At last!
It may have taken until after Mike Brown got his first two wins with the New York Knicks, but the New York Jets finally got Aaron Glenn his first win as an NFL head coach.
Sparked by three Breece Hall touchdowns in the fourth quarter, New York erased a 15-point second-half deficit, stunning the Cincinnati Bengals in a 39-38 shootout.
Sitting at 1-7 entering the bye week, the Jets’ playoff dreams are long gone. Still, any victories from here on out can serve as valuable building blocks for the organization’s future.
The catch, though, is that the Jets should be evaluated through the lens of long-term sustainability rather than merely “Ws” and “Ls.” New York’s fanbase needs reasons to be optimistic about the organization’s future. Whether the team wins or loses each week, its goal is to strengthen the foundation.
The Jets accomplished that in Cincinnati.
It may go down as a one-point win against a 3-5, Joe Flacco-led Bengals team, but Glenn and the Jets’ coaching staff showed growth in several areas. That’s a critical development for New York. We have seen multiple games this year where the coaches could be blamed for representing the difference in a close loss. This time, they tilted the game in the Jets’ favor.
For now, it’s just one game in a mostly dismal season, but if Glenn and the staff can sustain their progress in these areas, Jets fans might be able to enter the offseason feeling much better about where the franchise is headed.
Glenn, in particular, showed tremendous progress in the one area that is completely attributable to him: Game management.
Aaron Glenn’s management masterclass on the banks of the Ohio River
I have given Aaron Glenn quite a bit of flak for his game management this season. Credit is due for a savvy day of decision-making in Cincinnati.
Throughout all four quarters, Glenn consistently made aggressive choices that were smart given the context of the situation. It was a sign of growth after his first seven games featured a plethora of conservative choices in situations where going for it was ideal.
There’s a misconception among old-school thinkers that analytics say you should always be aggressive; that’s not true. Glenn has also made some suboptimal aggressive decisions this year. In this game, though, he consistently made choices that were aggressive, yet optimal.
It all comes down to context. Analytical models will advise field goals and punts, contrary to popular misconception. Sometimes, going for it is ideal, and sometimes, it’s not.
It’s up to the coach to consider all of the factors at play to make the choice that gives his team the best chance of winning—even if it entails overriding the analytics due to unmeasurable factors. Glenn largely struggled to do that over his first seven games, mostly due to being too conservative, but sometimes due to being too aggressive.
He flipped the script in Cincy.
Fourth down choices in the first half
Glenn set the tone early with a fourth-and-1 attempt from the Jets’ own 37-yard line on their opening drive, trailing 3-0. The attempt failed after Justin Fields apparently checked out of a sneak and into an outside run play, but Glenn made the right call to keep his offense on the field.
Early in the second quarter, the Jets faced fourth-and-1 at Cincinnati’s 28-yard line while trailing 10-0. The analytics offered a slight recommendation in favor of going for it, but it was close enough to be a toss-up. Glenn made the call to rely on his near-perfect kicker to take a goose egg off the scoreboard. This paid dividends in the end.
It’s worth noting that the above calculation is made with the assumption that New York’s 46-yard field goal attempt had a 77% chance of success, but the Jets have Nick Folk, who is 19 for 20 (95%) on 40-49-yard attempts over the last three seasons. This is the type of context that analytical models can overlook.
If we assume that the Jets’ odds of making that field goal were 95%, their expected win probability would have been identical whether they had gone for it or attempted the field goal. It’s up to the coach to consider these overlooked factors and not blindly follow the models. Good on Glenn for understanding that a red-hot kicker adds appeal to attempting field goals, and that his offense needed points on the board to reward its early ball-movement success.
Kicking that field goal, though, was Glenn’s final choice on the safe end. From there, he put on his Dan Campbell cap and started biting off kneecaps.
Cincinnati responded to Folk’s field goal with a touchdown in under 90 seconds. That turned up the urgency for Glenn.
With 5:23 left in the second quarter and New York trailing 17-3, the Jets faced fourth-and-2 at the Bengals’ 15-yard line. This decision was actually considered a near-even toss-up by the analytics.
However, given how easily Cincinnati was moving the ball to that point of the game, it was smart of Glenn to be aggressive, knowing his team could probably only win in shootout fashion. Glenn kept the offense on the field, and Justin Fields rewarded him with perhaps his best pass of the year, an absolute dime of a touchdown to Tyler Johnson against the blitz.
Once again, give Glenn credit for understanding the context of the situation. In a game where his defense was clearly overmatched (especially with no Sauce Gardner to stop Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins, which decreased optimism that the unit would improve throughout the game), Glenn understood that a field goal wouldn’t have been enough to keep up.
After Cincinnati responded with yet another touchdown, Glenn kept his foot on the gas pedal. When the Jets got the ball back down 24-10 with 1:15 remaining in the first half, Glenn showed growth from the ugly end-of-half sequences the team displayed in recent weeks.
