They say the NFL is a “What have you done for me lately?” league.
Aaron Glenn is learning that lesson quicker than his team blowing a fourth-quarter lead.
The rookie head coach spent nearly eight months building tremendous goodwill with the New York Jets’ fanbase, only for all of it to evaporate in a matter of six weeks. The man pegged as the Jets’ potential savior at the start of last month is already listed with the second-shortest odds to be the next NFL head coach who loses his job.
It leaves Jets fans sitting on a strange bubble… one that is bound to pop soon.
Jets fans’ complex predicament
Entering the 2025 season, there was no talk of Glenn potentially facing pressure to prove why he should stick around in 2026. That’s because the Jets’ expectations were so low that it seemed unlikely for Glenn to fall beneath them.
New York won five games in 2024 and has missed the playoffs in 14 consecutive seasons. The organization took a conservative roster-building approach in the 2025 offseason and settled on a starting quarterback with a 14-30 career record. Ultimately, the Jets’ over-under coming into the season was set at 6.5 wins, per Pro Football Reference.
Suffice to say, the Jets weren’t expected to win many games this year. The goal was for New York to show positive habits that could set the foundation for sustainable winning over the long haul. If the team stayed competitive on a weekly basis and Glenn displayed a solid plan for the franchise, most fans were prepared to label the season a success regardless of the win-loss record.
Six weeks in, the Jets are nowhere close to meeting those low expectations. The winless record is part of the equation, but New York’s troubles go much deeper than the standings. The Jets have been mostly uncompetitive throughout their six-game body of work, and Glenn looks as incompetent as any head coach in the sad history of a franchise that has employed 19 head coaches with a sub-.500 record.
With Glenn performing so poorly that his job is already on the line before Halloween, Jets fans are left wondering what they should really be rooting for over the next 11 games.
For now, there is still enough time for Glenn to turn the 2025 season into a success. There are 11 of 17 football games left to be played. If the Jets play substantially better over the next 11 games, this campaign can still go down as one that meets New York’s pre-season goals.
It’s hard for fans to realistically expect such a turnaround given how the team has played so far. Still, as unlikely as it may be, it would certainly be the best-case scenario for Glenn and the Jets to forge a marvelous turnaround that inspires legitimate optimism going into 2026. This is what fans should be rooting for going into the Jets’ Week 7 game against Carolina.
But how much longer will it be until that isn’t the Jets’ best-case scenario for the future?
Glenn has already dug himself into a deep hole. He is trying to do something that only four coaches have done over the past 45 years: Start a tenure 0-6 and eventually lead that same team to the playoffs. It’s been pulled off by a measly 26% of the coaches to start 0-6 with a new team since 1980 (four of 17).
We can safely assume that, as we sit here today, Glenn’s odds of eventually leading the Jets to the playoffs are no higher than 26% at the absolute most. This means he has a lot of work to do over the next 11 games to raise his implied odds of future success up to 50-50.
So, if Glenn doesn’t start rapidly improving as soon as these next couple of games… it might be best for the bottom to fall out completely.
The Jets cannot afford to risk a Brian Callahan scenario.
Earlier this week, the Tennessee Titans fired head coach Brian Callahan just six games into his second season with the team. It leaves rookie quarterback Cam Ward, the first overall pick in this year’s draft, playing for his second coach in as many months as an NFL starter. In all likelihood, he will have a third coach by the start of his second season.
If the Titans were so low on Callahan entering the 2025 season that it took only six games to fire him, they should have cut bait after the 2024 season and hired a fresh coach who would be given time to grow alongside the young quarterback. Instead, their unwillingness to be proactive has derailed Ward’s development. The Titans’ choice to be “patient” may have set their franchise back for years.
Jets fans are familiar with the dangers of putting a talented young quarterback through the coaching carousel.
In 2018, New York drafted Sam Darnold to play under a lame-duck defensive head coach in Todd Bowles. Given that Bowles was entering his fourth year with the team and had yet to make the playoffs, he was far from safe going into Darnold’s rookie year.
Bowles was ultimately fired after a 4-12 campaign in Darnold’s rookie year, which led to the hire of Darnold’s second head coach in two seasons, Adam Gase. The Jets also fired general manager Mike Maccagnan in 2019, but not before allowing him to oversee free agency and the draft.
Amidst a revolving door of coaching and front office changes, Darnold struggled to get comfortable throughout his three tumultuous years in New York. As a result of their instability, the Jets failed to get the most out of a talented quarterback who currently leads the NFL in net yards per pass attempt.
We’re on the verge of that happening again.
The Jets are nearly guaranteed to draft a rookie quarterback in 2026. Justin Fields is not the answer, and the Jets will likely have a high pick in the draft.
A rookie quarterback is coming.
Does Woody Johnson really want Aaron Glenn to be the guy responsible for that rookie quarterback’s development?
