It looked and felt like reactionary move on Tuesday morning, when Jets owner Woody Johnson made the shocking decision to fire coach Robert Saleh after more than three years on the job.
The Jets had massive expectations heading into this season, with quarterback Aaron Rodgers finally on the field. And then they showed up looking utterly unprepared to face the Broncos and Vikings and suffered humiliating losses to fall below .500.
It felt like the final straw for a fan base that started to turn on Saleh, en masse, last season after the Jets’ miserable failure to adjust to losing Rodgers. So Johnson must have seen something over the past two weeks that made him decide to make a change.
“I would refute that,” Johnson said, hours after moving on from Saleh. “It’s not just the last two games that has precipitated this decision. It’s a longer time frame. I’ve had a couple years to think about this. And yeah, I just think we can do better. The team can do better.”
More than one thing can be true.
Johnson did have longstanding doubts about Saleh. And for good reason.
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He never posted a winning record or even got to the final week of the season with the chance to end what has, at 13 seasons and counting, become the longest active drought in the four major North American sports.
And let’s not forget Johnson wasn’t involved in the hiring process that brought Saleh to the team – his younger brother Christopher Johnson, who served as acting owner for the four years Woody Johnson was away from the team serving as the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britan in the Trump administration, gave the final approval for the hire weeks before his older brother returned to run the team in January of 2021.
It’s remarkable Saleh made it this long considering Johnson was skeptical about his first-year head coach even before his regular season debut – Johnson, according to sources, wasn’t happy after the Jets performed poorly during training camp joint practices
But it’s also true that Saleh didn’t do himself any favors over the past two weeks, and that almost certainly played a role in him getting shown the door right now, even if Johnson isn’t willing to admit it.
It certainly didn’t help when Saleh unwittingly sparked a controversy after the Broncos loss as he tried to explain a rash of pre-snap penalties by wondering aloud if his players were “good enough or ready to handle all the cadence.” Quarterback Aaron Rodgers wasn’t thrilled when a reporter relayed to him Saleh’s message of an uncertain cadence future and predictably defended the Jets use of them, and suggested the team focus less on changing the way they do cadence, and more on holding players accountable for their mistakes.
In hindsight, it’s fitting that Saleh spent a good part of his final week as Jets coach dealing with the fallout, at one point explaining away the whole “cadence issue” as a “created” storyline, when of course it was it was a self-inflicted wound, created by his imprecise choice of words.
The whole ordeal pointed to the accountability disconnect between the head coach and the locker room that ultimately doomed his tenure, and made it obvious he had taken this team as far as he was capable of.
The problem wasn’t that Saleh refused to talk about accountability. He did. And sometimes he’d take it. But it often came across as the surface-level coach speak of someone who was checking a box because he knew he was supposed to – in large part because he put in a lot more time and energy into explaining why everything had gone wrong, and why it was something that he could get fixed, with time – and not the carefully chosen words and actions of a leader who knows that he’s setting the tone, not just for the locker room but for the entire building.
That doesn’t change the fact that, even after the ugly and necessary end, Saleh has a lot to do with the Jets being in a far better place now than they were when he took over as coach in early 2021. And, like it or not, he helped build the foundation that has put the Jets within striking distance of where they want to go, even if he isn’t the right man to lead them there.
He created an environment that helped young, unproven players (like Quincy Williams, Bryce Huff and Michael Carter II) maximize their talent.
He also got the locker room, after years of being a punchline, to believe it was good enough to beat any team, long before anyone else did. And it showed in early 2022, when the Jets started 6-3 and charged into December at 7-4 firmly in charge of their playoff destiny only to lose the last six games. The problem was, they could also lose to any team, and they tended to do just that the higher the stakes got, like the final six games of 2022, when they lost their final se which they did in dropping six straight to end the season and miss the playoffs.
Saleh had no problem getting his team to perform when nobody believed they could. He had no issue pushing his team to keep going through intense adversity. But when it came to handling their own success, when it becomes easy to fall into the trap of thinking one has arrived and has it all figured out, Saleh couldn’t convince his team of what the best teams know: you’ve never arrived, you’ve never got it all figured out.
Of course, that was apparent by the end of last season, when Saleh proved unable to follow one of his most-used slogans: keep the main thing the main thing. He was quick to come up with explanations (some might call them excuses) for his team’s failures, and seemed more interested in lamenting what was lost and how it ruined their grand plans, than getting the most out of the talent they still had.
So why did Johnson decide to keep Saleh a year ago, only to get rid of him now?
“We didn’t have this team last season,” Johnson said. “But we’ve got an unbelievable team [now].”
In short, he bought into the story Saleh was telling the world in the hopes of keeping his job: that having Rodgers on the field would fix everything.
Unfortunately, the Jets followed their leader and bought into the same story, once again, deeming themselves true contenders before the they played a down. And thinking they’d finally arrived after they pasted a lowly New England team on TNF to improve to 2-1 after Week 3.
So imagine what Johnson was thinking – after that Week 3 high, and after an offseason of demanding winning and progress now – as he watched his team respond to their own success by showing up completely unready in back to back weeks, and squandering both because of it. Imagine what he was feeling as he listened to his coach talk repeatedly about how there was still so much time left in the season for them to get things right.
No one around the Jets wants to hear about patience. Not when they’ve regularly had to wait multiple weeks between touchdowns for several years
Not the players. Not the fans. And certainly not the owner, who finally realized that every week he waited for Saleh to finally start getting it right was a week the Jets couldn’t get back if they squandered another winnable game.
“One of the reasons that I decided to make a coaching change at the highest level is exactly that,” Johnson said, speaking about the offense but it applies to the all encompassing task ahead now for Ulbrich. “We need to find ways to win and so we’re not going to find those ways by doing the same thing over and over and over.”
And that’s how and why it ended this way: with a star defender, Quincy Williams calling out the team’s lack of accountability on camera, with the underperforming core of their offense unable to score or hide their intensifying frustration from the world. And coach who showed up for work Tuesday morning for what he thought would be a normal day, only to be asked to leave and not come back.
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