Tom Rock: Aaron Glenn fumbled Jets' chance to start season 2-0 with questionable decisions
Jets coach Aaron Glenn made some questionable decisions in Sunday's overtime loss to the Packers that cost his team a chance of starting the season 2-0. Credit: Jim McIsaac
With a little over a minute left in regulation and the score tied at 17, Jets safety Dane Belton came up and made a third-down tackle on Christian Watson that should have given his team the ball back with a chance to win the game. The short completion left the Packers facing fourth-and-5 from the Jets’ 45, too far to attempt a field goal and too dangerous to try to convert. They were going to have to punt.
Only they never did.
The Packers were able to run 1:02 off the clock and send the game into overtime because Aaron Glenn did not call a timeout that he later said he did not consider using. He had two remaining at that point.
“It was weird,” Belton told Newsday of that sequence in which the Packers would eventually outmaneuver the Jets by taking a delay-of-game penalty with 21 seconds left along with a 10-second runoff and then scrambling off the final seconds of play in the fourth quarter. “Obviously it’s a situation that doesn’t happen a lot. We came off the field and the whole time ran off with the penalty and everything. I guess it is what it is.”
Was Belton expecting the Jets to call timeout there? If not immediately after his tackle then at least while those precious seconds ticked away?
“For sure,” he said.
Of course he was. Because that’s what the Jets should have done. Maybe they block a punt. Perhaps the Packers shank the kick out of bounds. Even if they got the ball pinned deep in their own territory, they would have had at least 40 seconds and one timeout remaining to try to get into position to score. The way the Packers were committing penalties all game, they probably wouldn’t have even had to make actual plays to get there.
Glenn didn’t do that and the Jets wound up losing an eminently winnable game against the Packers in overtime, 20-17. After the game, the coach still seemed unsure exactly how that situation transpired, jumbling up the details as he attempted to explain it.
“I want to go back and really look at it to be honest with you,” Glenn said.
Eventually he landed on saying that “they could have put us in a backed-up situation there” with a punt.
Yes. But the Jets would have had the ball with time to play. What more can you ask for?
There were a number of reasons for this balloon-popping defeat, one that saw them blow a 10-point fourth-quarter lead with a chance to start a season with two straight wins for the first time since 2015, and Glenn outlined them succinctly afterward. He cited the high number of penalties, the inability to run the ball effectively, a defense that created four fumbles but recovered just one, and a normally reliable special teams unit that was sloppy and costly. All of that is accurate.
“I’m highly upset,” Glenn said. “It’s not OK.”
Yet it also was an overall performance that should have been good enough to win had Glenn had been able to steer them to victory. He did not. Somehow after the game he forgot to mention that element in his list.
The Jets have gotten so much better since last season when Glenn had little to work with. Back then it was completely fair to say he was being held back by his roster. This year — or this week at least, which currently represents 50% of the season — it was the other way around.
When the Jets face a perennial playoff team like the Packers and Geno Smith plays the way he did (27-for-41, 247 yards, one TD), and the offense does not commit a turnover and the defense plays the way it did (holding the Packers to 199 yards, just one third-down conversion, and 17 points through four quarters) they should expect to win.
Glenn cost them that victory.
Every coach makes hundreds of decisions each game and some work out and some don’t. Usually it comes down to execution. Everyone can live with that. When it comes down to flawed logic or oversights from the sideline, however, that’s the fastest way to lose a team.
Only two weeks into the season and it’s becoming obvious what the biggest obstacle to this team’s success is going to be. According to ESPN, the Jets were the first team on record (since 1941) to lose a game while holding an opponent to less than 200 yards of offense, having an opponent with 100 or more yards in penalties, and winning the turnover ratio.
Glenn is clearly an upgrade from what they had in terms of his defensive play-calling, but even after a year on the job he still lacks the astuteness and instincts to manage the game as an entirety. Whether he is getting bad advice in his headset, ignoring the good advice, or suffering from the kind of myopia that many former coordinators (especially from the defensive side) are victims of when they first become coaches, Glenn continues to demonstrate that he is not up for this task.
It’s not OK.
It wasn’t just the lack of a timeout that was costly. Glenn miscalculated at other critical junctures. Opting to receive the overtime kickoff given the relatively new rules that generally allow for two possessions in a 10-minute period will be dissected rabidly, but statistics show that call is pretty close to a coin-flip anyway. It’s the others that bit these Jets the most.
Glenn’s transgressions began at the end of the first half when the Jets got the ball with 4:00 remaining and ran 12 plays, including three third-down conversions but never had a serious chance to score points.
In the fourth quarter, after the Jets finally did recover a fumble and had the ball at the Packers’ 18 and then faced fourth-and-1 at the 9, Glenn futilely opted to try to draw them offsides (he called that a “no-brainer”), took a delay penalty and kicked a field goal to go ahead 17-7 with 11:04 remaining. A first down there and a possible touchdown likely would have cemented the game for them.
“Let’s take the points,“ he said of that call.
Fast-forward to the end of the fourth quarter and the Jets faced fourth-and-1, this time at midfield. Glenn tried to convert it — “In that situation, I want to go try to win the game,” he said, which is exactly what he should have been thinking on the earlier fourth down — but Braelon Allen did not get the yard. That gave the ball back to the Packers with 1:15 left.
Even after that disappointment, the Jets were on the verge of forcing a three-and-out while allowing barely 15 seconds to have elapsed when Belton made that tackle.
What did Glenn do? Nothing.
So after a game in which the Jets players and their fans had every right to expect to be celebrating a rousing win in the home opener with the entire season suddenly opened up in front of them and all kinds of possibilities to dream about, nothing turned out to be exactly what they got, too.
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.
