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FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — Anyone who does a decent amount of public speaking winds up having a verbal crutch. Not necessarily “like” or “um,” but sometimes a phrase, a few words, to bridge one thought to the next.
Aaron Glenn has one. The New York Jets head coach has a habit of saying some form of: “what I do know is … ” Sometimes there’s a variation — “here’s what I know,” or “I just know this” — but the meaning is the same: acknowledging the unknown while making a declarative statement about what is certain.
There is, of course, plenty Glenn does know. A couple years in scouting and 11 more as an assistant coach, including four as a defensive coordinator — not to mention the decade-and-a-half as a player — prepared him to be a head coach.
There is also plenty that Glenn learned last year. His Jets limped to a 3-14 record in a season of unprecedented feats of futility. He started three quarterbacks who won’t start anywhere to begin this season. Glenn grabbed 41 interceptions across his 15-year playing career, but the defense he coached couldn’t secure a single one. He sparred, often unnecessarily, with the media. After the season ended, it took him two weeks to decide to fire half the coaching staff he’d hired less than a year earlier.
Despite all of that, in a rare sit-down interview, Glenn swears that his vision for this team hasn’t changed.
“There’s a number of coaches that have (early success), but, man, it just takes time,” Glenn tells The Athletic. “And you know what, Ben Johnson hit it. He did a good job this first year. Liam Coen did a great job.
“Listen, I just know this, I want to build this to where it’s sustainable, and where we will always put ourselves in a chance to win every year, and that takes time.”
In other words: Glenn sees what’s coming for the Jets. He knows what’s coming.
Some mistakes weren’t fully within Glenn’s control. He won’t say this, but it can’t be ignored: Coen, in Jacksonville, and Johnson, in Chicago, inherited recent No. 1 draft picks at quarterback. When Glenn arrived in Florham Park, there was no potential franchise quarterback in place.
In 2024, Justin Fields went 4-2 as a starter in Pittsburgh before losing his job to Russell Wilson. Looking over the options in free agency and the draft, the Jets chose to bring him in last season. Glenn was part of the brain trust that made the move, in part because of Fields’ success with the Bears against Glenn’s Detroit Lions defenses.
It turned out Fields was bad in a way that can’t be captured by traditional box-score metrics. His passer rating was a palatable 89.5; he had seven touchdowns to just one interception, but he failed to put the Jets in position to win games. His EPA/dropback through Week 11 — the final time he played — was negative-0.07, tied for 28th in the league.
“I’m not here to make any excuses like that,” Glenn says when confronted with the reality of Fields’ season.
Owner Woody Johnson did say it last October. Even coaches who were let go in a January purge will say it now. “We’re in London, and we hold Denver to 13 points, and we can’t win that game,” said one former Jets coach who, like two others in this story, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a team they no longer work for. “Get 10 yards to get a field goal, and we win the game. Come back the next week, (allow) 13 points against the Panthers and can’t win that game.
“If we get down a TD or two, the game is over. We don’t have that capacity to come back.”
Glenn had his role in the offense’s struggles. He committed several game-management miscues, most notably packing up toward the end of the first half against Denver instead of attempting a Hail Mary. Because he felt like the Jets had a good running game with Fields as a dual-threat quarterback, Glenn pushed the envelope on fourth downs. Only three teams in the previous decade went for it on fourth down more often than the 2025 Jets did — they succeeded on 18 of their 41 tries.
The Jets’ 0-7 start ensured they’d consider selling at the trade deadline — if the price was right. That was the case with their two best defensive players: defensive tackle Quinnen Williams was sent to Dallas, and GM Darren Mougey accepted the Colts’ Godfather offer for cornerback Sauce Gardner. Mougey secured three future first-round picks and then some to help build Glenn’s vision for this roster, but in turn made a talent-deficit team even weaker in the short-term.
The defense, infamously, never intercepted a pass, the first team in recorded NFL history with that distinction. The embarrassment was even more tightly packed into the season’s final month, when the Jets became the first team in NFL history to lose five straight games by 23 or more points in a single season.
“Worst football experience I have had,” a second former coach says of that final stretch.
Others who endured it were forgiving of Glenn’s role.
“The team that A.G. took over, they were a five-win team, and we got rid of all the best players,” says a third fired coach. “I’m not saying those weren’t the right decisions. You had an old roster, but you’ve got to be realistic and live with the consequences.
“He had a good plan as a first-year head coach. There were a lot of other factors. I don’t have anything against A.G. I think he was stuck in a tough situation.”
Adam Hunger / Associated Press
There were also the mistakes that Glenn can do nothing but own.
Defensive coordinator Steve Wilks was the first coach voted off the island. Glenn regularly referenced how Dan Campbell kept him as the Lions defensive coordinator when everyone wanted him fired during a trying first season in Detroit. Glenn was planning to stick by Wilks, too. That changed in mid-December after the defense allowed 48 points in Jacksonville.
Wilks was the first of more than 10 coaches who wouldn’t get a second year on Glenn’s staff, many of whom believed they were staying for 2026 until the tide turned two weeks into the offseason. Among them, offensive coordinator Tanner Engstrand opted against taking what was effectively a demotion, with play-calling duties going to a more veteran coach (eventually, Frank Reich), and left, too. Several fired coaches tell The Athletic they believe Woody Johnson motivated many of the firings. Two Jets front-office sources, on condition of anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak publicly, deny that, and Glenn has owned the decisions publicly.
