How Fans Should Measure Glenn’s Ability To Tackle Jets Gig
In un-Jets-like fashion, New York starting quarterback Justin Fields, who was carted off the Florham Park practice field on Thursday, avoided a worst-case scenario. Jets fans aghast by ESPN’s Adam Schecter tweet that the team feared a season-ending torn Achilles were able to exhale when it announced the diagnosis as a dislocated toe, with Fields only out “day-to-day.”
Aaron Glenn, who is navigating his first training camp at the helm of this tortured franchise, seemed to have sounded the proper notes at his post-practice press conference when Fields’ prospects were iffy. In Glenn’s mind, a potential Fields absence would change nothing; the offense would simply carry on as planned with backup Tyrod Taylor calling signals.
Glenn is a Bill Parcells disciple, turning in some of his best pro seasons of his 15-year career at cornerback when the legendary coach loomed over the Jets’ sidelines from 1997-99. Thursday’s defiance was fodder for some members of the Jets media who partake in the easy narrative that the apple won’t fall far from the coaching tree.
However, what will distinguish Glenn, who deserves every opportunity to prove himself on his own merits, from all eight other discarded head coaches who have followed Parcells here will be criteria that has nothing to do with handling the media. Robert Saleh was relatively adored when it should have been obvious that he was out of his depth by Year 2 at most.
Since this is Glenn’s first HC gig, we just don’t know his level of competence on anything that relates to the doings on the football field. He received high praise for his work over the last four seasons as Detroit’s Defensive Coordinator, but that wasn’t exactly the team’s high-achieving unit. You can attribute last season’s mediocre performance to an abnormally devastating injury plague (though to be fair, the Lions were seventh in the NFL in points allowed despite giving up the 13th-most yards), but he ran a bottom-10 defense in those other years.
In other words, Glenn seems to have the right personality to tackle this Herculean task; how he fares in the following departments will determine whether he can actually buck the Jets post-Parcells coaching curse:
Preparedness
In countless games this century, the Jets have taken the field with the look of a team that had no clue as to how the opponent would hit them. Defensive statistics would get skewed because New York would get down by multiple touchdowns early, allowing opponents to figuratively take the air out of the ball for the remainder of those games. Though Glenn delegated play-calling responsibilities to Defensive Coordinator Steve Wilks, this is the area where his expertise is expected to be the most translatable. Only Glenn isn’t going to have an explosive Lions offense to bail the defense out; it has to be ready to play from the opening kickoff. That means better film study and game planning than we have seen from previous regimes.
On the other side of the ball, Glenn can’t just go into every game with a we’re-going-to-run-the-ball-down-their-throats philosophy. This is the NFL, where early-down smashes into the middle of stacked boxes too often yield second-and-longs. For the first time in my memory, the Jets will boast a starting QB with the ability to contribute to a running attack. As I’ve noted in prior posts, that’s what almost all of the league’s best rushing teams have in common. Offensive Coordinator Tanner Engstrand is also new at this role, so we’ll have to see how the schemes are designed. That includes route combinations to help wide receiver Garrett Wilson extricate himself from the inevitable double teams. In general, Engstrand must leverage Fields’ wheels to keep opposing defenses guessing instead of knowing what’s coming. Jets fans have yet to see what that looks like.
Adjustments
In a typical NFL contest, the best laid game plans can go awry. For example, Glenn’s Lions owned the league’s second-heaviest blitz percentage last season, per pro-football-reference.com, and all signs point to him moving the Jets, who tended to be a strict four-man rush team during Saleh’s tenure, in that direction. Except certain QBs who are known blitz beaters, like Buffalo’s Josh Allen, might make them pay. If a particular player is struggling, Glenn must act quickly to either scheme extra help in that area or bench the player. How will he hold players accountable for unforgivable sins like egregious personal foul penalties? Injuries will occur in the regular course of business; you can talk about a “next-man-up” mentality, but adjustments might be necessary as well to accommodate the replacement’s lesser ability. To sum it up: The Jets will surely face adversity, not just in between games when the media stirs the pot, but during games. It’s safe to say that they have not dealt with it well for quite some time, and much of it has been on the Head Coach. A strong presence in the locker room only gets a HC so far; in order for Glenn to maintain his authority, he will have to find solutions to problems on the fly.
Game Management
Nothing gets fans stirred up about a HC more than how he handles this responsibility. And it’s not like there’s unanimous agreement as to the protocols. Until we see it in practice, we won’t know if Glenn likes to lean towards his former Detroit boss Dan Campbell, who by nearly every analysis is the league’s most aggressive HC when it comes to using all four downs, or is in more of the old school, conservative, rely-on-the-defense-to-get-the-ball-back mold like Saleh was. There are various models that measure “win probability added” to help a HC make the most appropriate decision on a fourth down situation, but their gut will often override the data. If the Jets are still punting on fourth-and-short from midfield, that should tell us a lot.
Then there’s clock management, whose effectiveness can also be in the eye of the beholder. With Glenn offloading all play-calling responsibilities, he should be in a better position during games to focus on the big picture, such as when to utilize timeouts. I think everyone can agree that the Jets’ prior habit of wasting timeouts early in halves was a symptom of their dereliction in the first topic.