Breece Hall has a chance on Sunday to put Robert Saleh right back in the middle of the mess he left behind.
Saleh will make his Titans debut against the Jets on Sunday afternoon, and the buildup around him has been loud all offseason. A lot of that national conversation has tried to clean up his New York tenure, framing him as a coach who got a raw deal and was wrongfully pushed out in October 2024. The part that keeps getting left out is that Saleh still had real offensive talent to work with, including Hall and Garrett Wilson.
Hall, though, hasn’t sounded like a player eager to join the rescue mission.
During training camp in July, the fifth-year running back made comments that were widely read as a shot at his former coach. Hall pointed to the difference he’s felt in the organization now compared with what he had before.
“I feel like there’s a lot more organizational stability, which I feel like helps the players because I feel like the players are only going to be as good as the organization is,” Hall said in July. “You can’t have good players and not have a stable organization and still have a good team.”
Those words landed in the same neighborhood as comments from ex-Jets defensive lineman Solomon Thomas, who has reunited with Saleh in Tennessee. Thomas, 31, had previously played for Saleh with the 49ers and criticized the Jets organization for what he saw as a disconnect between management, the coaching staff, and the team.
Sunday gives Hall a clean stage to remind Saleh what he walked away from. Aaron Rodgers’ 2023 injury doesn’t get pinned on Saleh here, but the results down the stretch still tell a blunt story: the Jets went 8-19 in Saleh’s final 27 games dating back to December 2022.
The bigger issue was what happened around that talent. Saleh had Hall and the rest of the Jets’ offensive core, but he was working with Mike LaFleur and Nathaniel Hackett as offensive coordinators. LaFleur has since picked up some revisionist shine because of his recent success with the Rams, which only reinforces how quickly people forget the lessons of Josh McDaniels.
And it’s fair to ask why Hackett is now LaFleur’s offensive coordinator in Arizona.
If Saleh had shown more common sense when putting together his first Jets staff in 2021, he might not have hired an inexperienced LaFleur to help develop Zach Wilson. Instead, he made a series of decisions that helped create the environment Hall has been stuck in, and one that has kept him from experiencing a winning season.
The irony doesn’t stop there. If the Titans had shown common sense, Mike Vrabel might still be there, and they wouldn’t have used the No. 4 pick on a receiver.
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