Tuesday Whispers – As the Jets coaching world turns . . .

I was going to Mobile for the Senior Bowl, but after all day at Newark Airport yesterday, that didn’t happen – LOL.

Today, ESPN’s Adam Schefter announced the Jets are parting ways with offensive coordinator Tanner Engstrand.

This should not be a surprise.

On January 23, NFL Insider Aaron Wilson of KPRC-TV in Houston announced, “Offensive coordinator Tanner Engstrad remains on Aaron Glenn staff, per league sources, while role. responsibilities, structure of the 29th-ranked total, scoring offense expected to change, and still being defined.”

Once Wilson made this announcement, you could argue that Engstrand wasn’t long for the organization.

If you are going to have a new offensive play-caller, how uncomfortable would it be to have the old play-caller working under him?

Not a great set-up for sure. Awkward.

If you are going to replace him, you need a clean break.

And while I don’t call for anybody to be fired, now that it’s happened, I telling you, the only way Aaron Glenn has a chance of turning things around as Jets coach is to have two experienced, seasoned play-callers running his offense and defense.

He needs two master chess players.

The Jets lost the chess matches too often last year with the old offensive and defensive coordinators, who obviously weren’t ideal selections.

Both good men, but Engstrand have never called offensive plays before on the NFL level, and Steve Wilks had, but was fired after one year of doing it in both Cleveland and San Francisco. Wilks’ best role as a coach is as a secondary coach, and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s a good job.

While a lot of people are down on Glenn after a 3-14 first season where his team often seemed over-matched, if he had all-star coordinators running all three units, three high-level strategists, I think he has a shot. He can focus on being the leader of men, and those cats can handle the chess match in all three phases.

He hit the special team’s coordinator hire out of the park last year, and now he’s got to do the same with the OC and DC spots.

This is where Hymie and Ira come in. They have to allow Glenn to spend the requisite money to land two guys like that.

There is no salary cap for coaches.

One of the biggest reasons the New England Patriots are in the Super Bowl, aside from hiring Mike Vrabel, is that they brought back OC Josh McDaniels and are paying him big bucks. McDaniels’ development of QB Drake Maye and his brilliant play-calling for the kid is a big reason the Patriots will be playing on the last Sunday of the season.

Will Hymie and Ira push Woody to write whatever checks are necessary to secure big-time OCs and DCs, we shall see. They are major players in the Jets’ financial picture and decision-making process.

And it applies also to replacing all the assistant coaches who were fired. They need to pay the going rate to get the best candidates they get at each spot.

There was a bloodletting on the defensive side of the ball, with almost every assistant being fired.

While many of these guys were victims of a bad roster, especially on defense, the Jets’ defense was so horrid this year that even if some of the Jets’ struggles were personally related and not the fault of position coaches, fair or unfair, many would argue that blowing things up is justified.

The Jets were blown out in the last five games of the season, and in each game, their defense was a horror show, non-competitive, aside from the first half against New Orleans.

And another issue for these position coaches, was working under a coordinator, who Glenn should never have been hired as DC (he should have been hired as assistant head coach/secondary – what we wrote a year ago). He was their boss, and it didn’t work out well for him or them.

So while some of you don’t love Woody Johnson as an owner, whether it was Johnson, or an owner like Steve Bisciotti or Kraft, after what we saw this year, most owners would have called for massive changes to the defense.

Now the owner needs to open up his checkbook and pay what it takes to hire two big-time coordinators. Not a time to pull in the purse strings.

January 27, 2026

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