Jets players will tell you: Frank Reich is building the offense of their dreams

FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — Garrett Wilson longs for the kind of football he grew up watching. He thinks about the Sundays on his father’s couch in Austin, Texas. He’d watch the wide receivers and marvel at what they could do.

Even now, he still thinks about the life Terrell Owens got to live as a star wide receiver. Things were simpler then. If a coach had Terrell Owens, he’d build his offense around getting the ball to Terrell Owens.

“Guys like that, you don’t see as much anymore because it’s more schematic now,” Wilson told The Athletic. “It doesn’t have to be. That’s what it moved toward, but it doesn’t have to be.”

Modern offenses, he says, have become overcomplicated, bright-eyed masterminds trying to show everyone how smart they are. Wilson thinks they sometimes fail to see what’s right in front of them. “With receivers like Terrell Owens, his coaches knew they had a special talent,” Wilson says. “We’re not going to overcomplicate it. It’s man coverage, let’s throw a fade to Terrell Owens. The last 10 years you’ve seen that fall off and it’s all about everyone’s plays.”

To Wilson, early days with New York Jets offensive coordinator Frank Reich have felt like a blast from that past. Reich is coaching the kind of football Wilson always dreamed of playing. He felt it from their first conversation, when Reich had clearly already studied him, understood which routes and plays best suited his skill set, and shared his plan to deploy the star receiver. He showed Wilson film of other wide receivers to come through Reich’s offense, like T.Y. Hilton with the Indianapolis Colts and Alshon Jeffery with the Philadelphia Eagles. He’d be showing old clips, but in an offense that Wilson sees as timeless.

“When he’s pulling clips up to show us examples, some of the clips are from like 2014 or ’15, and he don’t gotta say anything, but we all notice it. The clip is blurry as hell,” Wilson says. “This isn’t a complicated game, and I think Frank gets that. The schemes that have worked for a while will work.”

This isn’t a complicated game.

Wilson sees Reich calling aspects of an offense that simply — there’s that word again — uses “five good players” running routes designed to win versus man coverage or Cover 3.

“You don’t gotta recreate the wheel,” Wilson says.

“That’s the league I grew up watching and loving. That’s the receivers I grew up watching. That’s what it was. Frank reminds me of the league that I grew up watching.”

Reich walks into a meeting room and looks … lighter. He’s no longer carrying the weight of being a head coach. Jelani Woods has seen it. The tight end laughs in team meetings sometimes, looking around, thinking about how this is the only version of Reich his Jets teammates have ever experienced.

Reich was Woods’ first NFL head coach, the one who drafted him in 2022 with the Indianapolis Colts. That was at the end of his tenure, when things were a bit more tense than they’d been at the beginning. Reich was fired midway through that season. The coach had always carried himself with a level of grace and professionalism, but Woods never saw him particularly loose. Back then, Woods saw him as “stern” and “strict” — not in a bad way, but not exactly the Energizer Bunny.

When Woods was a rookie, Reich put a lot of work into getting him ready for the NFL. He was hard on him. “He was on me,” Woods says.

“Frank is a little different now. Frank then, he was a head coach so it’s a little different mindset. He still has some of that now, but he’s not leading the whole team, just the offense. Now he’s still stern — but he’s a little more laid back. I can see the fun he’s having. I can see the joy in him again.”

Reich was fired and replaced by Jeff Saturday midway through that 2022 season. He was fired again in an even more dysfunctional situation, with the Carolina Panthers a year later. That experience — with a meddling owner questioning his decisions at every turn — dimmed some of the light he had carried with him as a beloved and respected NFL figure since his playing days.

The plan was to retire until Andrew Luck came calling, asking Reich to take over as Stanford’s interim head coach for the 2025 season. Reich would coach for one last season, then sail off into the sunset. Instead, even in a 4-8 season, Reich felt his football itch once again. When the opportunity expired, he was open to returning to the NFL, but he wasn’t going to just take any job. He turned down some opportunities with close NFL friends, like a job working with Eagles coach Nick Sirianni.

That’s when Aaron Glenn called. The two were teammates 30 years ago for a 1-15 Jets team led by Rich Kotite, just before Bill Parcells arrived to change the culture and set a moribund franchise back on the right path. Glenn wanted his old friend to help him do the same thing.

