Jets under Aaron Glenn: Wouldn't it be nice if they showed some progress?

FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — Aaron Glenn admitted to being a little nervous and uncertain heading into his head-coaching debut in September.

“That’s just who I am,” he said at the time, comparing the jitters he felt  to the ones he always had as a player. “I'll always have that within my body, and I can feel it. But at some point, man, it goes away really, really, really quick, and I get dialed into what I have to do as a coach, and as I did as a player.”

One of the things that anchored him that day was the embrace of the fans, the familiarity of the “J-E-T-S!” chants and the optimism that the crowd had regarding the direction of the team.

That opener was the first Jets game of the season at MetLife Stadium.

On Sunday, Glenn will coach in the Jets' last game of the season at MetLife Stadium.

Now it’s the fans’ chance to be nervous and uncertain.

That’s just who they are.

This inaugural year under Glenn and general manager Darren Mougey has publicly divulged plenty about the areas in which the organization is lacking, from its quarterback play to its defensive front to its inexplicable lack of takeaways in general and interceptions in particular.

What it hasn’t demonstrated are many areas in which the team has improved. It’s virtually impossible to find an offensive or defensive player on the roster with considerable playing time (never mind a position group) who has performed better this season than in 2024 (and yes, we are purposely leaving special teams aside; that core has done remarkably well).

These Jets have scored fewer points than last year’s team, allowed more points than last year’s team and, barring an improbable two-game winning streak to end the schedule, will have lost more games than last year’s team.

All the while the head coach keeps talking about the progress he is making and the “plan” he has for the franchise and the way both of those invisible pieces are growing splendidly back behind the curtains, where we can’t really observe them for ourselves.

It sure would be nice to see some of it on the field before we close the book on 2025. Sunday is an opportunity to do just that.

“We want to go out there and put on a really good showing for our fans,” Glenn said earlier this week. “We know it's our last home game. We look forward to it. We know it's a really, really good opponent, too, so there's nothing better than us going out there and probably spoiling what they're trying to accomplish as a team and just making sure our last game [at home] is a game that our fans can remember.”

If the Jets can’t deliver on that, it’s fair for the fans to leave this calendar year wondering if what they have witnessed during the past four months is more a flea circus than a football program.

In the summer, when Glenn was asked what a successful first season would look like for him and the Jets, he said he wanted to make this a team the fans could be “proud” of. This week he directly addressed those fans, many of whom stopped showing up at home games weeks ago.

“Listen,” he said, “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.”

Now he and the Jets get one last chance to put some kind of a positive stamp on this season in front of that increasingly twitchy and skeptical audience.

Maybe that is too much to ask. They’ll attempt to do it with an undrafted rookie at quarterback, a piecemeal defensive backfield and most of their promising draft picks sidelined by injuries. And they’ll be going against a Patriots team that might be able to clinch the division title with a win and  undoubtedly will be flooding the secondary ticket market with buyers hoping to catch a glimpse of their MVP-caliber quarterback, Drake Maye.

“We just want to put our best performance on film, man,” cornerback Brandon Stephens said of this last chance to play in front of the home fans. “Obviously, we want to get these fans another win in our home stadium, but we just want to go 1-0 each week, and it doesn’t matter where we play.”

For some players, this will be their last Jets home game ever. There is nothing about a three-win (to this point) season that tells management to bring back as many folks as possible, so the turnover in the coming months will be steep.

Others know they will be back, but with heightened expectations, different responsibilities and less patience shown them.

Then there are  the ones who fall in between, who can’t be quite certain if their future aligns with the Jets’.

Glenn? He figures to be back. It would be an absolute shock if he is not.

But then he needs to start delivering on concrete improvements, not the abstract ones he always likes to float.

“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 in-house perspective for the most part,” Glenn said this week. “You still have a number of things that you have to go through as far as making sure that everybody understands exactly what you're trying to accomplish, what type of team you want to be.”

In a little more than eight months, the Jets will return to MetLife Stadium and play the first home game of their 2026 schedule. It’ll be a new roster, a new team and a new season. But it will be the same head coach and, ostensibly, that same plan and vision for what the Jets should look like.

It would be nice if by then we had an actual example of it.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

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.