New Jets coach Aaron Glenn gets five-star reviews from rookies
New York Jets head coach Aaron Glenn at Rookie Camp at the Atlantic Health Training Center on Saturday. Credit: Corey Sipkin
FLORHAM PARK, N.J.
Aaron Glenn spent his Saturday morning strolling. Counterclockwise, he casually paced around an otherwise bustling practice field in relative stealth, stopping occasionally at a drill to observe but never for long enough to become a noticeable intrusion. Round and round he went, studying the offensive linemen with his arms folded, the linebackers with hands on his hips, the quarterbacks with a thoughtful stroke of his silvery chin whiskers, and the defensive backs with his hands on his knees as if he were ready to jump in for a few reps.
It was a new angle from which to view the game for this 52-year-old football lifer, more removed from the actual action than he has ever been yet oddly having more of an impact on it.
As a position coach when he began in the profession, Glenn recalled, he was tunnel-focused on his defensive backs. As a coordinator, he was entrenched with the defense.
“Now my focus is on the whole team,” he said while wearing a new title as head coach of the Jets. “It’s outstanding getting a chance to go to every position and being able to give my opinions on how they should do things and help those guys be successful . . . That’s the fun thing about coaching, the fun thing about my development as a coach.”
The Jets assembled their draft picks, first-year free agents, tryouts and a handful of relatively inexperienced veterans this weekend, but the most intriguing rookie at this camp was Glenn. And once the season truly gets underway in training camp, in the fall and through the early winter, he’ll easily be the most important rookie in the entire organization.
There are some early signs that the Jets have gotten this one right. Or, at the very least, they have not gotten it so terribly wrong that the hire already has imploded. Consider a couple of the other directions this could have gone.
Remember just a few months ago when the Jets quickly passed on the “opportunity” to at least discuss their opening with Bill Belichick? They were ridiculed at the time for turning up their noses at one of the game’s greatest minds and their chief tormentor for most of this century. Now Belichick and his girlfriend/publicist are a national punchline creating more snickers than schemes at the University of North Carolina. The Jets sure sidestepped that one.
Jeff Ulbrich? He was the interim head coach here most of last season, and if he had been able to win a few more games, he probably would have been a stronger candidate for the full-time job.
Still, he was an option for the Jets this offseason. They went in a different direction and he wound up as the defensive coordinator in Atlanta, where he found himself at the center of one of this past draft’s most despicable sidebars.
It was Ulbrich’s teenage son who pilfered the secret phone numbers of several top players off Pop’s league-issued electronic tablet and prank-called them, impersonating general managers with phony selections. It was an awful, embarrassing and ultimately expensive situation for the Ulbrichs . . . but not a Jets problem.
Instead they have Glenn, who is getting five-star reviews from his fellow rookies.
“I love him,” cornerback Azareye’h Thomas said on Saturday. “He’s about business and he loves defense, so it’s good.”
Said linebacker Francisco Mauigoa: “I love the energy he brings. He’s very straightforward . . . Everything’s been smooth.”
Safety Malachi Moore said Glenn is different from Nick Saban, the head coach he played for until last season at Alabama.
“Coach Saban is more outgoing, more of a yeller,” he said. “Right now, Coach Glenn, he’s just been kind of observing and encouraging us to keep working and keep pushing forward. But he’s got that [fiery] side to him, for sure. I’m pretty sure I’ll see that later down the road.”
Of course those raves are coming from players who don’t know any better, at least at the NFL level. This is their first sip of the league. The true test of Glenn winning over the players will come from the veterans who make up the majority of the roster.
For that, Glenn is ready. More than he realized he would be before actually starting here, perhaps.
He said that during the previous three years with Detroit, head coach Dan Campbell gave him opportunities to do things such as run meetings with the entire team, organize daily schedules and script practices. Head coach stuff, in other words.
“Now that I look back and think about the position he put me in,” Glenn said, “I give him so much credit for making this a seamless transition for me to stand here and be the head coach of this team.”
There will be times this year when Glenn will have to break through that invisible barrier that kept him from interacting too much with the players on Saturday.
He’ll be the one who ultimately decides how things are supposed to get done around here, and that will mean taking a more hands-on approach. If the Jets wanted someone to coach from a balcony overlooking the stage, they hired the wrong guy. Glenn has a clear vision and is going to get dirty explaining and enforcing it.
Before he took this group of athletes out for their workouts this weekend, he gave them a message from his heart. He told them what he was looking for and what his expectations would be. He wants players who can learn and improve and grow.
And then he told the rookies about the opportunity of a lifetime in front of them.
“It really doesn’t matter where you are from or even what you did,” he said. “Once you get in the building, you have a shot.”
The same, it should be said, goes for rookie head coaches.
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.
