Tom Rock: Enough from Aaron Glenn. Jets fans deserve to hear from Woody Johnson.
Jets owner Woody Johnson before the game against Miami at MetLife Stadium on Sunday. Credit: Ed Murray
The biggest news to come out of Aaron Glenn’s media availability on Monday morning was that Aaron Glenn held his media availability on Monday morning. It went off as previously scheduled. There was no sudden cancellation, no suspicious delay.
The morning after one of the most ominous losses of his tenure as head coach of the Jets, a home loss to the previously winless Dolphins that sapped nearly all public faith in his ability to do the job for which he was hired, he remained employed.
That wasn’t unexpected. The shock would have been if he was fired.
As we’ve litigated and iterated several times in the past few weeks, there are plenty of reasons why Glenn will likely remain with the Jets for the time being. The lack of viable in-house alternatives, the respect the organization has for him as a former player and person, and the team’s hesitation to make an in-season change for the second time in three seasons all tilt the odds toward Glenn being relieved of his duties later rather than sooner. He may even manage to squeeze a few more wins out of this gig before it all ends. That’s fine. We all know where this is going.
What isn’t OK any longer is that Glenn remains the highest-ranking public voice of the organization.
Right now, Glenn is the lamest of ducks. While he quack, quack, quacks about the issues regarding the Jets, gives his view that progress is being made, offers his weekly agreement that Garrett Wilson needs to be more involved in the offense while doing nothing about it, and relitigates his obviously lacking clock management skills, none of it matters. It’s because as far as the future of the Jets goes, Glenn doesn’t matter either.
The fans deserve more. They deserve to hear from someone who will be around when Glenn is not, who is going to have a hand in finding the team’s next direction after a series of failures in that pursuit, and can try to explain to them what has gone wrong and what needs to go right moving forward.
This current Jets crisis has reached the level of ownership, and it’s time we hear from Woody Johnson on it.
He’s made several public appearances recently where he had a chance to speak his mind, from the NFL meetings in Manhattan last week to his departure from the despondent locker room at MetLife Stadium on Sunday. At each of those he was guarded by a security detail in place to keep him from having to speak. But it’s important to remember that those blockers work for him. If he wanted to stop and say something, he would have.
We’ve reached the point where he should.
It’s unlikely to occur. We no longer live in an age when owners openly pontificate about the status of their team on a regular basis… unless of course you are the Dallas Cowboys or maybe the New York Mets. When they do, it rarely satisfies what fans want to hear anyway. Ask Hal Steinbrenner how the reviews of his press conference last week played out.
The last time Johnson spoke to reporters was a year ago when he expressed his faith in Glenn, lambasted Justin Fields and said he was glad to have Sauce Gardner with the Jets on a long-term deal. He got one of those right -- his assessment of the quarterback -- and it turned out to be the one that created the biggest stir.
So much has changed since then, though. So much needs to be addressed now, either through words or deeds.
Are the Jets in position to make the kind of huge hire that has quickly turned the Giants around? On Sunday night NBC analyst Mike Tomlin was talking about the Jets’ troubles in the final two minutes of halves and offered advice to the team. “If I were them,” Tomlin began… and Jets fans probably didn’t hear the rest of it as they began drooling over the possibility that one day soon he could be.
Have the Jets’ long-term plans at quarterback changed as the can’t-miss college quarterbacks expected to populate April’s draft becomes less of a sure thing with each passing Saturday?
What lessons have been learned over the past four or so years beyond the obvious: Stop putting the fate of the organization in the hands of people named Aaron.
These are not topics that a soon-to-be-former head coach can’t answer.
The best allegory for the big picture Jets at this point is their clock management ills. Glenn says they go over those strategies each week beginning on Tuesday and continue to have discussions about them throughout the week. Yet when Sunday rolls around Glenn so often makes the wrong decisions. This week it was not using any of his three timeouts to save seconds for whenever the Jets got the ball back.
“We’re trying, we’re trying,” Glenn said on Monday. “I know it's frustrating for the fans. I know it's frustrating for the players. It’s frustrating for us as coaches. But we've just got to continue to work at it and as long as we continue to do that I just know that we'll get better at it.”
If only Woody Johnson would say the same thing, only in regard to hiring coaches and drafting players and signing free agents rather than about play-calling and timeouts. How seen would his customers – a.k.a. the Jets fans – feel? It wouldn’t erase any bitterness or frustration on their part, but that doesn’t mean such sentiments shouldn’t be shared.
Until then, all we have is Glenn speaking for the Jets. Quack, quack.
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.
