Tom Rock: Jets' Aaron Glenn and Geno Smith share a mutual bond
New York Jets head coach Aaron Glenn speaks to reporters at the AFC coaches breakfast on Tuesday in Phoenix. Credit: AP/Ross D. Franklin
PHOENIX — Aaron Glenn and Geno Smith wouldn’t seem to have much in common. One is a quarterback, the other comes from the world of defensive secondaries. One had a successful tenure as a promising Jets draft pick, the other, well, an infamously poor one. One hails from Texas, the other from Florida.
But there was an immediate attraction between the two feisty men when they started to talk about their careers, their lives, their legacies and their now entwined future. The doubts that they have had to overcome on their journeys, perceived or otherwise. The forces that drive them. Their mutual desire to not just prove critics wrong and quietly move on, but to do so with told-ya-so thunder.
“There is something about a quarterback with a chip on his shoulder,” Glenn said of what he likes most about his new quarterback . . . probably because it’s exactly the way he played as an undersized NFL cornerback and the way he goes through his life now as head coach of an organization that has not reached the postseason in 15 consecutive seasons.
Chip, it seems, recognizes chip.
“I think there is a synergy that draws us together when you have something like that,” Glenn said. “There is nothing better in this league than having players who have an edge . . . Man, it’s just a mentality. In this league it’s really about mindset for the most part.”
It’s also about winning. Producing.
Glenn and Smith now are in the quest for those long-missing elements of Jets football together, tethered to each other. And the thing about tethers is that both anchors and kites have them. Whichever way one of them goes, Smith and Glenn now seem destined to head arm-in-arm in the same direction.
Quarterback Geno Smith of the Jets celebrates against the Baltimore Ravens at MetLife Stadium on Oct. 23, 2016. Credit: Getty Images/Al Bello
Maybe Smith is, as Glenn said Tuesday at the NFL’s annual meeting, the “perfect guy to fit exactly what we want to do” and — perhaps with a bit of conscious delusion — the quarterback who “is going to lead us to the Promised Land.” More likely, though, his is not, and the Jets will remain where they have been for about as long as anyone alive can remember: in Empty Promise Land.
Glenn even had to chuckle at his own absurdity as he laid out a scenario where Smith, 35, becomes the team’s long-term answer to the half century-long quarterback issue that has plagued the Jets.
“He can go out there and throw for 4,000 yards with 30 touchdowns and no interceptions,” Glenn said while stifling a giggle, “and you think we’re just going to let him go?”
That doesn’t seem like something the Jets will have to truly worry about. The chances seem much higher that neither Glenn nor Smith is with the Jets in 2027 than that both are back. Smith is certainly a better option at the position than anything the Jets had at their disposal last season, but he probably isn’t close to having the potential of the kind of options the Jets should have next season.
If the Jets can land a young franchise quarterback on their roster acquired through the draft either this April or next, things will be going well for them. If they don’t, things will be heading in a very wrong direction.
Smith did play well during his several years in Seattle but he is coming off a terrible 2025 season with the Raiders in which he won two of his 15 starts, threw a league-high 17 interceptions and absorbed a career-high 55 sacks.
Still, Glenn laid out his reasons for hope in him, the ones that go beyond blind optimism.
“I do know this: He understands exactly what happened last year,” Glenn said. “I wasn’t there with the Raiders, but I do know that he knows there are some things he knows he needs to correct. There are some things he knows he is going to get better at.”
He said having Smith play behind the Jets’ offensive line — one of the better units in the game — will help. “I think he is going to do some damage because of his arm talent,” Glenn said of Smith if he is given time to find his targets.
He thinks Smith will mesh nicely with the Jets’ receivers, particularly Garrett Wilson and tight end Mason Taylor, in a way that the more timid Justin Fields never did with them last year.
“The one thing Geno does a really good job with is he gives his guys an opportunity,” Glenn said. “Sometimes you have guys like Garrett, he can be covered but he’s not covered because of the way he can contort his body and go up and catch the ball. I think he understands that very well and I think he is going to allow us to do that.”
Smith also has to overcome the baggage of his previous tenure with the Jets when he was a second-round pick who flamed out and left town viewed as an unpopular mistake. Glenn said the Jets considered that dynamic before bringing him back to the team a decade after he last threw a pass for them.
“I didn’t think it would be a detriment,” Glenn said. “Obviously there are some fans that probably didn’t like him, and I understand, but there are fans who did. Listen, he has a fresh start. I look forward to the way he is going to operate. I do. Because he really, really wants this. Just going through the process of getting a quarterback, that was something that stood out: He wants to be here. When you have guys who really want to be here, want to be Jets, that only makes it better.”
That’s another thing these two have in common, their clearly earnest if not fanciful desire to not only be with the Jets but to fix their ills.
Glenn got a little emotional when he was asked on Tuesday how often he thinks about getting the Jets to that “Promised Land” he referenced.
“There is no better feeling in the world than if you are down for a number of years and then you finally get over that hump,” he said. “I want to leave a legacy, I do. When I am gone I want to look at this team as a team that consistently puts itself in a position to win. So every day. There is not a day, not an hour, not a minute that I don’t think about that.”
Now he has a quarterback who at least appears to share that mindset with him.
It doesn’t mean they’ll succeed. But whatever they do now, it’ll be together.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