As of now, that answer should be a resounding no. That can change by January if Glenn uses the next 11 games to improve his stock dramatically, but as we discussed, he has an extremely deep hole to climb out of.
If Glenn does not perform immensely better over the next 11 games, and the Jets still bring him back, they will put themselves in grave danger of repeating the Darnold scenario.
Glenn, a defensive head coach coming off a poor debut season, will enter Francisco Mendoza’s (we’ll just use his name as a placeholder) rookie season on the hot seat. Barring shocking improvement, Glenn will be fired either midway through 2026 (like Callahan) or after the season (like Bowles). Either way, it will leave Mendoza playing for his second head coach in 2027.
And thus, the Jets’ perpetual cycle of misery continues.
Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson: What do these MVP quarterbacks all have in common?
They’ve each played for one head coach in their NFL careers.
Would Josh Allen be the Josh Allen we know today if the Bills put him through a revolving door of coaches at the start of his career? What about Jackson or Mahomes?
When they were drafted, these guys weren’t the “generational talents” we’ve come to know them as. Allen and Jackson were the third and fifth quarterbacks chosen in the 2018 draft class, respectively. Mahomes was chosen 10th overall in 2017, the second quarterback after Mitch Trubisky, while wide receivers Corey Davis, Mike Williams, and John Ross were taken over him.
It was widely agreed that these three quarterback prospects had lofty ceilings thanks to their unique gifts, but due to their unorthodox mechanics and reckless play styles, they were perceived to have relatively low chances of hitting those ceilings. This is why they fell in the draft; ample time and meticulous attention were figured to be necessary for any of them to pan out.
As it turns out, organizational stability was integral to ensuring these high-ceiling quarterback prospects were properly developed.
The Jets’ long-standing woes at quarterback aren’t solely due to picking the wrong guys; they haven’t created favorable environments for quarterbacks to succeed.
And if they allow Glenn to dupe them into giving him a lame-duck season in 2026, they will be punching themselves a one-way ticket to ruining another young quarterback.
That’s why Jets fans are on such a strange bubble going into Week 7.
Conceivably, it’s still early enough for Glenn to turn things around and put together the season that was promised. But it will take a lot for him to pull that off after what he has shown through six games.
So, if Glenn’s woes persist, at what point do Jets fans start hoping that the team flames out completely, making it obvious to Woody Johnson that Glenn must go?
The worst-case scenario for the Jets’ future goes something like this: After continuing to struggle through at least the end of November, Glenn picks up a handful of faux late-season victories to display so-called “progress,” convincing Johnson to run it back with Glenn despite his 17-game body of work overwhelmingly suggesting that he flat-out isn’t the guy.
Adam Gase picked up a bunch of misleading wins late in his 2019 debut season with the Jets: a one-point win over the tanking Dolphins, a six-point win over “Devlin Hodges,” and a seven-point win over a Bills team resting its starters in Week 17. Sandwiched between those were blowout losses to the Ravens and the 0-11 Bengals.
Without these faux wins, perhaps Johnson would have seen the light and gone one-and-done with Gase. It might not have solved everything, but there’s a chance Darnold could have been salvaged in 2020 with a better coach.
Johnson needs to learn from his past mistakes. The Jets might set their franchise back for years if they buy into meaningless December-January wins once again. With late games against the Dolphins, Saints, and a potentially resting Bills team, Glenn is set up to build a similarly misleading finish to Gase in 2019.
But who knows? If those wins are overwhelming blowouts, strengthening a convincing 11-game run that begins well before December, Glenn might be worth buying into. It isn’t as black-and-white as the Jets’ win-loss record and who they beat; it comes down to their overall quality of play (and the quality of Glenn’s coaching in areas he can control) over the next 11 games.
The Jets’ nightmare scenario involves them slumping to an uncompetitive 0-12 or 1-11 before barely beating the Dolphins, Saints, and resting Bills, tricking Johnson into buying in because “the Jets finished 3-2.” It wouldn’t be hard for logical observers to see the truth that lies beneath the win-loss record (Gase’s 2019 finish was obviously fake at the time), but team owners tend to make decisions based on surface-level results with little nuance, which is what makes this such a dangerous scenario for the Jets’ long-term prospects.
Whether it’s positive or negative, what Jets fans should be rooting for is an obvious conclusion. Glenn must either build a roaring finish like Kyle Shanahan in 2017 (who went 6-1 with four double-digit victories after an 0-9 start) or flame out and make it clear to Johnson that one-and-done is the only option. Those are the Jets’ best paths into the future.
As we sit here in Week 7, the Jets remain on the bubble. The possibility of a tantalizing finish remains afloat, and Jets fans should hope to see it from the coach who had a high approval rating just six weeks ago. But if things don’t change quickly, it won’t be long before the bubble pops, leaving fans hoping to avoid faux late-season progress that could doom the franchise’s future.
For an 0-6 team, the stakes are wildly high over the next few weeks.
