The Jets are 2-5 after losing to Miami 28-25, and Aaron Glenn is now 5-19 as a head coach. Four of the five losses came by a touchdown or less, which is exactly the kind of stat that keeps a coach employed and keeps a team losing. Meanwhile Darren Mougey has built the best war chest this franchise has had in years. Three first round picks in 2027, well over $100 million in projected cap space, a 2026 draft class that looks like it hit, and even Brandon Stephens, the corner everybody laughed at in March
2025, settling in as a solid starter. So the real question isn’t whether Glenn has been good enough. He hasn’t. It’s whether you can fire him without losing whatever is making this roster better.
There’s a real case that Glenn is part of the evaluation. He spent two years as a Jets scout after he retired, and he and Mougey were hired as a pair, which usually means a shared board. The popular version of the argument goes further. Glenn drives the draft, Mougey owns free agency, because pro scouting happens during the season while Glenn is busy coaching. That doesn’t hold up. College area scouts are on the road all fall too, and both the draft board and the free agent decisions get made in March and April, when the head coach is in the room for all of it. The honest answer is that nobody outside the building knows who’s hitting on these guys. Woody does, and that should be the first question in the end of year review.
So you have to compare the two ways this can go wrong. Fire Glenn, and it turns out he really was the evaluator. The drafts slip some, but the scouting staff, the picks and the cap space all stay, and you find out within a draft or two. Keep Glenn, and it turns out he’s just not a head coach. The quarterback they take in 2027 spends his first, most important years under a defensive coach with no track record developing one, and the Jets burn the most attractive head coaching opening they’ve had since Rex Ryan walked in. One mistake costs you a couple of drafts. The other costs you a quarterback. That’s not close. And if Mougey turns out to be a lesser GM without Glenn, the timelines actually work in the Jets’ favor. A young quarterback is tied to his head coach and his system, not the guy who drafted him, so you can replace a GM in year two or three without touching the QB’s development. Replace the coach and you start the kid over. The one real exposure is the 2027 pick itself, which could be Mougey’s first big call without Glenn, so that quarterback has to be the new coach’s pick as much as the GM’s.
Which brings up Mike Tomlin, the name a lot of people want. He stepped away from Pitts in January for what Art Rooney called mostly family reasons, and the Steelers still hold his rights so getting him costs picks on top of the money. The bigger problem is the quarterback. His ring came with Big Ben, whom Bill Cowher’s staff drafted three years before Tomlin got there. Every quarterback Tomlin had to find himself Pickett as a first rounder, Rudolph, Haskins didn’t stick, and his coordinator hires, Todd Haley, Matt Canada and Arthur Smith, aren’t exactly a QB factory. The fair counter is that he never picked in the top ten because he kept winning, but Jalen Hurts and Brock Purdy weren’t top ten picks either. Somebody developed them. Tomlin is a great culture coach for a team that already has its quarterback. The Jets are about to draft theirs.
The tempting move is to clean house, fire both, and go big game hunting for a coach and a GM. Don’t. A GM hired in late January gets about three months before he picks the franchise quarterback, off a board somebody else built, with scouts he doesn’t know yet, and he’ll probably bring in his own people and toss the work that built this war chest. The one constant through every Jets reset has been ownership, and two hires at once just doubles the bet on the part with the worst track record. Here’s the path. Let Glenn finish the season, because a midseason firing buys you nothing but an interim coach. Then make the change, keep Mougey with final say on the roster, and hire an offensive head coach whose whole résumé is developing quarterbacks. Hold on to the defensive assistants and the people who turned the secondary around, since that’s the part of Glenn’s tenure actually worth keeping, and if the review shows Glenn was the guy on the board, offer him a personnel role and see if he takes it. The pitch to candidates sells itself: picks, cap space, a rookie quarterback to shape, and a GM who has already proven he can stack assets. The Jets don’t have a talent problem anymore. They have a coaching problem, and for once they’re in position to fix it the right way.
