A look at the four keys to success for new Jets coach Aaron Glenn

FLORHAM PARK, N.J. -- Aaron Glenn has experienced the best and worst of the New York Jets.

He knows what it's like to be a laughingstock, which happened in his third season as a player -- a 1-15 record in 1996. He also knows the flip side, the adrenaline rush of being part of something special. The Jets won a franchise-record 12 games in 1998, captured their first division title in three decades and reached the AFC Championship Game.

In recent years, they've hovered at the bottom, increasing the degree of difficulty for Glenn, who begins his first training camp as head coach on July 22. He's been on the job for six months, changing everything from the roster to the support staff to the way they think and talk about football.

It's a full-blown overhaul of the culture.

"We want to create our own narrative, we want to write our own book," Glenn said, adding: "When it's all said and done, this is going to be a book that a lot of people would like to read."

It won't be easy.

The last six full-time coaches finished with losing records, including Rex Ryan, the last coach to lead them to the playoffs (2010). Glenn doesn't need a history lesson; he knows how the franchise and its fan base have suffered. It's one of the things that attracted him to the job. He wants to finish what his mentor, Bill Parcells, almost accomplished in the '98 season, when they came within minutes of the Super Bowl.

"This is part of his legacy," cornerback Sauce Gardner said of Glenn.

Glenn will do it his way. He might chafe some people with his gruff personality, but he has a plan and he's not likely to deviate from it. No one has complained, he said. To illustrate that, he shared a snippet from a conversation with linebacker Quincy Williams, who told him, "Coach, the reason I know things are changing is because there's no bitching about anything as far as how we do things."

This is the honeymoon period, the time for unbridled optimism. No one was more fired up than former coach Robert Saleh, who, at his introductory news conference in 2021, predicted multiple Super Bowl titles. Then reality set in, and the Jets continued with their losing ways.

They have nine straight losing seasons.

Fourteen straight seasons out of the playoffs, the league's longest active drought.

Twenty-two seasons without a division title.

Winning? What's that?

Their longest-tenured player, long snapper Thomas Hennessy, was a junior at Duke for the Jets' last winning season, 2015. Nearly an entire generation of players has passed through One Jets Drive without having experienced a plus-.500 record, let alone a postseason berth.

It's not that different than the early portion of Glenn's playing career, when losing was the norm. Former Jets star Keyshawn Johnson, who played with Glenn from 1996 to 1999, said his former teammate can use that to his advantage.

"He can tell them, 'Once upon a time, I was 1-15 and we had a young receiver in here who had fire coming out of his nose,'" said Johnson, describing himself. "AG has seen it all."

For Glenn, who has no previous head-coaching experience, there are four keys to success, all of which will begin to take shape in training camp:

1. Establish toughness. The Jets had all the earmarks of a soft team last season, mentally and physically. Glenn's challenge is to change the mentality and make them believe they can be the bully, the team that dictates the tenor of a game.

To do that, they must win the line of scrimmage. That didn't happen in 2024, as they showed little interest in running the ball (last in attempts) and did a poor job of tackling when teams ran against them (1,647 yards after contact, third most). Some of that can be attributed to personnel. Some of it was fundamentals and attitude.

Glenn's objective is to improve the latter two, and it starts this summer with the creation of an identity.

They will be run-oriented on offense. Makes sense, considering their strengths are the offensive line and the running backs, not to mention the dynamic running ability of quarterback Justin Fields.

From all indications, they will do more live tackling than in recent camps. There are CBA rules that limit physical contact (16 padded practices), but as Glenn said, "The only way you get good at that craft is to do it."

The downside is an increased injury risk and potential fatigue. The last thing a coach wants to do is burn out his team in training camp. In this case, the players expect a more intense camp than last year.

"It's going to be hard," said nickel back Michael Carter II, who believes players will embrace the change.

