I couldn’t tell you the reason, but football tends to produce the most classic coach press conference rants than any other sport. On the college side, the undisputed king of press conference rants is the recently
fired Mike Gundy of Oklahoma State. In 2007 he famously yelled at a reporter, “I’m a man! I’m 40,” at a reporter who wrote an article he thought was unfair. On the pro side, coach rants are the stuff of legend. Famous rants include “You play to win the game,” from former Jets coach Herm Edwards, “Talk to the trainer! Next,” from Mike Ditka during his brief and unsuccessful run coaching the Saints, and. “The Bears are who we thought they were!” from Dennis Green.
The undisputed king of the NFL coach press conference rant is former Saints and Colts head coach Jim Mora. His greatest hits include but are not limited to, “Playoffs?!” “Diddly poo” and “People are sick.” If you ever find yourself down and in need of a laugh, find a YouTube video with a compilation of Mora’s greatest press conference meltdowns. Mora is best remembered for incredulously saying, “Playoffs?!” but if you watch the full press conference you’ll see Mora melted down to the point that, “Playoffs?!” arguably wasn’t even in the top three of hilarious moments in that very press conference.
Less remembered is a rant from then-Oakland Raiders head coach Bill Callahan in 2003. The Raiders had gone to the Super Bowl the previous year in Callahan’s first season. Callahan inherited John Gruden’s infrastructure. Oakland lost the Super Bowl to Gruden and the Buccaneers, and the season that followed was a disaster.
Callahan had a long and distinguished career as an assistant offensive coach in the NFL. This includes a four year stop in New York where he molded the Jets offensive line into one of the league’s finest and molded D’Brickashaw Ferguson into a Pro Bowl player. Ferguson’s career was so successful that people forget how shaky his first two seasons were before he received Callahan’s mentorship.
Callahan is a highly respected assistant and has been for decades. He was in over his head as a head coach, however.
He did provide us with that one press conference. I couldn’t stop but think of Callahan’s words when watching the Jets lose to the Miami Dolphins to fall to 0-4.
It’s one thing to be short on talent. The Jets started the season with some pretty glaring holes on their roster. They also began the year with virtually no depth anywhere. The team could not afford any injuries. Unfortunately the injury bug has struck often at the early stages of the 2025 season. This was naturally going to limit this team’s upside.
My hope was that a new coaching staff would lead to a hard nosed football team that maxed out its talent and gave opponents everything they could handle. I was hoping to see a smart, disciplined football team.
Was this too much to me for ask? Looking back, perhaps it was. The Jets roster is loaded with young players. Young players make dumb plays. It is also loaded with bad players. Bad players are bad in part because they make dumb plays.
Still it feels to me like the Jets are playing below their talent level right now. Even with the Jets’ personnel issues, a Jets team that played smart and disciplined football would likely be 2-2 right now and maybe even 3-1. That wouldn’t make the Jets a good team any more than their 4-3 start with Zach Wilson playing in quarterback made those Jets a good team. A fall would almost certainly come, and a paper thin roster would be exposed eventually. We at least could feel good about the team.
There isn’t much to feel good about with the current Jets team. I think the loss to Miami shows that currently the Jets are the worst team in the NFL. They went out there in Week 4 and lost pretty handily to a Dolphins team that had looked hopeless heading into this game. Much of that goes back to the Jets being a dumb football team.
If you watched this game, you saw that the Jets were actually pretty successful moving the ball on a terrible Miami defense. Drive after drive stalled, however, because of an error. It started on a Braelon Allen fumble that short circuited a physical drive where the Jets ran the ball at will. Time and again we saw a penalty or some other error bring ruin to a promising possession.
If the offense played well except for a handful of errors, I can’t say the same thing about the defense. A Miami offense that spent much of the first three weeks looking lifeless came to life as the Jets defense busted assignments, missed tackles, and committed penalties.
Capping a first half 96 yard touchdown drive, the Dolphins went for it on fourth and goal from the Jets’ 4 yard line. I had two thoughts when Miami kept its offense on the field. The first was that going for it would have made zero strategic sense for the Dolphins under most circumstances. The second was that I understood why they went for it here because I had no faith in the Jets to stop them. The Dolphins scored on a touchdown reception by Darren Waller. It was the first of two touchdown catches for Waller who previously had been out of football for a year.
In the second half on a De’Von Achane touchdown run, Tony Adams had the chance to make an open field tackle. I didn’t even need to watch to know the play would end with an Adams missed tackle and an Achane touchdown.
On special teams, you might remember the Jets cut Xavier Gipson after his costly Week 1 fumble against the Steelers. The team signed Isaiah Williams to take over as return man. Leave it to the Jets to find the one return guy in the NFL more useless than Gipson. Williams fumbled the opening kickoff of the second half away, one of three Jets lost fumbles on the night. Later in the game he inexplicably made a fair catch on a punt return on the 3 yard line.
To be the worst team in the NFL, it’s not enough to lack talent. You have to combine a lack of talent with an incredible dumb approach to the game and create a level of hopelessness for your fans. Whenever things are threatening to go well, you need to make an inexplicable major mistake at the worst possible time.
I’m far from ready to declare that Aaron Glenn is another Bill Callahan, a quality assistant in over his head in the top job. I don’t think that’s fair to Glenn, and I think that would miss the magnitude of the job Glenn must do. Glenn shouldn’t be one and done with this team. He also probably won’t be. He hasn’t lost the locker room, and the media likes him. Those are two prerequisites for a coach getting an early hook.
The good news for Glenn and the Jets are that the Playoffs were never the expectation. If this young team can make meaningful strides and start playing smarter football, wins will follow. If that happens, fans can still come away from the 2025 season feeling good. It probably sounds crazy to say, but it’s true.
Perhaps the Jets won’t be the NFL’s worst team at the end of the year. We can hope to see that sort of progress.
Four weeks into the season, however, the Jets are the worst team in the NFL. They’ve also drawn inspiration from the 2003 Raiders as the dumbest team in America.
