The Jets have a new offensive coordinator. It is former Colts and Panthers head coach Frank Reich. Let’s discuss the good and the bad of this hire.

Likes:

It’s rare when the Jets hire a play caller who actually has a track record of success in the NFL. In the last twenty years, the Jets have hired ten men to call plays for them. Nine of them held the offensive coordinator title while one was a head coach who ran the offense. Five of the ten had no experience calling plays on the NFL level.

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Of the five who had experience, two were Nathaniel Hackett and Adam Gase. The two were among the least effective offensive architects of their generation. Both Hackett and Gase had lucked into jobs coaching Hall of Fame quarterbacks, which they parlayed into plum gigs for other teams across the league. Marty Morinhinweg was best known for a disastrous stint as the Detroit Lions head coach under Matt Millen. Jeremy Bates was at one point viewed as an up and coming offensive mind. At the point the Jets promoted him to offensive coordinator in 2018, however, he was coming off a year as the team’s quarterbacks coach which followed a four year stint out of football. Of the veteran coaches the Jets have hired in the last two decades to oversee their offense, only Chan Gailey had anything resembling a quality track record.

Say what you will about Frank Reich. He does have a history of running quality offenses. In three of his five years as Colts head coach, Reich ran a top ten scoring offense. It’s more impressive when you consider how tumultuous the team’s quarterback situation was after the retirement of Andrew Luck during the preseason in 2019.

Prior to his stint with the Colts, Reich was the offensive coordinator of the Philadelphia Eagles who won the Super Bowl with backup quarterback Nick Foles. Reich didn’t call the plays in Philadelphia. Head coach Doug Pederson did, but still Reich has to get some of the credit for that feat.

The reality is turning around the Jets offense will be a massive undertaking. There simply is no time for on the job training. Tanner Engstrand might be a good offensive coordinator one day. He certainly seems to have mastered the media relations side of things based on the outpouring of praise his work with the Jets received in 2025 for no discernible reason. But in his sole season running the Jets offense, he frequently seemed to be in over his head, unable to figure out how to use what minimal talent he had or understand situational play calling. On a team with better players and an experienced quarterback, you might be able to live with an offensive coordinator’s growing pains. To pull off a massive turnaround, you need a coach who knows what he’s doing on day one.

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Simply put, the Jets needed someone with experience for this job, and Reich checks that box.

Dislikes:

Reich does have a record of success, but none of that success is recent.

He hasn’t even coached in the NFL for a full season from start to finish since 2021. He was fired by the Colts in season in 2022. Indianapolis finished 30th in scoring. Reich was promptly hired by Carolina in 2023 but fired before finishing his first season. The Panthers finished 31st in scoring. After sitting out 2024, Reich took over the head coaching job at Stanford University on an interim basis in 2025, guiding the Cardinal to a 4-8 record.

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In context, it’s debatable how much blame Reich really deserves for any of these struggles. The Colts finally hit the wall with an aged Matt Ryan playing quarterback in 2022 after years in the quarterback wilderness. Indianapolis has struggled at the position even after Reich departed. The Panthers have been a notoriously dysfunctional franchise, and Reich’s role in the trade up for Bryce Young has been disputed. And it’s tough to blame Reich for not doing better than 4-8 with a Stanford team he inherited on the fly.

Of course it’s one thing to say that Reich isn’t really to blame for any of these issues. The reality remains that Reich hasn’t had any sort of success in five years. At 64 years old, you have to seriously ask whether his best days are behind him.

Looking at the three finalists the Jets interviewed for offensive coordinator, Reich, Darrell Bevell, and Greg Roman, you do see a lot of the experience the Jets need in an offensive coordinator. You don’t, however, see names that many other teams covet. Unless I’ve missed it or something has gone unreported, I don’t believe any of the serious candidates for this job got so much as a coordinator interview from another team in this cycle.

That’s just the way things are for the Jets at the moment. This is not a coveted destination. People with options don’t want to come to this team. The best hope is to hire a coach with a good track record but whose stock is low right now and hope he bounces back.

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While Reich certainly won’t need on the job training, he isn’t a big enough offensive mind for his hiring to immediate turn around the perceptions about the Jets offense. Had the Jets landed Mike McDaniel, suddenly there would be a lot of confidence about things looking up. McDaniel wouldn’t consider the Jets right now, though. That’s where we are. This situation is too unstable for top choices to have any interest. And what we have in New York largely resembles the unstable circumstances where Reich failed in Indianapolis and Carolina.

A part of me wonders whether Greg Roman might have been a better fit. The Jets and Aaron Glenn have a lot of time to turn this offense around. Roman isn’t an elite coordinator by any stretch of the imagination. He is, however, a floor raiser. His ability to orchestrate a rushing attack has produced credible offenses without requiring top notch quarterback play. There have been a few rumors about Roman perhaps joining the staff in a lesser capacity so I guess we can keep an eye on that.

At the end of the day I would say Reich is a credible coach. He is a likely improvement on Engstrand, and has a much better pedigree than your typical Jets offensive coordinator. But the gravity he’s fighting will likely prove to be too much to overcome. The Jets got a quality coach, but they need a miracle worker (or short of that at least a top five offensive mind) to actually pull this off.