MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Breece Hall walked off the field, shook owner Woody Johnson’s hand on his way into the locker room, changed out of his jersey, put on his headphones and hopped into the cold tub. That’s his routine after every game, win or lose. As his body sunk into a tub full of ice-cold water, he couldn’t hear anything but the music.
At some point, he must have felt the reverberations of Aaron Glenn’s voice in the other room. Glenn’s comments — voluminous, brimming with anger, emotion and expletives — carried through the walls separating the visitor’s locker room from the compact postgame press conference at Hard Rock Stadium. Glenn’s words were loud, and clear, to anyone close enough to hear them. His directive at the end was simple: Get ready to go to work.
“I don’t remember exactly what the message was word for word,” cornerback Sauce Gardner said, “but we’re 0-4 and it’s not OK.”
Hall didn’t need to hear it to hear it. He’s been here before — literally here, in Miami, their Hard Rock House of Horrors, a place the Jets haven’t won since 2014. Some of their worst losses have happened here. Hall, Gardner, and wide receiver Garrett Wilson have stood in this locker room since they all were drafted together in 2022, and tried to explain away lost moments, lost games, lost seasons. They’ve done it elsewhere too. The same tale, told pretty much the same way. On Monday, Hall found a fitting — if distasteful — way to summarize their troubles:
“Teams will shoot themselves in the foot,” he said, “and we’ll come back and shoot ourselves in the head.”
These Jets have been here before, but not here, winless through four games. There were only two head coaches in Jets history that started 0-4 in their debut season before Monday night: Adam Gase in 2019 and Lou Holtz in 1976. Glenn joined their company after a 27-21 loss to the Dolphins, a game that often felt more lopsided than the final score might indicate, the result of a comedy of errors that weren’t particularly funny. If the Jets fall to 0-5 next week with a loss to the Cowboys, Glenn will be the first coach in Jets history to ever lose his first five games.
This one was like the others this season, and many in the years gone by: baffling mistakes, confounded by other mistakes, confounded by an inability to overcome them in any meaningful way.
“We have to understand before you can win games,” Glenn said, “you have to learn how not to lose games.”
That’s been a lifelong lesson plan. Glenn was never going to fix all of the Jets’ problems overnight. But four games into his tenure, he hasn’t fixed any of them — and in some ways, this team is worse in areas that weren’t a problem before Glenn arrived. Pick and choose some stats from Monday’s game and you’d think the Jets won. They out-gained the Dolphins on offense 404 to 300. They were better on third down (4 of 9 for the Jets, 4 of 12 for the Dolphins), rushed for 197 yards, held Miami under 200 passing yards, had more total first downs (23 to 19) and only punted twice.
But they also were flagged for penalties 16 times — 13 of them were accepted for 101 yards. They turned the ball over three times, all on fumbles at terrible times. Through three quarters, Justin Fields had only thrown for 110 yards. For the fourth straight game, the Jets failed to force a turnover — making them the fifth team in the last 90 years, per ESPN, to start a season 0-4 without recording a takeaway. The things that were supposed to improve have stayed the same. A defense that was once a strength has looked more like a weakness (the Jets have allowed 27 or more points in three of their four games).
The good vibes of Glenn’s first offseason evaporated into the humid Florida air, and now the coach is left trying to figure out why the things he’s coaching, the things he’s preaching, aren’t changing anything.
“Have we been 0-4 since I’ve been here?” Gardner asked, rhetorically. “It’s extremely shocking. I want to win. Period, point blank. When I was younger coming into the league it was just like: me, Garrett, the young people, we just gotta do our job. But now it’s to a point where it’s like: It’s bigger than just me. I want to win. That’s something I want on my resume: Winning. Nobody wants to keep losing.”
Said Hall: “We’re doing pretty much everything we can to lose the game right now. It’s just a matter of us not making dumb mistakes. When we have (so many) penalties we’re not going to win the game — and we still almost won the game. I’ve been dealing with it for four years, so it’s frustrating.”
There was hope early, but a sign of things to come came first. It was an inauspicious start, the Jets called for two penalties on the opening kickoff, followed by a Dolphins march down the field for a field goal.
