“We live in an instant gratification world in 2025! These kids and their social media.”
“You have no patience! The Jets never stick things out, and that’s why they keep ending up in this position!”
“Oh yeah? Who would replace him?”
These are just a few of the retorts that will come your way if you suggest that the New York Jets should fire head coach Aaron Glenn after one season at the helm.
Here’s why those arguments are nonsensical based on what we have seen in recent NFL history.
What do you really think the Jets would be missing out on?
Fans opposed to the idea of firing Glenn seem to be under the impression that the Jets might come to regret the decision. They believe going “one and done” with a coach is a reckless move made by impatient organizations.
Sure, on the surface, it could be perceived as such.
But in the long run, a one-and-done firing would only have negative consequences if the coach proves himself to be an asset that the team rues cutting ties with.
Considering how many fans support the idea of sticking with Glenn, one would think that there is a track record of this happening: Coaches being fired after one season and going on to have success elsewhere, causing the initial team to look foolish for being so impatient.
In reality, no such track record exists in recent NFL history.
As a matter of fact, “one-and-doning” a head coach has generally led to positive results. Teams have been rewarded for having the guts to quickly admit their mistake instead of prolonging the inevitable.
Since 2018, here are the eight head coaches to go one-and-done with their teams (listed alongside their “Simple Rating System”, a measure of point differential adjusted for strength of schedule):
None of these coaches has even held a head coaching job since being fired, let alone leading another team to success as a head coach. Only two of them have even held a coordinator role: Nathaniel Hackett and Steve Wilks, who were both abysmal in their most recent roles and were quickly fired (by the Jets, ironically).
More importantly, most of those teams enjoyed positive returns from rapidly dumping their abysmal coach.
Of the eight coaches to go one-and-done since 2018, five of them gave way to a coach who led the same team to at least one playoff appearance:
Cardinals: Steve Wilks to Kliff Kingsbury
Browns: Freddie Kitchens to Kevin Stefanski
Jaguars: Urban Meyer to Doug Pederson
Texans: Lovie Smith to DeMeco Ryans
Broncos: Nathaniel Hackett to Sean Payton
The Panthers will join this list if they clinch the NFC South on Sunday, making Dave Canales a playoff coach after following in Frank Reich’s footsteps.
The only two one-and-done coaches since 2018 who did not yield a playoff coach were Dave Culley (leading to Lovie Smith) and Antonio Pierce (leading to Pete Carroll).
Overall, though, that’s at least five (possibly six) out of eight one-and-done firings that yielded a playoff appearance.
Those sure seem like better playoff odds than whatever the Jets would have by keeping Glenn, don’t they?
If a coach is struggling to the point where he is even in the conversation for a one-and-done season, it probably means the team should go ahead and pull the plug. At a certain point, things get too far out of hand for patience to be deserved.
Glenn’s bar was low coming into this year. Most fans expected the team to have a record well below .500; I had them going 6-11.
However, the on-field product generated by Glenn has sunk to depths so low that he is beyond salvaging. There was a world where Glenn could have produced an acceptable (or even promising) season while winning as few as three games, but the issue is that his team looks nowhere close to NFL-caliber. The Jets are routinely out of games by the end of the first quarter.
There is no excuse for that, regardless of how poor your talent is.
Coaches like Wilks, Meyer, Culley, Smith, Kitchens, Reich, and Pierce didn’t have much talent, either, and yet, all of those infamously poor coaches led teams with better SRS ratings than Glenn’s 2025 Jets.
Other rebuilding squads in 2025, like the Titans, Saints, Giants, and Browns, could also make excuses related to talent, quarterback play, youth, and injuries. Yet, all of those teams have significantly better SRS ratings than the Jets. In fact, each of those teams is so much more competent than the Jets that their SRS ratings are at least four points ahead. The Browns are the worst of that bunch at -7.6, which is 4.4 points better than the Jets’ -12.0, a margin similar to the one that separates the 11-5 Buffalo Bills (4.2) from a league-average team.
That is how bad a product Glenn has created.
At what point is a coach’s debut season too horrific to warrant a second chance?
The answer: This point. Right here, right now.
Glenn is too far from being a competent coach for the Jets to feel any sort of fear that firing him after one season will end up being a regrettable decision. Not only is it highly likely that Glenn’s replacement would be a better coach, but there is a good chance that the replacement would lead the Jets to the playoffs.
That’s the elephant in the room that Glenn’s defenders do not seem to grasp at the moment, with Black Monday only six days away.