Coaching the New York Jets is a challenge like no other.
And Aaron Glenn is built for it.
You know the deal. No playoff appearances since 2010. Not even a .500+ season since 2015; every other NFL team has made the playoffs since then. No division title since 2002. No trip to the promised land since 1968.
When you’re facing a mountain that steep, it’s difficult to find someone with enough climbing experience to be trusted with the task of reaching the summit all the way from the foot. Glenn is the rare coach you can look at and say, “He’s ready for this,” when “this” entails rejuvenating a franchise with the longest playoff drought in American professional sports.
That’s because he’s already witnessed and contributed to multiple 180-degree turnarounds in his football career. From various different perspectives, Glenn has learned what it takes to pull something out of the basement and bring it to the roof.
Aaron Glenn: Built to orchestrate a turnaround
New York Jets (1994-2001)
Glenn’s first exposure to a meteoric turnaround came as a player with this very same organization.
After Glenn was selected by New York in the first round of the 1994 draft, the Jets missed the playoffs in each of his first three seasons. They had the worst record in the NFL over that span, going a miserable 10-38. That includes a record of 4-28 from 1995-96.
Glenn was one of the Jets’ few impressive players over this span. According to Pro Football Reference, he ranked fourth-best on the team with 19 AV (Approximate Value) from 1994-96. It placed him 20th among all NFL cornerbacks and third among corners who were under 25 years old entering 1997. He can relate to current young Jets players such as Sauce Gardner and Quinnen Williams, who have seen their early-career individual success go to waste on struggling teams.
Following a solid run in the early-to-mid 1980s, the Jets had become a laughingstock once again. Entering 1997, they had gone 10 consecutive seasons without winning a playoff game or having a season with more than eight wins.
Then “The Big Tuna” showed up.
Bill Parcells took over as the Jets’ head coach in 1997, and Glenn witnessed firsthand the blueprint for transforming a losing culture overnight. After going 1-15 in 1996, the Jets went 9-7 in 1997. They missed the playoffs, but they improved once more to 12-4 in 1998, which remains the best win total in franchise history. The Jets fell short in the AFC championship game, but the speed of the franchise’s turnaround was mesmerizing.
The Jets went .500 or better in each of Glenn’s final five seasons after he began his career with a 10-38 record. Glenn was one of the leaders of the turnaround, tying Wayne Chrebet for fourth-best on the team with 43 AV from 1997-2001. It placed him second-best among the team’s defensive players, trailing only Mo Lewis. As a veteran who was present before the turnaround and one of the team’s best players, Glenn’s role as a leadership figure was vital in the Jets’ resurgence.
Speaking on Jets X-Factor’s Underdog Jets Podcast the night of the hiring, Chrebet said of his former teammate, “He will get in your face. He’s as tough as they come. I got better, I think he got better going against each other every day.”
Glenn’s former partner in the Jets’ defensive backfield, Victor Green, recently said Glenn is “real” and that “a lot of coaches don’t have this mentality.” Green added that he believes Glenn “will hold everyone accountable.”
According to Eric Allen of the New York Jets’ website, Frank Ramos, who was the team’s head of PR throughout each of Glenn’s seasons with the team, had the following to say of the former cornerback:
“Aaron was one of the smartest players I can remember who ever played for the Jets. Coaches always talked about all the hours of film study he put in, which I think helped him have such a long career as a DB, especially so since he was only 5-9 and 183 pounds. But even at that size he was as tough as nails sticking his head in there and making tackles as well as being so quick and smart in his pass coverage. He was a leader and well liked by his teammates.”
While Parcells coached the Jets for just three seasons, his arrival set the foundation for a long-lasting cultural overhaul in New York. Over the 14 seasons from 1997 to 2010, the Jets made seven playoff appearances, won six playoff games, made three AFC championship appearances, and finished below .500 only three times.
It all started with the arrival of Parcells, despite being directly preceded by a one-win year. He immediately altered the standards and respectability of the entire operation, which is precisely what Glenn will seek to do as the Jets find themselves in a drought similar to the one Parcells inherited.