“As soon as AG called, I knew right away this was something I wanted to do, mainly because of him, but also because of the challenge and the opportunity to be a part of a staff and be a part of a team and organization that has an opportunity to do something special and turn something around,” Reich said in May. “At this point, I love that idea and I’m excited about that, and I feel like I got something to offer.”

In the aftermath of a disastrous 3-14 debut season for Glenn, Reich checked in on him. He told Glenn to stay true to who he was as a man and as a football coach, to keep sticking with his process and to “not let anything on the outside deter you from what you’re trying to do.” Glenn said it was a meaningful conversation from someone he respects — and who understands the perils of an NFL head coach.

In Glenn’s debut season, he was so focused on being a CEO head coach that, he admits, he lost sight of what got him here in the first place. He hired a first-time offensive coordinator (Tanner Engstrand) and spent more time supervising that side of the ball than devoting his energy to building the defense in his image. The defense suffered as a result. So, when Glenn decided to fire Steve Wilks as defensive coordinator and eventually take back defensive play calling for himself, he wanted to hire an offensive play caller that didn’t require supervision, that had done that job before — that had done his job before.

Thirty years ago, Frank Reich was piloting the Jets’ offense as their quarterback. (Kevin Terrell / Associated Press)

Reich has said that opportunity reignited his fire. Everyone who comes in contact with him can feel that warmth.

“Every single unit meeting we have, he finds a way — I’m saying this for me because I’m a pretty chill, cool, composed guy — but by the end of every unit meeting, he has me feeling like I’m ready to run through a wall,” tackle Olu Fashanu says.

Says Woods: “He has so much energy now, so much joyfulness. It’s a sight to see.”

Jets wide receivers coach Shawn Jefferson, who was on Reich’s staff in Carolina, says Reich “has this presence about him that he’s able to draw people in” and that “every day he stands in front of that team, the guy is just dialed in. He sets the tempo every day for this offense. The players have really, really bought into his message.”

When Reich was hired, Adonai Mitchell — drafted by the Colts in 2024 — reached out to his old teammates about what to expect; wide receiver Michael Pittman Jr. gave him a report. Breece Hall heard the same from Colts star running back Jonathan Taylor, a close friend.

“The first thing (Pittman) told me was: ‘You’re gonna love him,’” Mitchell says. “He’s a great coach, knows what he’s doing and has a great plan. Shoot, so I was ready.”

Taylor told Hall: “It’s very easy to play for Frank. He’s a very chill and cool dude, but he definitely wants you to execute what he’s telling you to do. He said he’s very easy to play for and he makes you play harder for him because of how good of a person he is, how good of a coach he is, how he’s a players’ coach and how he rides for his guys.”

Reich believes his fire comes from two places: Glenn and the Jets players he gets to work with.

Before every practice, Reich meets with passing game coordinator Seth Ryan. Sometimes they’ll throw a football around — Reich, a 13-year NFL quarterback, can still sling it — or simply huddle up and go over the day’s plan. Ryan has spent a lot of time in Reich’s office since he was hired in February.

Reich’s playbook has grown exponentially over the years, from things he learned as an offensive coordinator under Mike McCoy with the Los Angeles Chargers and Doug Pederson with the Eagles, his time as head coach of the Colts and Panthers, and even at Stanford. He’s committed to evolving, though he hasn’t called plays in an NFL game since the Panthers fired him. That Carolina team ranked 29th in scoring and 30th in yards before letting him go. Before the Colts fired him in 2022, Indianapolis ranked 31st in scoring and 27th in yards. But in four combined seasons before that, with better quarterback play, the Colts ranked ninth in scoring and 11th in yards.

Reich is trying to find that again. He believes he has the right quarterback in Geno Smith, and the weapons and offensive line around him, to get there. Smith wasn’t on the roster when Reich was first hired, but he was a top target. In the early days of the offseason, Reich used his playbook from Carolina with plans to add wrinkles — and to develop it further as they filled out the roster. Ryan was in his office daily with ideas and concepts he learned under Ben Johnson with the Detroit Lions, and they worked together to incorporate them.

At the root of everything was also simple: the players.

Reich wanted to build an offense that had room for improvisation, especially for someone like Wilson.

“From the first day he told us: ‘Guys, this is what it says on paper, but it’s not always going to be the coverage you expect. It’s not always going to be the technique you expect. At the end of the day, we want you to get it done this way, but you guys have to react and make the plays yourself, make the offense your own so we’re on the same page,’” Hall says. “Once he said that, it let us all be a little bit more comfortable knowing we don’t have to be in a box. We can still be in the parameters of our offense and make it our own.”

