The Jets are 2-5 after losing to Miami 28-25, and Aaron Glenn is now 5-19 as head coach. Four of the five losses came by a touchdown or less, which is exactly the kind of stat that keeps a coach working and keeps a team losing. Meanwhile, Darren Mougey has built the best war chest this franchise has had in years. Three first round picks in 2027, more than $100 million in projected cap space, a 2026 draft class that looks like a hit, and even Brandon Stephens, the corner everyone laughed at in March 2025, settling in as a solid starter. So the real question isn’t whether Glenn has been good enough. He is not. This is if you can get rid of him without losing anything that makes this roster great.
There is a real case that Glenn is part of the review. He spent two years as a Jets scout after he retired, and he and Mougey were hired as a pair, which basically means a shared board. The popular version of the argument goes further. Glenn drives the draft, Mougey owns free agency, because pro scouting happens during the season while Glenn is busy coaching. That doesn’t last long. College area scouts are also on the road, and the draft board and free agent decisions will be made in March and April, when the head coach is in the room for it all. The honest answer is that no one outside the building knows who is hitting these people. Woody does, and that should be the first question at the end of the year review.
So you have to compare the two ways it can go wrong. Fire Glenn, and he is actually the evaluator. Drafts have slipped some, but the scouting staff, the picks and the cap space all remain, and you’ll know within a draft or two. Keep Glenn, and it turns out he’s not just the head coach. The quarterback they’ll hire in 2027 is spending his first, most important year under a defensive coach without the track record of building one, and the Jets have burned the most intriguing head coaching opening they’ve had since Rex Ryan. One mistake gets you several drafts. Others cost you the quarterback. That’s not close. And if Mougey turns out to be a lesser GM without Glenn, the timelines actually work in the Jets’ favor. A young quarterback is tied to his head coach and his system, not the guy who drafted him, so you can replace a GM in two or three years without touching the QB’s development. Change the coach and start the kid. A real exposure is the 2027 pick itself, which could be Mougey’s first big call without Glenn, so that quarterback should be the new coach’s choice as much as the GM’s.
Which brings up Mike Tomlin, the name that many people like. He walked away from Pitts in January for what Art Rooney called mostly family reasons, and the Steelers still hold his rights so acquiring him would cost picks over money. The bigger problem is the quarterback. His ring is with Big Ben, which was built by Bill Cowher’s staff three years before Tomlin arrived. Every quarterback Tomlin has to find himself Pickett as a first rounder, Rudolph, Haskins doesn’t stick, and his recruiting coordinator, Todd Haley, Matt Canada and Arthur Smith, is not exactly a QB factory. The fair counter is that he didn’t get picked in the top ten because he kept winning, but Jalen Hurts and Brock Purdy weren’t top ten picks either. Someone developed them. Tomlin is a great culture coach for a team that already has a quarterback. The Jets are about to draft them.
The tempting move is to clean house, fire both, and hunt down the big game for a coach and a GM. don’t. A GM hired in late January gets about three months before he chooses the franchise quarterback, from a board built by someone else, with scouts he doesn’t know yet, and he’ll probably bring his own people and throw away the task of building this war chest. The one constant in every Jets reset has been ownership, and two hires at once only doubles the stakes on the side with the worst track record. Here is the path. Let Glenn finish the season, because firing midseason buys you nothing but an interim coach. Then make the change, keep Mougey with final say on the roster, and hire an offensive head coach whose entire résumé is developing quarterbacks. Stick with the defensive assistants and the turn-around guys in the secondary, because that’s the part of Glenn’s tenure that’s really worth keeping, and if the evaluation shows that Glenn is the man on the board, offer him a staff role and see if he takes it. The pitch to the candidates sells itself: picks, cap space, a rookie quarterback to mold, and a GM who has proven he can stack assets. The Jets no longer have a talent problem. They have a teaching problem, and once they are in a position to fix it the right way.