This is a part of a series where I take a look at potential coaching hires for the New York Jets for the 2025 season.
The 2024 New York Jets season will go down as one of the biggest failures in sports history. From the hype to the talent to ultimately, the embarrassment. The New York Jets began to spiral early in the season, and Woody Johnson fired then head coach Robert Saleh and promoted defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich to the top spot in hopes of generating a spark for the team. That spark did not come.
So, with the Jets all but set for a rebuild and a new regime taking over, I thought I could spend the second half of the season looking at potential coaching candidates for gang green in 2025. It’s not like there will be plenty of good football to discuss on these pages.
So, with that in mind let’s get to our next candidate: Aaron Glenn.
Aaron Glenn is currently the defensive coordinator for the playoff bound Detroit Lions and he has been there since 2021. In that time, the Lions have ranked in the bottom third in defensive points per game every year except this one. Considering all the injuries they have had on the defense, that goes to Glenn’s coaching ability. But this is a one-year spike more than a constant rise.
Glenn was voted as the most highly rated coordinator by the NFLPA in a survey earlier this year. So, he is definitely well liked and well respected in the league.
My colleague who writes for Detroit Lions, Mike Payton is a big fan of Aaron Glenn and huge fan of Glenn going to the Jets:
“One of the big reasons why the Lions are as good as they are, is because they have the right coach and that coach has been able to come in and build a culture that everyone believes in and everyone will fight for. The Jets can't have Dan Campbell, but they can absolutely get the next best thing in Glenn. He is the defensive version of Campbell. Every single player on that team loves Aaron Glenn and would run through a wall for him...It's truly the best way for the Jets to go. Here's their second chance after interviewing him for the head coaching job in 2021. Maybe they get it right this time.”
While I appreciate how easy Mike makes it sound to fix a team that has been terrible for decades by trying to replicate the magic that another team that has been terrible for decades, I completely disagree with him here. There are no simple steps to fixing the Jets that don’t begin with Woody Johnson selling the team to someone who understands that owning an NFL team, doesn’t make you qualified to run the football side of an NFL team. But I digress.
What the Lions have in Dan Campbell, Aaron Glenn and Ben Johnson is a unicorn. It can’t be replicated by simply stealing one of the coaches and saying, “do that here”. Any one of those guys might crumble without the other two.
The Jets have long been a team that has looked at what a successful franchise has done and tried to replicate it as opposed to finding their own path. They tried to replicate the New England Patriots by hiring Eric Mangini. They tried to replicate the San Francisco 49ers by hiring Robert Saleh. They tried to replicate the Baltimore Ravens by hiring Rex Ryan. They tried to replicate the Philadelphia Eagles by hiring Joe Douglas. And they even tried to replicate the Green Bay Packers by trading for Aaron Rodgers. In the end, a copy is never as good as the original.
You must hire from somewhere, right? Yes, but that doesn’t mean you have to try replicate the same formula. They should be hiring the man, not the team he just left’s resumé.
But back to Aaron Glenn. He is a good defensive coach and very well may be a leader of men. But one of the main jobs for a new coach is to develop a young quarterback to be the face of the franchise for years to come. Aaron Glenn is not equipped to do that, and you will be taking a huge risk that whatever offensive position coach he can convince to follow him to New York is going to be able to do that. I, for one, have seen this movie play out time and time again and I am not interested in watching it again.
Aaron Glenn might be a fantastic leader, but he will never have the chance to succeed in New York without the ability to take a young QB and turn him into a winner in today’s NFL. Frankly, after 14 seasons without the playoffs and a terrible owner steering the ship, Glenn won’t be afforded the luxury of patience.
And let’s stop with the Jets connection stuff because he played here almost 30 years ago. Aaron Glenn was good player for the New York Jets, but he wasn’t some overly beloved figure. Go to a Jets game today and you won’t see one Aaron Glenn jersey in the stadium. You will see plenty of throwbacks, but none of them are Glenn’s. In fact, when Glenn retired as player from the NFL, he chose to sign a one-day contract with the Houston Texans to retire, not as a Jet.
All of this being said, this looks and smells like a Woody Johnson hire to me. Woody will see the success of the Detroit Lions and attempt to bring back someone with a connection to the Jets to replicate it. Aaron Glenn checks off too many of the wrong boxes that Woody won’t be able to resist. We are weeks, maybe even months away from the Jets making a head coaching hire, but I believe Glenn should be the betting favorite at this point.
Do I think it would be a bad hire? No. But I don’t think it is the right hire. It feels too much like doing the same thing and expecting a different result. What did Einstein call that again?
