What’s your message to the fans who are tired of losing?
It’s a question that every losing coach gets asked at some point, especially the ones at programs that have gone through prolonged stretches of losing. Some handle it better than others. Joe Judge, for example, went on an 11-minute rant after a 2021 loss to the Bears in response to that exact question — it contributed to his downfall.
Jets coaches, for obvious reasons, have been fielding some version of that question for a while. Their answers hover around the same message: patience.
During the preseason, Glenn’s message to the fans was that they would be proud of this Jets team. As their struggles and their losing went on, Glenn’s message changed: They’ll be proud of the team eventually. He said that on Nov. 5. More recently, he’s gone back into the same playbook, with a message he’s now repeated on multiple occasions: “Don’t let go of the rope.”
“I will continue to say don’t let go of the rope because there is a plan, there is a vision,” Glenn said Monday, the day after a 29-6 loss to a four-win Saints team. “From day one, we’ve been trying to set the foundation of what we want this team to be, and a lot of that is from an in-house perspective for the most part.”
Glenn is asking for trust from a fan base that is watching this Jets team struggle in worse ways than it has in a long time — and in a way that, by some statistical measures, very few teams have ever struggled. The tenor of that trust is shaky, at best.
“For the fans, listen, it’s going to be a tough road, and we knew that, but man, the thing is we know exactly what we’re doing, and we do have a plan,” Glenn said. “Don’t let go of the rope.”
Glenn says that’s an expression he remembers hearing Sean Payton tell the Saints when he first joined Payton’s staff in 2016. The Saints missed the playoffs that season, for the third time in a row, but were back in 2017. It was Dan Campbell’s message with the Lions, too, after a 3-13-1 season with Glenn as defensive coordinator. They turned it around.
“Even though no one else can see it, (players) see it and they trust it, and we have to continue to go down that path of: We have a vision, we know what that vision is, and man, we’re going to do everything we can to be able to chase that and get it,” Glenn said.
Those examples, particularly the Lions since Campbell was in his first season in Detroit and Payton had already won a Super Bowl by the time Glenn got there, are examples of that message paying off. But history is not in Glenn’s favor.
The Jets punted on this season a while ago, but it’s verged on tanking in recent weeks as they’ve stuck with undrafted rookie Brady Cook at quarterback, even as he’s looked increasingly overmatched. They’ve lost three games in a row, each by more than 20 points — and they’ve had four losses of at least 20 points this season. They have the third-worst scoring margin (-144) in the NFL. They’ve gone 15 straight weeks without recording an interception, an NFL record, and they’ve forced four turnovers with two games remaining (the all-time NFL low for a season is seven). Whatever progress they showed during a five-game stretch from Week 8 to 13, when they went 3-2, feels as if it’s evaporated over the last three games, all blowouts.
Their combined offensive and defensive DVOA (-42.2 percent), per For the Numbers, is on pace to be one of the 10 worst combined marks in recorded history (dating back to 1978) and the worst in franchise history. DVOA (Defense-adjusted value over average) “measures a team’s efficiency by comparing success on every single play to a league average based on situation and opponent.” The Jets are also 29th in offensive EPA and 28th in defensive EPA and have given up 27 or more points 10 times.
And there’s the history of struggling coaches — in their first year and beyond. In the last 10 years, six first-time coaches started 0-6 or worse — Glenn started 0-7 and has lost by 20 or more points four times. In 2016, Hue Jackson’s Browns started 0-14 and finished 1-15 with four losses of 20 or more points; Jackson was fired midway through his third season. In 2017, Kyle Shanahan’s 49ers started 0-9, finished 6-10 (with five wins in a row at the end of the season), and he’s still coaching in San Francisco (the 49ers lost by 20 or more three times). In 2019, Brian Flores’ Dolphins started 0-7, finished 5-11 and won three of their last five games — they lost by 20 or more four times, in each of their first four games. Flores was eventually fired despite two winning seasons. Also in 2019, Zac Taylor’s Bengals started 0-11, finished 2-14 and lost by 20 or more points four times. The Bengals drafted Joe Burrow in 2020, so Taylor remains in Cincinnati. And then there’s Campbell: He started 0-10-1 in 2021, finished 3-13-1 and lost by 20 or more four times.
