The New York Jets are running out of room for excuses, and the calendar is starting to do the damage.
What looked like a manageable opening stretch back in May has already turned into a missed opportunity. The Jets opened with a win over the Tennessee Titans, then came up short against the Green Bay Packers, Detroit Lions and Chicago Bears.
The expectation was that New York could survive that run at 2-2. Instead, the Jets are 1-3, and the gap between those two records is enormous.
The strange part is that the early schedule ended up being kinder than it first appeared. Micah Parsons, Josh Jacobs, Brian Branch, Kerby Joseph and Caleb Williams all sat out their teams’ games against New York. Even with those breaks, the Jets still couldn’t cash in.
Now the road gets tougher in a hurry.
Sunday’s game against the Cleveland Browns carries real weight. The Browns arrive on a three-game winning streak, and first-year head coach Todd Monken has them moving in the right direction while Deshaun Watson is playing some of his best football in years. After that comes a trip to Foxborough to face the 2-2 New England Patriots, where the Jets are 2-18 in their last 20 games against New England at Gillette Stadium.
Then there’s the rest of the path: a home date with the 0-4 Miami Dolphins and a meeting with the 3-1 Las Vegas Raiders, whose only loss came by three points last Sunday against the undefeated Kansas City Chiefs. That’s not the kind of runway a 1-3 team wants to see.
The difference between 1-3 and 2-2 is massive. At 2-2, a team can absorb a loss and still keep moving.
At 1-3, every week starts to feel like a hinge point. For the Jets, dropping to 1-4 before heading to New England would put them in deep trouble.
And that reality brings Aaron Glenn back into the center of the conversation.
There’s no need to jump straight to a firing, but Glenn is hardly sitting comfortably either. In his first 21 games as Jets head coach, he is 4-17, the second-worst start through 21 games among New York’s 19 full-time head coaches, ahead of only Rich Kotite.
Woody Johnson has shown he is willing to move on midseason, most notably when he fired Robert Saleh after a 2-3 start in 2024. The situations aren’t identical, but the message is the same: patience has limits. Johnson wants wins, and if he looks around the league at the early success of first-year head coaches like Monken and Kubiak, the contrast only gets sharper.
Nobody is saying Glenn should be gone if the Jets lose on Sunday. But if Cleveland hands them a rough defeat, the noise around his job security is only going to get louder. In-season change would be a short-term fix at best, but it would not be shocking if the question surfaces.
At this stage, Glenn’s shot at a third year on the job already looks thin. Another loss would make even finishing the season a real conversation.
The Jets are already carrying the weight of a 3-14 season from last year, and Glenn still hasn’t done enough to show he’s pulling them forward. The blown game management against Green Bay did him no favors, and an ugly loss to the Bears only revived the same concerns from his first season.
That’s where the story sits now: a team that can’t point to the schedule anymore, and a head coach who is starting to look like the common thread in all of it. On Sunday, he’ll be standing across from one of those successful first-year coaches.
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