Aaron Glenn didn’t need a deep dive to identify what bothered him most after the Jets’ Week 4 loss to the Bears. The numbers were ugly across the board, but the New York coach said the real issue wasn’t just the yardage - it was the penalties and the failure to finish drives defensively.
The Jets were outplayed in almost every direction in Chicago. They went 0-for-7 on third down, ran only 32 plays and were flagged 12 times for 76 yards.
On the other side, they surrendered 492 total yards, including 232 on the ground. For a team trying to build around Glenn’s defensive vision, it was a rough afternoon.
Still, Glenn pointed to a more specific problem than the raw stat sheet. He said the penalties repeatedly erased chances to get off the field, which let the Bears keep possessions alive.
"So the yards -- that's not really the issue with me," Glenn said, per the team. "It's more or less the penalties that happened that negated plays where we should have got off the field.
I'm more thinking about that than anything else. I mean, yards are yards.
"It's some of the other undisciplined plays that we have when it comes to penalties. When it comes to having a chance to get off the field and not making the plays that we have to make, and they get to extend drives."
That’s the kind of mistake that can snowball fast against a Chicago offense coached by Ben Johnson, whom the source described as arguably the best offensive mind in the NFL. Giving an attack like that extra chances is a dangerous formula, even if the final score only showed 23 points allowed.
For the Jets, the encouraging part is that the damage wasn’t even worse. The less encouraging part is that the problems were self-inflicted, and Glenn made it clear that discipline is where his focus sits after the loss. If New York can tighten that up, there’s still a path to looking much cleaner.
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