While it is easy for any optimistic Jets fan to claim that Glenn absorbed Parcells’ coaching wizardry simply by playing under him, things rarely work that way. However, when you hear Parcells himself proclaim that his former Pro Bowler is ready for what lies ahead, you know that Glenn was watching the Hall of Famer closely.
At age 83, you don’t hear much from Parcells in the media these days, but he made it a point to voice his thoughts on Glenn’s hiring as soon as the news dropped, which speaks volumes.
“I know he’s done an awful lot of diligent work to prepare himself to be a pro coach,” said Parcells of Glenn, per ESPN’s Rich Cimini. “He worked hard over the years. He started in scouting, which is a very good place to start, and learned about personnel acquisition, prototypes and things like that. He knows all that.
“I think Aaron is going to be himself. He’s very straight forward. He’s a very candid guy. I don’t think that will be a problem, I really don’t. I think he’ll just be Aaron Glenn, and I think that will be fine. He’s a very honest, principled guy. I have a high regard for him, I really do.”
New Orleans Saints (2016-20)
Following two years in Cleveland as an assistant defensive backs coach, Glenn was hired as the New Orleans Saints’ defensive backs coach in 2016.
“Defensive backs coach” might not seem like much when you read it on a resume, but this was a vital hire for New Orleans at the time. For his first-ever role as the leading positional coach of a unit, Glenn was handed one of the most challenging jobs of any assistant coach in the NFL.
The year before Glenn arrived, New Orleans ranked last in the NFL in pass defense DVOA (per FTN Fantasy). The 2015 Saints defense allowed the league’s most points per game, most passing touchdowns, and highest passer rating. Their opponents threw for 45 touchdowns and a 116.2 passer rating – both remain all-time NFL records. It was and still is, quite simply, one of the worst pass defenses in NFL history.
Inheriting such a unit would be daunting to many coaches, but not for Glenn. This was nothing to a man who had already proven it was possible to go from 4-28 to the AFC championship game in two years.
The Saints crept up to 28th in pass defense DVOA in 2016, cutting their opponent passing touchdown total all the way down to 27 (20th in the league). From there, New Orleans’ secondary emerged as one of the NFL’s best. The Saints ranked top-10 in pass defense DVOA in each of Glenn’s final four seasons with the team (2017-20), while also tying for second in the league with 63 interceptions over that span.
While it is easy to attribute a unit’s success to its position coach, it is not always that simple. Sometimes, players are just talented, and the coach is merely along for the ride. In this case, though, Glenn undoubtedly deserves credit for his role in facilitating the unit’s development.
New Orleans’ improvement in the secondary was mostly led by the emergence of four young players who were drafted during Glenn’s tenure: Marshon Lattimore (2017), Marcus Williams (2017), Vonn Bell (2016), and C.J. Gardner-Johnson (2019). Lattimore is the only member of that group who was a first-round pick.
Glenn deserves immense credit for helping the Saints hit on so many young defensive backs during a time when they badly needed to. Give the front office credit for identifying and selecting the right players, but a team does not find such consistent success at drafting one position without the coaching being phenomenal.
Earning head coaching interviews without any experience as a coordinator is an extremely difficult thing to do – especially from the defensive side of the ball. But Glenn pulled it off, landing a head coaching interview with the Jets during the 2021 cycle. It speaks volumes to the impact that he made on the people around him in New Orleans.
Veteran quarterback Teddy Bridgewater, who shared time with Glenn in New Orleans and recently reunited with him in Detroit, spoke this past December about his respect for Glenn.
“I think a lot of people don’t understand the relationship that Dan and I have, and A.G. and I have. It all goes back to our New Orleans days,” Bridgewater said. “It goes beyond football. I watched the way those two — the way Dan prepared the tight end room when we were in New Orleans, the way A.G. was with the defensive backs. And I watched the way those guys grew in their system, from the tight ends to the defensive backs. Marcus Williams, Vonn Bell, Marshon Lattimore and those guys and then just following those guys journeys, and knowing the impact that A.G. and Dan had on those guys. These are two men that I can look up to. I’m 32 years old, I’m not too old to look up to someone. And what two better guys to idolize?”
