Jets' firing of Robert Saleh comes at the wrong time
Jets head coach Robert Saleh talks to reporters after an NFL game against the Minnesota Vikings on Sunday at the Tottenham Hotspur stadium in London. Credit: AP/Kirsty Wigglesworth
It was always clear that this season was going to be Robert Saleh’s Last Stand as head coach of the Jets, a year in which he would be handed the best roster of his tenure with a capable quarterback for the first time in his career and he would either make it work . . . or be out of work. Even without the dire “playoff mandate” from owner Woody Johnson, that was the underlying, unspoken deal. It’s really the only reason the Jets brought him back for 2024, to give him a supposedly fair shot after 2023’s efforts were essentially tanked four plays into the opening game.
So no one should be shocked that this all-or-nothing coin flip of a campaign landed on the latter.
What is surprising is how quickly it happened. And now that it has, with the announcement that Saleh was fired on Tuesday, the biggest flaw in Johnson’s plan appears to be why it didn’t happen much, much sooner.
If Johnson knew in the back of his mind that Saleh’s security as head coach was so tenuous that he wouldn’t last a month into this fourth season as head coach, that two losses that essentially came due to a missed 50-yard field goal and a pick-6 interception would topple the entire experiment, then he would have been much better off making in January the decision he made on Tuesday.
The Jets could have regrouped and done an extensive hiring search. They could have gauged the interest of candidates such as Bill Belichick and Jim Harbaugh and Mike Vrabel, conducted interviews with offensive coordinators, and given themselves time to build a staff to match what Johnson called “one of the most talented teams ever assembled” by the Jets. Now they have to wade through their own chaos to try to straighten this out.
There is a reason only two interim head coaches have come in from the bullpen and carried their teams to the postseason in the Super Bowl era: Bruce Arians with the 2012 Colts and Rich Bisaccia with the 2022 Raiders. They each assumed the job under very different than typical circumstances, however. Arians took over when Chuck Pagano was diagnosed with leukemia and Bisaccia after Jon Gruden resigned. Since the NFL merger in 1970 no team has made the playoffs after firing their head coach in midseason.
Now the Jets are counting on Jeff Ulbrich as their interim head coach to turn this failing staff and underperforming roster into a playoff-worthy success . . . and to do it on the fly. As the IHC of the NYJ noted on Tuesday, he began his morning as the defensive coordinator devising game plans to stop Josh Allen in the upcoming contest against the Bills and four hours later he was standing in front of the cameras for what was essentially his introductory virtual news conference in his new role.
“It’s been a whirlwind,” he said.
It’s going to continue to be one, too.
Maybe he can get the job done. There is a good chance Ulbrich is a better head coach than Saleh. He probably can’t be worse. And if he shakes up the offensive roles on his staff in the right way it will certainly help. But the disappointments of 2023 called for wholesale changes and instead the Jets opted for the status quo.
So now they are here, in status woe.
Saleh was the same coach on Sunday in London that he was when the 2023 season ended. Same personality, same style, same limitations. Same unwillingness to hold players and members of his coaching staff accountable and inability to initiate the changes that need to be made. Same blank stares from the sideline during games and slumping body language when things were slipping away from him.
Johnson didn’t care for any of that, obviously. The owner said on Tuesday that he has had “a couple of years to think about this” and his decision was based not on the losses to the Broncos and Vikings but a “longer time frame.” He said there was “quite a lot of soul searching and looking back at my experiences in sports, particularly with the New York Jets for 25 years” before coming to this conclusion.
With patience in such short supply then, why did Johnson stick with Saleh when no one would have blinked twice if he’d fired him after the terrible 2023 campaign?
“We didn’t have this team last season,” Johnson said. “We’ve got an unbelievable team. It just felt like the right decision to make at this time so I made the decision to do it now.”
Before it was too late to salvage this season, in other words.
If the Jets win on Monday they’ll be in first place in the AFC East and may be back on the rails toward their first postseason appearance in 13 seasons. A lot has to happen for either of those things to occur, some of which Ulbrich can control and some — such as quarterback Aaron Rodgers not playing like a limping, washed-up, 40-year-old has-been — he probably can’t.
But even if the very best takes shape and all of it comes together for a playoff push, that doesn’t make the timing of this any easier to understand. Simply put: Johnson made it harder for this team to reach its potential by not firing Saleh in January, not easier for them by firing him in October.
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.