Instead of conservatively running the ball with no sense of urgency, the Jets passed on 11 straight plays, driving the ball down to Cincinnati’s 7-yard line. They couldn’t punch it in, but the Jets showed proper urgency, allowing them to score a gimme field goal and prevent Cincinnati from getting the ball back.
Second-half two-point attempts
In the second half, the attention turned to Glenn’s two aggressive calls for two-point attempts. New York went two-for-two on those tries, so he looks like a genius due to the success, but let’s evaluate the process behind those calls.
With 14:17 left in the game, Breece Hall scored a five-yard touchdown to cut the lead to 31-22. Conventional wisdom says to kick an extra point to make it a one-score game.
New-school thinking has popularized the concept of going for two when down by nine in the fourth quarter. The idea is that you will have to get those two points eventually, so you might as well go for it as soon as possible. That way, you can give yourself information to dictate how you should approach the rest of the game. It decreases the consequences of failing the two-point attempt.
If you kick the extra point (cutting the lead to eight) and wait to go for two until the ensuing touchdown (looking to tie the score), you could fail the attempt and lose the game right there, leaving little to no hope for a comeback. Assuming the team was only down “one score” leading up to that touchdown, they may have slow-played their possessions due to the belief they only needed one score to extend the game, minimizing their own leeway to recover from potentially failing the two-pointer.
But if you fail the two-point attempt earlier, you can adjust your approach to remedy the failure. It leaves you with the knowledge that you still need two scores, allowing your team to play with urgency that it otherwise would not if it were down by one score and played for a potential game-tying touchdown requiring a two-point conversion.
Simply put, it was a proactive call by Glenn. The fact that it worked out makes him look good, but it was the right move regardless. At the very least, it was a toss-up, and given the game’s shootout nature, chasing the most points was logical.
Cincinnati responded with another touchdown to push the lead back up to 14. When the Jets fired back with a touchdown (7:52 on the clock), their previous two-point conversion gave them a chance to cut the lead to seven with a simple extra point.
But Glenn doubled down.
Looking to play for the win, Glenn went for two again. The goal was to position the Jets to win the game on their next touchdown (if they could get stops). The risk was that if they failed, New York would have to convert another two-point attempt just to tie the game.
However, the Jets’ success on the first two-point attempt bought Glenn leeway to be aggressive. Even if the Jets failed, they would still be within one score. And, given, how well they moved the ball all game, Glenn had to feel good about the Jets converting at least two out of three potential attempts.
The analytics slightly preferred going for it.
The main takeaway is not that Glenn “should” have gone for it, but that these decisions are often more of a toss-up than people realize. Fans will praise or chastise a coach based on the outcome, claiming they obviously should have done the opposite, but it often isn’t that obvious.
As clear as it may have seemed to kick an extra point in this situation, the potential reward of converting the two-point attempt was great enough to make it worth the risk of failing. That doesn’t make it the objectively better call, though; a 0.6% advantage in win probability is ultimately marginal. It’s up to the coach to break the relative tie by considering the context. Glenn did just that, sticking with the theme of chasing points in a shootout and trusting his offense, and he was rewarded.
New York converted the attempt on an Isaiah Davis reception, and as a result, they took the lead with an extra point on their next touchdown.
A step in the right direction
Glenn’s aggressiveness won’t always work out as perfectly as it did in this game. There will be times when he makes these types of calls, and the Jets lose as a result of their failure to convert in those situations.
But fans often forget that there are plenty of games where teams lose because they were not aggressive. Those instances just receive less attention because playing it safe is a less blatant form of losing points than going down swinging.
In the long run, Glenn will likely add more wins than he subtracts if he continues coaching the way he did in Cincy.
And it’s not always about being all-out aggressive. In this particular game, being aggressive made sense given the context of the situation. As you could see, the analytical models were not strongly pushing Glenn to make any of those attempts. He made those decisions using a combination of context and his gut, and he was rewarded for riding the game flow.
That is what Glenn must continue to do better: Feel out the game. It’s not as simple as him needing to go for more fourth downs or learning to blindly obey every decision recommended by a model. He just has to improve at understanding what’s happening and making optimal decisions based on the factors at hand.
In Cincinnati, he did that tremendously.
Glenn looks great right now because his choices resulted in a win, but I like to think that he would still deserve praise today if those decisions had failed and resulted in a loss. It’s about the process, not the results, because while the results may not always be what you want in a particular instance, a good process will lead to better results in the long run.
Now, it’s about stacking these performances. Glenn is a rookie coach, after all. Maybe it took him some time to figure out this whole “head coach” thing. It’s really easy for me to sit around on my computer calculating all these decisions, but do you know how long it took me to write this article? About an hour and 50 minutes. That’s 6,560 more seconds than Glenn has to make a decision between each play.
There’s credence to the idea that Glenn is starting to figure things out after going through rookie bumps. For now, though, this is a one-off in an otherwise rocky run. It’s up to Glenn to stockpile coaching performances like this one, win or lose.
If Glenn continues managing games like this over the final nine weeks, Jets fans can feel much better about his prospects as a head coach.
