gone poorly enough that Glenn can fairly be placed in that Mayo/Meyer/Gase group where a quick change can be justified.
If you don’t believe me, consider this. The Jets currently have a point differential of -176 through 16 games. Rich Kotite’s Jets in 1996, a team Glenn played for, had a point differential of -175 in 16 games. Thus we can objectively say that Jets this season have played at a Kotite level.
With that in mind, if the Jets keep Glenn for 2026 there have to be some major conditions. Namely he needs to be able to articulate what went wrong this year and offer a clear and convincing plan that he can fix it. Nobody wants to hear cliches about building taking time. Nothing has been built this season, and eleven months after Glenn’s hiring this team doesn’t feel any further along than it did the day he arrived.
Category: General Sports
