Aaron Glenn means business; just ask his former Jets teammates
New York Jets head coach Aaron Glenn, middle, with former Jets teammates, from left, Glenn Foley, Fred Baxter, Rob Carpenter, Wayne Chrebet, Chad Cascadden and Dennis O’Sullivan after he is introduced at the Atlantic Health Jets Training Center , Monday, Jan. 27, 2025, in Florham Park. Credit: Corey Sipkin
FLORHAM PARK, N.J.
Something has been eating at Aaron Glenn for about 26 years now. So much so that he brought it up on Monday when he was introduced as the head coach of the Jets.
It was the AFC Championship Game on Jan. 17, 1999. The Jets had taken a 10-0 lead over the Broncos and were one half away from reaching the Super Bowl. Then Denver kicked off to start the third quarter and the ball got caught up in the Rocky Mountain winds. It came down in the middle of the field and the Broncos recovered it, scored a touchdown and rattled off 23 unanswered points on their way to a championship.
It was the closest Glenn ever came to reaching the heights he hoped to attain while a cornerback for the team that drafted him with its first-round pick in 1994. To have his hopes dashed as they were — not by men but by meteorology — clearly has irked him since.
As he recalled that afternoon, the intensity of a Pro Bowl player began to surface. And as he looked over at his former teammates while telling the story — “Wayne, you remember this,” he said to Wayne Chrebet, a wide receiver on that team — the passion was palpable.
“I’ll be damned,” Glenn said, “if I am not going to come back here and get that back.”
The Jets aren’t an organization that can boast many glory days. Most of their stories, like that one about that zephyr of doom, have sad endings. But there is an immense pride among the players who took part in those ill-fated crusades, a bond despite the bungles that ties them all to each other.
So when Glenn stepped up on the stage Monday to take the reins of this team in the latest attempt to squeeze a winner from the organization, it was as if they were all up there with him. A few minutes later, in fact, they literally were, a half-dozen or so of them posing for a photo before another batch of Jets alumni from other eras joined the group.
“I was tearing up,” former quarterback Glenn Foley told Newsday after listening to the player with whom he was drafted give the very rough outline of his plan to fix the Jets.
Said Chrebet: “I didn’t sleep last night. I was so excited about seeing this today.”
Glenn made certain he acknowledged that brotherhood.
“To the former players, my guys,” he said, “listen, I would not be here without you men. The expectations haven’t changed. The blood, sweat and tears that we shared on that field have been valuable to my success. I love you guys.”
That, he said, is why he wanted this job. Not because it is a head-coaching gig but because it is the Jets’ head-coaching gig. And he has unfinished business.
“It was all about the Jets and it’s been that way from the beginning,” Glenn said. “This is where I started. You can’t write a story no better than that. Hopefully this will be my last stop. That’s the way I am looking at it.”
Those kinds of things resonated with the former players who immediately had flashbacks to the better days when Bill Parcells arrived in town and cleaned up a mess of a team that had won four games in two seasons under Rich Kotite.
“If you listened to him today, yeah, he said the right things, but you can tell that he means it and things will change around here,” Chrebet said.
“Having the [Bill] Belichick pedigree, the Parcells background, those are invaluable,” Foley said. “And then [Sean] Payton, too. Playing for those guys means structure, it means discipline, it means no joking, no clowning. I know right away what is coming. I don’t know what the culture was here before, but this is going to be strict. As a player, get ready for rules . . . Any nonsense is immediately gone.”
In two years’ time, Parcells had the Jets a game (and a gust) away from the Super Bowl. They might have had a bigger window of opportunity, too, if their starting quarterback hadn’t torn an Achilles in the opener the next season. Yes, before Aaron Rodgers did that in 2023, Vinny Testaverde crumbled in 1999, taking with him to the turf the team’s hopes of contending.
Glenn’s thunderous introduction likely sent tingles through the Jets fans who remember watching the transformations of the past, who allowed themselves to believe in those teams and thirst for a reason to do so again.
That’s the easy part for Glenn, winning over fans and former players. Their investments are peripheral. Now he has to sell it to the current roster. Are players in 2025 ready to respond to the toolbox Parcells used to will the Jets into working order three decades ago?
The game has changed, coaching has changed and the more successful leaders these days are a lot more cuddly and empathetic than Parcells was, than what Glenn projects to be.
The tough guy shtick works for some, but it gets old quickly and turns colossally bad much more often than it succeeds. Did anyone else hear echoes of Joe Judge’s introductory news conference on Monday? That turned out to be the highlight of his two miserable years with the Giants.
Glenn needs to make sure that his first day on the job is not his best.
It’s hard to say how today’s Jets will react because they weren’t here on Monday. Former players showed up, among them Rob Carpenter, Fred Baxter, Dennis O’Sullivan, Damien Woody, Tony Richardson, Leon Washington and Nick Mangold.
The current ones curiously kept their distance. And the most important one — Aaron Rodgers — hasn’t yet spoken with his new coach or general manager (although the new regime said they have exchanged texts with him).
They don’t care about the past. They aren’t consumed by 26-year-old kickoffs. They live very different lives than the players used to back in Glenn’s days of patrolling the Jets’ secondary, when guys would grind through two-a-days at Hofstra and then head over to Eisenhower Park to hit the driving range.
If they are anything like Glenn and his pals, though, they want what he wanted. They want to win.
“He knows the blueprint,” Chrebet said of Glenn. “He’s done it before.”
Now he’ll try to do it again . . . and this time finish the job.
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.