Then came the hope, a Jets offense carrying itself like it did in Week 1, when they ran it down the Steelers’ throat even as everyone in the stadium knew they were going to run it. That happened again on Monday: A drive that opened with 10 rushes, all of them successful (six yards, nine yards, six yards, five yards, 15 yards, 19 yards, four yards, no yards, six yards, four yards). There was one pass attempt, a 5-yard completion.
And then on the 11th carry, it all came crashing down. Braelon Allen took the ball at the 6-yard line and, as he lunged toward the end zone, had the ball punched out of his grasp by Dolphins corner Jack Jones. Miami picked it up and the pendulum swung away, right away. It was Allen’s first fumble in 110 NFL carries. The Dolphins promptly stormed back the other way with a 15-play, 96-yard scoring drive capped by a 4-yard touchdown catch for tight end Darren Waller, who hadn’t played in an NFL game since 2023. Allen injured his knee on the ensuing kickoff and was promptly ruled out. On that drive, Fields fumbled the ball away on a fourth-down sack.
“Every turnover was impactful,” Glenn said. “Obviously (Allen’s) was one that’s going to be magnified because it was right there … I thought he was about to go in and score, but every turnover is impactful. I’m not about to just put it on that. You cannot win in this league when that happens and I can continue saying that over and over, but to have three of them and have that many penalties, it’s tough.”
The third one came later. The Jets went into halftime, somehow, trailing just 10-3 after a last-second, 58-yard field goal by Nick Folk. On his way into the locker room, Glenn explained to the sideline reporter how turnovers and penalties were killing them — but the “good news,” he said, was that the Jets were getting the ball back after halftime. Not for long.
In Week 1, Xavier Gipson fumbled away a fourth-quarter kickoff and was made an example by Glenn: He was released days later, a message that those sort of mistakes wouldn’t be tolerated. In his wake, the Jets signed Isaiah Williams off the Bengals practice squad.
So there Williams was, fielding a second-half kickoff that looked like it might have gone out of bounds had he let it go. Instead he caught it, ran 30 yards and, as he fought for extra yardage, fumbled it away. Waller scored another touchdown a few plays later, screaming wide open after the Jets fell for a Tagovailoa bootleg, a recurrence throughout the evening.
“I let the team down,” Williams said. “We can’t have those mistakes.”
Later, Williams fair caught a punt at the three-yard line rather than let it bounce into the end zone for a touchback. He admitted that he was thinking about making a play then at the last minute saw a Dolphins defender closing in and lost track of where he was.
“We just have to be smart. We have to be smart,” Glenn said. “We can’t let that happen to us.”
All offseason, Glenn was quick to point out how the Jets were the most penalized team in the NFL last season — and how that wouldn’t be acceptable any longer. On Monday night, five of the penalties called on the Jets offense were procedural: illegal shifts, false starts and a delay of game. There were a few penalties called after the whistle too — an unnecessary roughness from guard John Simpson, and another from linebacker Kiko Mauigoa after hitting Tua Tagovailoa, sliding well short of the sticks on a third down. A few plays later, the Dolphins scored on a 9-yard De’Von Achane rushing touchdown to go up 24-10. Gardner was called for pass interference earlier that drive. Wilson was flagged for offensive pass interference on the final play of the third quarter, a questionable call that negated a remarkable touchdown catch.
Gardner has a theory as to why the penalties keep happening: “I watch football and I just feel like — and I don’t know if this is wrong to say — but I think I get called for more stuff just based off of us not winning,” Gardner said. “I watch these winning programs and there’s some egregious things that don’t get called … We don’t win and I feel like we don’t get the calls that we should get and we get calls we shouldn’t get called for. Obviously, that’s not why I want to win. I want to win because I don’t like losing.”
At the two-minute warning, Jets owner Woody Johnson sauntered through the visitor’s tunnel and into the locker room. As he walked through the doors, the crowd bellowed. Wilson had made up for the touchdown he’d lost earlier with another impressive grab, snaring a Fields pass over Dolphins cornerback Rasul Douglas’ head for a 23-yard touchdown.
Moments later, Glenn screamed in the locker room. Then he composed himself. He calmly walked into the press conference room and, in a measured tone, explained another one that got away.
At one point, a reporter started a question with a prompt: When you took this job, you knew it wouldn’t be smooth sailing…
Recently, in discussing the long-term nature of turning around the Jets, Glenn said that it takes a while to turn a ship around. Now, he’s just trying to keep from sinking.
Read more on The New York Times
