Jets' turning point of the season: That Week 4 loss to the Dolphins in Miami
Jets coach Aaron Glenn instructs his staff in a game against the Miami Dolphins on Sep. 29 in Miami Gardens, Fla. Credit: AP/Marta Lavandier
FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — There isn’t a whole lot worth remembering for the Jets from their first meeting with the Dolphins in Week 4 in Miami. It was one of the ugliest games of the season, a prime-time clunker on Monday Night Football in which they had three turnovers and committed 13 penalties for 101 yards in losing to their previously winless division rival, 27-21.
It was their fourth straight loss to open the season, tied for the worst start for any rookie head coach in Jets history, and Aaron Glenn had the record all to himself after losing the following week. It called into serious question whether Glenn was the right man to lead the franchise out of its long-term funk.
It was a game to forget about quickly.
One thing that many of the players do recall from that experience, however, is what happened in the locker room afterward.
That was the night Glenn tore into the team with a loud verbal assault that could be heard in the adjacent room, where reporters were waiting to dissect the events.
The exact words that Glenn delivered in that precarious early moment of his tenure are lost to the South Florida ether. Only the peeled paint and dented ceiling tiles that still carry their echoes can recall those details. But the message was what mattered. It’s what stuck with those who were there to hear and feel it.
The Jets could not continue to play in such a slipshod fashion and expect their results to change.
“Very disappointing. I’m very disappointed,” a much more composed Glenn said to reporters that night shortly after his diatribe. “There is no way you can win any game with 13 penalties and three turnovers. It just can’t happen. Before you can win games, you have to learn how not to lose games, and we have to do a better job in that case. And we will.”
As the Jets prepare to face the Dolphins again on Sunday, this time at MetLife Stadium, they’ve gone back to watch the film of that game. They’ve been forced to sit through the clips of the errors. But they also have reverted to that postgame experience. Glenn — who some players say was as angry as they have ever seen him — made it clear that things needed to change, and the frustrated players started to realize through their gloom and despair that he was right.
Guard Joe Tippmann told Newsday this week that the experience was “absolutely” a pivotal moment.
Tight end Jeremy Ruckert said it was “not a good feeling” to lose in such fashion. “We felt like we let one get away,” he said.
Tackle Olu Fashanu didn’t want to term it a wake-up call but said it was “a moment of realization where we recognized that if we wanted to get where we want to, plays like the plays that happened that night can’t happen again.”
Looking back, that game absolutely was a turning point.
The wins still would have to wait a few more weeks. The first one did not arrive for nearly another month in Week 8 in Cincinnati, but the dividing line in the season between the sloppy Jets and the improved version definitely runs right through that postgame locker room in Miami.
In the first four games of the season, the Jets committed seven turnovers. In the eight games since, they have committed seven turnovers, including three games in which they had none.
In the first four games, the Jets averaged eight penalties for 72.75 yards per game. In the eight since, they are at 6.25 per game and 48.75 yards. The league-wide average through 13 weeks this season is 6.63 penalties for 53.25 yards per team per game, so the Jets have been better than that since Miami.
More importantly, they were winless after that game. Now they have won three of their last five games.
It’s not perfect. It is progress.
Glenn called the Dolphins a “surging” team. Perhaps that word fits the Jets, too.
“I think now we have the confidence in ourselves to do our jobs and stay out of our own way,” Ruckert said. “It’s something we have been building since [Glenn] got here. It’s something we have been focusing on. It’s not something that is going to get changed overnight, but the more you talk about it, the more you focus on it, put it up in the meeting rooms, work on it with the reps at practice, you’re going to get results.
“I think that’s the biggest thing for [Glenn] is that whether we win or lose, squeak a win out or put a dominant performance out there, he’s not going to change his message on what he expects from us and his vision of what he wants the culture to be. Disciplined, smart, tough, those are the things he is preaching, and regardless of the outcome, that’s what he is going to expect from us.”
Glenn doesn’t scream as much these days, at least not publicly. And his persona in front of the cameras has changed a bit too. Even when the Jets were losing all their games in poorly managed fashion back then, he always tried to stress the positive, sometimes to a fault. Now that they have tasted a bit of success, he seems to talk more about negatives that need to be fixed than the things he likes.
“As a coach, you don’t want to sit in front of a team, OK we lost, and you start to pick out all the things why,” Glenn said this past week. “And when we win, I want to make sure I don’t sit in here and think everything is rosy, either, because there is some bad stuff that comes out of wins also. I want to make sure that we don’t overlook those things.”
The Jets can grin a bit now when they think about Glenn’s postgame rant directed at them in Miami. They also understand why it had to happen.
“It was about us not being disciplined enough in the important moments of the game,” Fashanu said. “Moments where we were so close but then one thing happens and it’s a game-changing penalty, a game-changing turnover. The emphasis for that postgame talk was finding ways to eliminate all those plays.”
Ruckert said he never took Glenn’s scolding as anger or frustration.
“It was just passion,” he said. “He invests so much time and emotion and effort into it that you can see he really cares. We don’t really see it as him yelling at us, it’s just how much he cares. You don’t want it to get to that point, but that’s the message I got from that.”
Whatever sentiment Glenn wanted to deliver at that moment two months ago, it apparently got through to the Jets quite clearly.
And very, very loudly.
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.