Current Broncos head coach Sean Payton, who was the Saints’ head coach during Glenn’s time there, took to social media to praise New York’s hire. This is quite noteworthy considering Payton did not hesitate to call Nathaniel Hackett’s coaching job in Denver “one of the worst in the history of the NFL” while Hackett was the Jets’ offensive coordinator.
It is also the only post that Payton has made to his X account since the 2024 season started. Alongside Parcells’ comments, it speaks to Glenn’s character that his former bosses – Super Bowl-winning bosses, no less – are so eager to speak up about how highly they regard him.
Detroit Lions (2021-24)
Glenn was hired as the Detroit Lions’ defensive coordinator in 2021. Once again, he was challenged with starting from the absolute bottom of the barrel.
Detroit earned the defensive Triple Frown in 2020, ranking 32nd in all three of defensive DVOA, points per game allowed, and yards per game allowed. It was just the latest miserable year for a franchise with a long-standing culture of abysmal defensive play; from 2000 to 2020, Detroit allowed the most points of any franchise in the NFL (8,396).
Little by little, Glenn guided the Lions in the right direction. They improved their defensive DVOA in each of his four seasons, rising to 29th, 27th, 13th, and then fifth in 2024.
No, those first two seasons aren’t anything to write home about, but it is crucial to understand where Glenn was starting from. This was the worst defense in the NFL – not to mention, within a franchise that had spent the last two decades struggling to establish an identity on defense. Glenn was tasked with exorcising 20-plus years of defensive demons. That does not happen overnight.
Taking a look back at the 2021 Lions roster, it is unfathomable how little Glenn had to work with when he arrived in Detroit. Starting with the pass rush, the Lions had one player who ranked top 100 in the league in quarterback hits: Charles Harris, who is now on the Eagles’ practice squad. As for the secondary, there was only one player in the top 75 of passes defended, Amani Oruwariye, who is now a backup for the Cowboys.
The Lions maintained their faith in Glenn and gave him time to turn things around, and he rewarded their patience once the talent in the building became viable.
Detroit’s defense was elite in 2024. Not only did they rank fifth-best in defensive DVOA (only the franchise’s third top-five finish since the stat was first tracked in 1981), but they were incredibly clutch in pivotal situations. The Lions allowed the NFL’s lowest third-down conversion rate (32.4%) and second-lowest fourth-down conversion rate (41.4%).
Furthering the impressiveness of Glenn’s 2024 success was the adversity he faced. Detroit finished the regular season with 12 defensive players on injured reserve. That includes their two best defensive linemen, Aiden Hutchinson and Alim McNeill, and their best cornerback, Carlton Davis.
“Aaron Glenn is — he’s as good a coach as you’re going to find,” said Lions head coach Dan Campbell just over two weeks ago. “He’s an even better human being. If nobody wants him, I’ll take him again. The thought of him going through another cycle and he’s not somebody’s head coach is ridiculous. This guy’s as good as they come. He can do it all. He understands how to manage a game. He understands offense, defense, special teams. He knows how to communicate. He understands discipline of players. And he’s motivated, he’s inspiring. I don’t want to lose him, but I also root for the guy because I think he’s a hell of a coach.”
After admirably fighting through the injuries for weeks – including allowing 9 points in a Week 18 clash against Minnesota for the NFC’s top seed – the camel’s back finally broke in Detroit’s playoff loss to a surging Washington team. That should not take away from the four-year body of work that Glenn put together in Detroit. He inherited a league-worst defense within a franchise that was allergic to defense, and in due time, he transformed it into one of the league’s best units, even in the face of adversity.
And for Aaron Glenn, it was just another day at the office. From his time in pads as a Jet, to his time coaching up young DBs in New Orleans, to his time calling plays in Detroit, Glenn is accustomed to starting from the lowest point imaginable. Reversing the irreversible isn’t a challenge for him – it’s the expectation.
For that reason, nobody is more prepared to be the head coach of the New York Jets.
