The early read on the news that New York Jets coach Robert Saleh, general manager Joe Douglas and most of the important power players of 2023 will be returning next year (as reported by the New York Post) is a predictable one.
The easy take is that Saleh, Douglas and the lot are so intimately tied with Aaron Rodgers that there is no way to separate them. Rodgers plans to return next season and beyond, or at least that’s what he tells his weekly television partner during the Big Thinker Variety Hour. And with Rodgers coming back, so, too, must a group of people that has so aggressively kowtowed to his whims throughout this lost season in Florham Park.
But let me challenge you a little bit. After all, this is the season of believing in the kind of phenomena that we can’t necessarily touch or see. And I wonder just where the Jets would be had Saleh not taken the approaches that he did throughout his three years on the job so far.
I get it. Yes, we’re again making an argument that is absolutely impossible to quantify. We’re talking about the Jets’ emotional health at a time when the Cleveland Browns, Houston Texans, Minnesota Vikings, New York Giants, Las Vegas Raiders, Pittsburgh Steelers and Cincinnati Bengals are having more success under similar—and perhaps even more dire—circumstances. It is an argument that almost no one wants to hear. But, I wouldn’t be bringing it up if I didn’t find it to be an important one.
Every so often, it’s important to remind people that if another person were coaching this team, sure, they may be the 2023 Bengals. New York may have a fringe wild-card contender and the sense that, schematically, this team is bulletproof. But we may also have had catastrophic rot. We may have also had new, unfathomable lows not even known to this throttled fan base. We have seen the Jets implode before at the altar of high expectations. It quakes harder there than it does elsewhere. We have seen what going from the pairing of Rex Ryan and Mike Tannenbaum, to Ryan and John Idzik, to Todd Bowles and Mike Maccagnan, looks like. We can trace a fault line to the bottom, stemming from seasons of high-profile public implosion, setting off one mistake after the next.
Saleh’s balancing act with the loss of Rodgers, the enduring struggles of Zach Wilson and the rest of the team’s complicated internal and external politics may not have been impressive to the rest of the world, but within his own small circle, the one that matters, it probably meant a great deal. Saleh could have coached this team like the rest of the desperate men who have held that position before him, turning and burning personnel in an impossible, endless shuffle for a few cheap résumé wins.
Or, he could have looked at the team like a living and breathing entity, well aware of the long-term consequences of his decision making throughout the process. He acted like a human being. He didn’t behave like someone desperately trying to hang on to a last, precious slice of head coaching power. That’s why he should stay.
I think Saleh deserved to keep his job no matter what. The Jets were, before his arrival, a faulty organization with dangerously low morale. This was the kind of football factory one couldn’t wait to clock out of. Stars were forcing their way out. Established veteran quarterbacks before Rodgers would put them low on the wish list.
And ownership, due to its whirlwind of cooks in the kitchen, never had time to grasp a handle on where the NFL was headed, or how to make the ideal, sustainable hire that this place has craved for more than a decade.
I can’t say with 100% certainty Saleh is that person, or that this experiment will end up yielding any meaningful success, but I can say that keeping Saleh and giving him a chance to grow with the team he has already shepherded and protected is a better option than entering the head coaching market at a time of peak uncertainty and inviting in those feelings of instability and expendability.
Saleh has earned the right, for better or worse, to be the voice of this team with a healthy Rodgers playing quarterback. If this experiment fails, the entire building will need to be cleaned out again anyway, so why not give yourself a chance to see the full realization of what everyone was working on? Why not give Saleh a chance to show you why this group was special enough to dig in and fix from the ground up?
