One year into Aaron Glenn’s tenure, the New York Jets already look like a franchise flailing for answers. Instead of stability or progress, what they’ve delivered is confusion, panic, and a string of bad decisions that somehow keeps getting worse.
The latest example is the firing of offensive coordinator Tanner Engstrand. Not because Engstrand was some flawless genius, but because dumping him made no sense in the context of everything else. Glenn reportedly wanted to keep Engstrand in a reduced role before ultimately firing him anyway. That kind of back-and-forth doesn’t signal confidence. It signals a head coach who doesn’t know what he wants.
What makes the move even dumber is that Engstrand wasn’t the real problem. For once, the Jets offense showed structure. Plays built off each other. Concepts that looked like they belonged in a modern NFL playbook. Receivers were getting open. The issue wasn’t the design — it was execution, mainly at quarterback. Instead of acknowledging that, Glenn chose the easiest scapegoat left in the room.
And that’s the key point: left in the room.
By the time Engstrand was fired, the rest of the coaching staff had already been picked apart. The defensive coordinator was gone. Position coaches were gone. Assistants were gone. Engstrand was the last piece of a staff Glenn himself put together, and rather than stand by any part of it, he finished tearing it down.
That’s not accountability. That’s panic.
Good head coaches don’t need to overhaul everything after one season. Competent organizations don’t look this lost this fast. If nearly every coach under you is failing within a year, the common denominator isn’t hard to find.
The Jets hired Aaron Glenn to bring order and leadership to a franchise that desperately needed both. One year later, they’re right back where they always are — firing people, reshuffling titles, and pretending the real problem isn’t sitting at the top.
Firing Tanner Engstrand wasn’t a bold move. It wasn’t a smart one either. It was just another sign that Aaron Glenn and the Jets have no clear direction, no real plan, and no idea how to fix what they keep breaking.
