Every Jets coaching search starts the same way. Find the next hot coordinator before anyone else does. Find the next Ben Johnson, the next Liam Coen. It sounds smart. It isn’t.
The Jets are 2-5, Aaron Glenn is 5-19, and the team has three first-round picks and well over $100 million in cap space coming in 2027. This is the most important hire the franchise has made in a decade, and the worst thing they can do is treat it like a lottery ticket.
Here’s the problem with chasing the next star coordinator:
you only know who he is after it works. Coen had one year as an offensive coordinator in Tampa when Jacksonville took him. Johnson spent a cycle turning down jobs before Chicago landed him. Both look like geniuses now. Jacksonville went 13-4 last year and Chicago took the NFC’s No. 2 seed.
But at the time, plenty of teams passed on both, and plenty of other “next big things” went nowhere. If you can’t clearly see who that guy is by now, you’re guessing. Guessing on your head coach in the same offseason you draft your franchise quarterback is the definition of stupid risk.
So stop guessing, and shrink the job down to the one thing that actually matters: building a quarterback. Not culture. Not a defensive identity. Not a big name who wins ten games around whoever’s under center.
The 2027 quarterback is the franchise for the next decade, and the head coach’s job description should start and end with him. The rest of the roster, the line, the secondary, the depth, Darren Mougey has already shown he can fix with picks and cap space.
The good news is that QB development is the one thing you can actually check. Shane Steichen called the plays for Justin Herbert’s Rookie of the Year season, for Jalen Hurts’ 2022 jump to MVP runner-up, and for Daniel Jones’ revival in Indianapolis, where Jones was an MVP candidate at 8-2. Dan Pitcher has been in the room with Joe Burrow every day of Burrow’s career.
And in college, nobody has a better eye and hand for quarterbacks than Oklahoma State’s Eric Morris. He was Mahomes’ offensive coordinator at Texas Tech, and he found Cam Ward as a zero-star recruit at Incarnate Word and coached him at two schools on his way to becoming the No. 1 overall pick. Now he’s done it again with Drew Mestemaker, a kid who never took a varsity snap at quarterback in high school and is now the top QB on a lot of 2027 boards after developing at lightning speed.
Those aren’t projections, they’re track records. You can argue about clock management or a head coaching record, and you should hire around those weaknesses, but you’re not guessing about what these guys do best.
And here’s what the hot-coordinator crowd misses: get the quarterback right and the next Ben Johnson comes to you. Coaches chase quarterbacks. The Chargers had Justin Herbert, and when their job opened, Jim Harbaugh took it.
A Jets team with a young franchise quarterback on a rookie deal, a stacked draft haul and a GM who knows how to build assets becomes one of the best jobs in football the next time it opens. That’s how you land a star coach: you build the thing star coaches want to coach.
The Jets have tried it the other way. They’ve chased the hot name, the culture guy and the defensive mind, and they’ve started over with a new quarterback again and again.
This time, flip the order. Hire the coach who builds quarterbacks, draft the quarterback, and let everything else follow. Get that right, and the Jets won’t be hunting for the next Ben Johnson. He’ll be calling them.