The hope for the Jets is that Glenn winds up being more like Campbell and Taylor — though there are two important caveats for them. The Lions already had their quarterback (Jared Goff) on the roster, and the Bengals got theirs (Burrow) in the following offseason. Glenn’s Jets will have paid $30 million for nine miserable games from Justin Fields, who was just placed on injured reserve, ending his season. Fields averaged 139.9 passing yards per game and was worse as a passer than at any other point in his career.
Looking beyond first-year coaches: If the Jets finish with three wins, which is likely with the Patriots and Bills looming, most coaches don’t survive very long with that outcome. In the last 10 years (2015 to 2024), 22 teams have won three or fewer games in a season.
• 13 of those coaches were fired during or immediately after those seasons.
• Six of those coaches were fired either during or following the next season, including Brian Daboll (Giants) and Brian Callahan (Titans) in 2025.
• Browns coach Kevin Stefanski went 3-14 in 2024 and hasn’t been fired in 2025 … yet.
• Two of those coaches survived beyond the next season (Campbell and Taylor).
That doesn’t mean Glenn will fail. He saw how Campbell turned things around in Detroit and played a significant part in helping the Lions’ resurgence. Many players expected to be back in 2026 have publicly expressed belief in what Glenn is building, including defensive tackle Harrison Phillips, center Josh Myers, tight end Jeremy Ruckert, defensive end Jermaine Johnson and running back Breece Hall (though Hall will be a free agent this offseason). Cornerback Jarvis Brownlee recently tweeted that Glenn was the “best HC in America. Watch him work.”
Saints running back Alvin Kamara spoke on a podcast in the days after the Jets’ loss to the Saints in Week 16 to say that he sees a similar process with Glenn — they crossed paths in New Orleans — that he saw with Payton in New Orleans and Campbell (another former Saints coach) in Detroit.
“I don’t even want to speak, I just want it to happen,” Kamara said. “Because I know AG. You hear things, you see things people are saying, that it’s terrible. But I’m like: They don’t know what we know. It’s a process. You just wait for the process to be executed and then you’re like: Shoot, I ain’t surprised.”
The problem for skeptical Jets fans: It’s all theoretical. There have been some positives this season — Chris Banjo’s special teams unit; the development of players like Brownlee, defensive tackle Jowon Briggs, cornerback Brandon Stephens, wide receiver Adonai Mitchell, wide receiver/returner Isaiah Williams and cornerback Azareye’h Thomas (now injured) among them. Plus, there’s the continuity of what appears to be a solid offensive line.
But there are more negatives outweighing that.
Glenn said he has — and has had — a plan for turning the Jets around. But some aspects of his plan have irrefutably already failed. He hired Steve Wilks to call the defense and that went terribly. A group that entered the season with three All-Pros (Sauce Gardner, Quinnen Williams, Quincy Williams), a Pro Bowler (Jermaine Johnson) and one of the NFL’s highest-paid linebackers (Jamien Sherwood) produced a product so poor that Wilks was fired before the end of his first season. Quinnen Williams and Gardner were traded away and Quincy Williams is not planning on returning to the Jets in 2026. Glenn might have a difficult time convincing top coordinators to take a job leading a defense lacking star talent — Johnson, Sherwood and Will McDonald have all regressed this season — not to mention Glenn might feel pressure to take over play-calling at some point next season.
The other failure: The Jets banked $30 million guaranteed on turning Fields into a viable NFL quarterback. They built the offense around his skill set. It didn’t work. So now they’ll have to try again at quarterback in 2026, with a draft class that might only have one or two quarterbacks worthy of a high selection, without any particularly enticing free-agent quarterbacks to speak of. Campbell went 9-8 in his second season in Detroit. Glenn needs the same sort of luck that Taylor found in Cincinnati — that the Jets are able to land Fernando Mendoza or Dante Moore, and they quickly turn into stars.
Otherwise, this Jets roster doesn’t look like a 9-8 roster. They’ll have plenty of cap space ($90 million) and draft capital (four picks in the first two rounds) to load up on talent. There will be significant roster turnover — especially on defense. And then it will be on Glenn to show real signs that a turnaround is happening. That they’re on the right track.
History is not in his favor.