A staff retooling of this size is uncommon after a rookie season. For years, Glenn prepared to be a head coach, and for the previous two years he had garnered several head-coaching interviews, where building a proposed staff is a common exercise. If you take him at his word — that these firings were his decision alone — then a self-scouting of where and why he got it so wrong is necessary.
“Absolutely, man. I kick myself in the ass for that,” Glenn says. He sighs, then pauses for six seconds. “When you have a vision for something, and as you execute it — sometimes you got to pivot. And I think the toughest people, just in general, are the ones that are not afraid to pivot and not afraid of what anybody else will say on the outside. Because if you don’t pivot, you crash and burn.”
An hour before this interview takes place, Glenn holds a post-practice news conference. He smiles at the podium, welcomes two national reporters in the crowd and then gives injury updates on players even though he’s not obligated to do so. Veteran cornerback Brandon Stephens got banged up toward the end of practice, and he forgot to mention him, but he promises the beat reporter who asked that he’ll get him an update when he has one.
Glenn is talking with his hands. He’s charming and agreeable. “That’s a really good question,” he tells another beat reporter who asked about training-camp energy.
There’s evidence that this version of Glenn is closer to the real thing than the one who suited up in full battle armor every time he stepped behind the podium. (Adam Hunger / Getty Images)
If you saw any of Glenn’s news conferences last year, watching this unfold will make you wonder: Who is this guy?
When the Jets were 0-6 and Fields was one of the worst starting quarterbacks in the league last year, Glenn rebuffed a question when asked if he’d be benched. “What kind of question is that?” Glenn said. “Come on, you know better than that.”
A few days later, as it was clear Fields would continue as the starter, a reporter asked Glenn about Fields’ lack of shots down the field.
“If something bad happens, you guys are going to be b—-ing about that,” the coach said.
He would battle with reporters over injury updates and his starting quarterback. People who knew Glenn in Detroit and New Orleans wondered what had gotten into him. His staff did, too.
“Everything with the media, I used to cringe,” one ex-Jets coach says. “First year, we’re not Belichick here. I just felt like he was arrogant — and I don’t want to say that word — but he knew ball more than everybody else.”
It’s a question many have wanted to ask Glenn for nearly a year. Do you think you spent a little too much energy on battling with the media?
“Absolutely. Absolutely,” Glenn says. “Another mistake. Because I came in and I was already pissed at something else, had nothing to do with the media. And then I started to think, man, take it out, these guys and gals, and for what? They had nothing to do with this here. That was a mistake.
“I think, like right now, I think people are getting a real version of who I am.”
A cynic could look at a hot-seat head coach presenting a kinder, gentler version of himself publicly as a low-cost effort to curry favor with anyone who has a pen and a notebook (or a phone and a significant social-media following). But there’s evidence that this version of Glenn is closer to the real thing than the one who suited up in full battle armor every time he stepped behind the podium.
Says another of the fired coaches: “I know the way he acted with the media — we never saw that. I don’t know why he decided to have that approach. That was confusing to me even at the time.”
If and when the Jets lose a couple games, we’ll see if Training Camp Aaron Glenn remains.
“I have an edge, and that’s not going anywhere,” Glenn says. “That’s just who I am, but it was one thing I wanted to make sure that I can make guys get to know who I am.
“As a head coach, learn these things, you nip them in the bud and you move on, you know. You pivot. I think you have to.”
For all the mistakes and miscues of last season, here’s what Glenn knows: He has more of his guys this year.
That’s not to say the 2025 Jets weren’t his, but every new regime needs time to craft the roster the way it wants. Getting Geno Smith at quarterback should help the team with more explosive plays. This offseason, the Jets inked Demario Davis and David Onyemata, both of whom overlapped with Glenn in New Orleans.
Evan Bernstein / Getty Images
Safety Dane Belton, who has some positional flexibility on the backend, is someone Glenn wanted — and Belton wanted Glenn.
“Coming into it, I knew what kind of coach he was. Very passionate, very gritty,” Belton says. “Talking to guys that I knew who played under him as a coach and just understanding how he is and the things he expects, coming in, that’s only been magnified. That’s what I got from other players, and that’s what I’m seeing now. I love it. That’s the type of coach I want — someone who’s passionate about it. He’s in the defensive room, obviously, and personifying what he wants to see in this defense and how he wants to go about it.”
Glenn hired Reich and Brian Duker as his offensive and defensive coordinators, respectively. Glenn and Reich were teammates three decades ago with the Jets, and Glenn wanted a veteran presence at that position as opposed to the first-timer, Engstrand, he had a year ago.
Duker and Glenn first worked together a decade ago in Cleveland, and in many ways the young DC is an extension of the head coach. That is, again, different from last year; Glenn knew Wilks but had never worked with him before.
The DC switch also means that Glenn will be calling the defense. While some returning NFL head coaches, like Dave Canales in Carolina and Sean Payton in Denver, ceded play-calling duties last offseason, Glenn is the only one to add that responsibility from last year to this one. He is spending this training camp balancing this new role, but he will be learning on the job again during the regular season.
Nowhere is the rub more evident for Glenn than in these camp practices. As a defensive guy, he wants to get the better of the offense. As the head coach, that’s not always a good thing. He wants to be “pissed off” after each training camp practice, because that means one unit won the day and the other gets an opportunity to grow from its mistakes.
“I’ll tell the guys we never have a loser. We only have a winner. We have a winner, and we have a learner.
“And hopefully the learner comes back and corrects his mistakes, comes back and wins the next day.”
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