Glenn also needs to work on the mindset. This team lacked killer instinct in 2024 -- a franchise-record six losses after leading in the fourth quarter. There also was a shortage of resilience. When they were down, they usually stayed down -- only two wins after trailing in the fourth quarter. Only twice did they overcome a double-digit deficit, and they wound up losing both those games.

2. Improve situationally. In the NFL, where 59% of the games last season were decided by one score, a well-executed drive in crunch time can mean the difference between winning and losing. It's why coaches always preach the importance of situational football.

The Jets, who finished 5-12, were 3-7 in one-score games, including five in which they had the ball in the final two minutes with a chance to take the lead. In one-possession games, they were outscored 26-10 in the final two minutes of regulation and overtime. They were undermined by a lack of situational awareness, which goes to coaching and preparation. There were sacks, interceptions, blown coverages and penalties, too many negative plays to overcome.

Glenn emphasized situational football in the spring, and there's hope that it will carryover into training camp. He likes unscripted periods, which are quasi-scrimmages.

"He likes to put the ball down and just let us play," running back Breece Hall said.

Glenn has a meticulous approach that dates to his playing days, according to former Jets coach Al Groh, one of Glenn's mentors.

"I don't think I've ever been around a player that took walk throughs more seriously than Aaron Glenn did," Groh said.

3. Create accountability. An opposing player had this to say about the Jets after facing them last season: "Good roster. They're just not playing together and for each other."

It's on Glenn to change that.

There's an edge to him, and he will coach them hard, demanding accountability. He moved on from strong personalities such as quarterback Aaron Rodgers, wide receiver Davante Adams and cornerback D.J. Reed, replacing them with players that he believes will fit better into his program.

"Straightforward. Honest," Williams said of Glenn's coaching style. "What I'm talking about is, we don't wait until we get to the meeting room. It's honest and straightforward on the field, so you can get it corrected right then."

Glenn isn't a sugarcoating kind of guy. If a player doesn't appreciate his directness, he probably won't love the new boss, who is a lot different than the old bosses.

Under Saleh and interim coach Jeff Ulbrich, the atmosphere was player-friendly to the extreme. For the most part, players were immune from harsh criticism, according to team sources. Ulbrich went so far as to praise edge rusher Haason Reddick for being unselfish -- the same player who sat out half the season because of a holdout over his contract and produced little when he arrived (one sack). That certainly raised eyebrows.

A tolerant approach can work in certain situations. It didn't work for the Jets. Coupled with an alarming number of penalties -- second-most in the NFL from 2021 to 2024 -- it created the perception of a discipline problem.

4. Win the trust of the locker room. The players appear to be buying what Glenn is selling, but it always helps to have validation. Sure, they know what he accomplished as a player (15 years in the league) and as an assistant coach, most recently as the Detroit Lions' defensive coordinator, but they want to see it for themselves. It's only natural when a new coach takes over.

Parcells experienced the same thing in 1997, when he inherited the rag-tag outfit that went 1-15. He had won two Super Bowls with the New York Giants and an AFC Championship with the New England Patriots, but his culture-changing impact on the Jets wasn't cemented until a 41-3 road victory over the Seattle Seahawks in the first game of the season.

There it was -- proof that this irascible, hard-driving coach was going to make everybody better if you believed in his not-for-the-faint-of-heart ways. Glenn hopes to have that kind of transformative moment.

In the meantime, he's trying to build trust by getting to know his players on a personal level. Soon after he was hired, he made it a point to reach out to veteran players, speaking to them individually. Williams said they spent 90 minutes on the phone, one of several players to acknowledge long chats with the new boss.

"We had some tough conversations, we had some funny conversations," Gardner said. "We have all types of conversations."

Glenn said he learned from Parcells that a coach needs to know what makes a player tick before he can push his buttons. Parcells was able to connect with players from different backgrounds, whether it was a brash, young receiver from South Central Los Angeles or an older quarterback from suburban Long Island.