Wilson has referred to it as “player empowerment.” He says he’s played for coaches whose philosophy was to run plays exactly how they’re installed, with an approach of “get on the train or you’re going to be left behind.” Reich, he says, wants everyone to feel like they’re riding the train together.

The way wide receiver Isaiah Williams put it: “He lets you be free. He lets you play. He lets players use their instincts but within the offense. His big thing is: he wants everybody to know the why, because when you know the why you can put your own sauce on it.”

During OTAs, Wilson says Reich told him: You’re a good player, this is what you do well, so let’s put you on this route. For the receivers who can handle it, Reich goes out of his way to explain how to adjust a route based on what the defensive back is showing. It’s what Wilson likes to hear.

“You can tell he’s worldly,” Wilson says. “He’s worked with a lot of different receivers, different quarterbacks, different personalities that lead you to be able to have a conversation with anyone and not put too much thought to it because it’s just another convo. That’s what I see with Frank.”

Reich, for his part, is quick to point out that there is a structure to what the Jets are doing on offense — just that there’s room to work within that and adjust.

“This isn’t like players are running the ship,” Reich says. “We’ve got to come in with a plan, we’ve got to have conviction about our system, about what we’re doing, and we do … But coaching is a small part of it, it’s about the players. So, you get a player like Garrett Wilson … that guy has elite instincts, he’s not just a great athlete. So we talk about the combination of discipline and instincts. We need to be extremely disciplined and extremely detailed, but we don’t want robots … I like to encourage: Let me see what you’ve got. Let me see what you’ve got and then let’s talk about it.”

It’s a conversation where it has never really felt like one for the longest-tenured Jets offensive players like Hall and Wilson, already going on their fifth offensive play caller in five seasons. Early in Wilson and Hall’s careers, it never felt like a conversation. As rookies in 2022, Mike LaFleur was a first-time play caller from the Kyle Shanahan tree devoted wholly to his scheme. Nathaniel Hackett’s philosophy was heavily influenced by whatever Aaron Rodgers told him it needed to be — and Rodgers wasn’t especially fond of Wilson’s proclivity for improvisation.

The Jets, for a long time, have tried to find the right answer at offensive coordinator and mostly failed. Since Brian Schottenheimer lasted six years, from 2006 until 2011, the Jets have shuffled through 10 offensive coordinators (including Reich), and none lasted for more than two seasons. The Jets also have finished as a bottom-10 offense in 13 of the last 14 seasons — including 29th last year with Engstrand calling plays and Justin Fields at quarterback.

That last part of that sentence is key: the quarterback. Reich believes he has the right one to steer his offensive ship, saying Smith has “pure” throwing mechanics that very few quarterbacks in the NFL can match. He and Smith, so far, are getting along swimmingly.

“He’s very detailed in the way that he teaches the offense,” Smith says. “Very meticulous in what he wants from us and how he wants us to execute.”

Says Reich: “I am just so impressed with Geno, I cannot express that enough.”

Reich believes he can get the most out of the Jets’ collection of weapons too, a versatile group of pass catchers and running backs that will test the limits of Reich’s imagination. It’s why those around the Jets caution not to expect Reich to trot out the same offensive style he used in Indianapolis and Carolina. The Jets have been purposefully “generic” in the preseason, though the starting unit easily worked its way up the field and scored a touchdown on their opening drive against the Pittsburgh Steelers last week.

The Jets drafted tight ends in the second round (Mason Taylor in 2025) and first round (Kenyon Sadiq in 2026) the last two years, so expect more 12 personnel. Sadiq can line up all over the field, including in the backfield, and he will. Same for first-round rookie receiver Omar Cooper Jr., at his best in the open field with the ball in his hands; he and Williams will be used plenty on gadget plays out of the backfield. Hall is one of the most explosive backs in the NFL, with the ability to make an impact as a pass catcher — something past offensive coordinators failed to utilize. Mitchell is an outside receiver who routinely uses his speed and athleticism to get down the field, and he’s looked like a compelling complement to the Jets’ No. 1 wide receiver.

And that’s Wilson, who had three straight 1,000-yard seasons before injuries cost him most of last year.

“This is one of the offenses I’m going to look back on in a few years and love the most,” Wilson says. “I’m excited to go bring all his thoughts and dreams to life.”