The Timing of Robert Saleh’s Firing Is Tough to Explain, But It Does Fit a Pattern

The decision stunned people in the Jets’ building Tuesday, though it fits a pattern of chaotic and near-constant shake-ups.

Saleh was fired five weeks into his fourth season as coach of the Jets. / Lucas Boland-Imagn Images

While nearly impossible, it’s important to put the fallout of the New York Jets’ firing of coach Robert Saleh into two distinct buckets. 

The first and most obvious: This is a move that, according to people familiar with the situation, stunned Florham Park on Tuesday morning. Saleh was obviously under pressure to win, but the Jets will play for a chance to tie for first place in the AFC East in six days. Saleh came in to work Tuesday expecting to continue preparation for the team’s Monday Night Football matchup against the Buffalo Bills. The Jets are sixth in defensive EPA per play allowed this year and first in the league since Saleh took the job in 2021. The Jets have also allowed the fewest points per drive during that time frame. Saleh was tasked with cleaning up organizational toxicity that had been building up since the decay of the Rex Ryan regime, and he spearheaded the development of the team’s best young defensive players since Darrelle Revis. The staff won seven games with a combination of Zach Wilson, Trevor Siemian and Tim Boyle last season, and is now just five games into a campaign with Aaron Rodgers, a quarterback Saleh tried to hold accountable despite his freewheeling nature and obvious stranglehold on the organization. 

The second and perhaps less obvious: Jets general manager Joe Douglas is entering the final year of his contract. Interim head coach Jeff Ulbrich is a legitimate head coaching candidate and, had the team defeated the Denver Broncos in Week 4, he would be discussed as one of the most sought-after head coaches on this year’s carousel (Ulbrich was on our prospective head coaches list in 2023). On the defensive side of the ball, he would be considered neck and neck with someone such as Minnesota Vikings DC Brian Flores. Ulbrich is also, like DeMeco Ryans, Dan Campbell, Antonio Pierce and some other trendy hires of late, a card-carrying member of the former player’s club, which tends to hold weight, especially in restless locker rooms and with teams who employ veteran quarterbacks. Ulbrich is, additionally, according to people familiar with the coaching industry, highly recommended by the same Shanahan tree from which Saleh was plucked. Combine the political advantages, job preservation and the need to satiate Jets owner Woody Johnson’s bizarre and premature desire to fire a coach (coincidentally after the Jets lost on British soil where Johnson was recently a U.S. ambassador and, just guessing here, surrounded by some of his former colleagues) and you have the recipe for a complete stunner. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that Johnson was not the one who hired Saleh, as that took place while Johnson was overseas and his son Christopher was acting owner. 

Johnson is making an aggressive gamble that the eventual tailwind of a coaching change will replace the prevailing emotions of the building on Tuesday, which were of shock, confusion and some notes of disbelief while the organization was preparing for a critical divisional matchup against a talented opponent also coming off a loss. 

Throughout his time as Jets owner, Johnson has constantly vacillated between the kinds of coaches and executives he sees as fitting leaders. He sacked the demure Eric Mangini for Rex Ryan, the ultimate wild card. He allowed Ryan’s general manager, Mike Tannenbaum, to spend aggressively, then sacked Tannenbaum, after two trips to the AFC title game, for John Idzik Jr., who appealed to Johnson because of his salary cap background and fiscal conservatism. Then, Johnson fired Idzik to hire Mike Maccagnan, allowing Maccagnan to re-sign Revis and Antonio Cromartie, sign Le’Veon Bell to a top-of-market deal and erase much of the excavation work Idzik had tried to do as general manager. These chaotic, near-constant shakeups laid the groundwork for one of the worst rosters in the NFL before Saleh arrived and a baked-in cynicism needing to be fumigated. 

While Saleh ultimately had a 20–36 record, it’s fair to assume there was an understanding that bringing the organization out of the swamp would take time. A year ago, the Jets beat the 5–0 Philadelphia Eagles and were one errant pass interference call away from knocking off the eventual Super Bowl–winning Kansas City Chiefs. Saleh coached the Jets to a win over the Bills in the season opener after the team lost Rodgers four snaps into the season. 

However, as the organization began to smash the fast-forward button on its rebuild, culminating in the signing of Rodgers to first mentor and then, later, completely replace Zach Wilson, Saleh likely worked himself into the owner’s crosshairs. We can now endlessly interpret the failed Saleh-Rodgers handshake like a Zapruder film. We can replay, over and over, the podium tête-à-tête the pair had over Rodgers’s staccato cadences. Though the inevitability was that Johnson’s impatience was only going to hold for so long. Despite the unrealistic nature of Johnson’s expectations—that a modern NFL offense immediately achieve top-of-the-league status with a 40-year-old quarterback coming off a torn Achilles by firing the club’s defensive-minded head coach—he has now turned to someone else in hopes that they will be fulfilled. 

When the seismic nature of this decision is given time to settle, it’s Johnson who will have to grapple with his own record and the concrete perception it has created for the franchise around the NFL. 

Again, we shouldn’t dismiss Ulbrich’s ability to read this locker room and pivot the franchise mid-season. It may turn out to be a move born completely of the wrong intentions that ends up producing favorable results. And Johnson had better hope so, because if Ulbrich doesn’t pan out, he’ll be left with the kind of torched farmland on which little can be built and a job that top head coaching candidates will avoid.  

Someone will take the job because, with only 32 positions available, there is always a soul curious and brave enough to believe they can make a difference in any given building. However, after what happened with Saleh and the way he was treated, we can assume those candidates will not necessarily be the best equipped for what lies ahead. Then again, with the Jets, who is?