NFL Security Had to Escort Fired Coach Out of Building: Report
The great thing about the NFL is that it’s one of the most consistently surprising top-flight sports leagues in the world.
This isn’t Formula One or the English Premier League — two associations I love, to be fair, but one where one or two teams almost always dominate the season. It’s not even the NBA, where, despite 16 teams making the playoffs (actually 20 if you count the play-in games for the final two seeds, which are de facto playoff games), you can be pretty much assured before the season starts who has a chance at making the NBA Finals and who doesn’t.
In the NFL, the Detroit Lions — one of the league’s most consistent losers — came within a hair’s breath of the Super Bowl last year. They were defeated by the San Francisco 49ers, led by a star QB who was the last player taken in his NFL Draft class. The 49ers lost to the Kansas City Chiefs, who … all right, they’ve been predictably great for most of the last decade, but their last Super Bowl appearance before the Patrick Mahomes era was after the 1969 season, when they were repping the American Football League, not the American Football Conference.
But, if there’s one airtight rule that applies to any NFL season, it’s this: The New York Jets are gonna New York Jet, even with Aaron Rodgers.
In the latest plot twist in the never-ending football soap opera “As the Gang Green Dumpster Fire Turns,” head coach Robert Saleh was fired after a 2-3 start. Not only that, he had to be escorted out of the building by security, according to reports.
Now, after being a popular preseason pick to go to the Super Bowl, the Jets will have to navigate a rocky patch of its schedule with an interim head coach, deal with the fallout from the controversial forced exit (literally) of the popular Saleh, and even questions from Islamic groups over why the Muslim Saleh became the first Jets head coach to be fired in-season under current owner Woody Johnson.
“Per multiple sources, Jets coach Robert Saleh was escorted out of the building by the team’s director of security, after Saleh got the news,” the usually reliable Mike Florio of NBC Sports reported. “That didn’t happen, we’re told, when the Jets fired Saleh’s predecessor, Adam Gase.”
And Gase was far, far worse than Saleh, who’s brought the Jets to respectability with a tight defense. Unfortunately, the offense hasn’t exactly done the job — and the return of Aaron Rodgers after he was out for the season due to an injury on the first drive of the 2023 campaign hasn’t actually helped matters.
Florio said that while this isn’t unprecedented, there are few precedents. The last one he remembers was Cleveland Browns general manager George Kokinis, who was escorted out by security in 2009. However, as ESPN noted at the time, Kokinis was dismissed by the team “for cause,” not performance, and there were no shortage of unconfirmed rumors about Kokinis’ personal life that supposedly precipitated the firing and the personal escort out of the building. (We’ll just leave it there.)
“For high-level employees of any organization, it’s a bad look. It’s a power play, plain and simple,” Florio said.
But remember: Jets are gonna Jet.
Johnson, who has owned the team for exactly a quarter of a century now, said the decision to fire Saleh was “my decision and mine alone.” He’ll be replaced by defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich.
“This is probably the best team I’ve had in 25 years,” Johnson said during a conference call with the media, according to ESPN. “I just felt that the best way to go forward was a new direction. Taking Jeff Ulbrich and making him the interim head coach, I thought that would get the most out of this team and give us the best chance that we all want to have, which is going to the playoffs.”
Fox Sports’ Jay Glazer reported that Saleh was “blindsided” by the decision.
Just talked to Robert Saleh who said was blindsided by Woody Johnson walking to his office and letting him go. Certainly disappointed he wasn’t going to be given the opportunity to get things going with what he said is a very good roster
— Jay Glazer (@JayGlazer) October 8, 2024
“Just talked to Robert Saleh who said [he] was blindsided by Woody Johnson walking to his office and letting him go. Certainly disappointed he wasn’t going to be given the opportunity to get things going with what he said is a very good roster,” Glazer wrote on social media.
Generally, whenever I feel the urge to publicly criticize an internal personnel decision a sports organization makes, I remember the advice of the epigrammatical former Saints and Colts head coach Jim “Playoffs?!” Mora to the media: “You think you know, but you don’t know.” In other words: These are professionals who dedicate their entire lives to football, while we’re talking heads, writers and/or reporters who may have some knowledge of the game, but our knowledge is grossly asymmetrical to that of those on the inside.
That being said, this is the New York Jets, so I feel much safer in the assumption that maybe the talking heads outside the building have a bit more to say about a franchise that finds new and innovative ways to besmirch itself season after season.
While finding an interim coach from the outside is practically impossible at this point in the NFL season, given the infeasibility of starting your system over from scratch, promoting Ulbrich — a defensive specialist — to fix a team where the problem is offense is deeply counterintuitive. Yes, the Jets are coming off of two close losses to the Denver Broncos (10-9) and Minnesota Vikings (23-17) in which offensive woes were the primary culprit. Perhaps ditching Saleh for Ulbrich solves those issues, although one is hard-pressed to think of how that happens.
Furthermore, it’s not like Ulbrich gets much chance to adjust: Three of the Jets’ next four games are against teams that look playoff-bound: the Buffalo Bills, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Houston Texans. (The only respite is an Oct. 27 game against the woeful New England Patriots, who the Jets have already beat 24-3 — but that was at home, and the upcoming matchup will be in Foxborough.)
And then, of course, there’s the matter of how the firing was handled, with a security escort. It’s unclear who leaked this. It looks bad if it was from Saleh’s side. If it was the Jets, that’s even worse.
Either way, identity politics has also entered the mix, with Muslim activist group CAIR immediately voicing concerns over the firing.
“We commend Coach Robert Saleh for making history as the first American Muslim head coach in NFL history,” the group said in a statement. “Although no one should jump to conclusions about why the Jets fired Coach Saleh, the report that Jets security physically escorted Saleh out of the building does raise concerns about the possible motive for such unusual hostility — especially given that Saleh wore a Lebanese flag pin at a game just days ago and that owner Woody Johnson is a former Trump administration official who has been accused of making racially charged remarks.
“We encourage the Jets to thoroughly explain its unusually hostile reported treatment of Coach Saleh.”
That “racially charged remarks” accusation is a (pun unintended) trumped-up series of allegations made by his staff when Johnson was Trump’s appointed ambassador to the United Kingdom which really doesn’t deserve going into — although it does throw a few more Molotov cocktails into the dumpster fire from hell.
And mind you, this is just talking about the fallout from the Saleh debacle. The Jets have gone to the Super Bowl once, after the 1968 season, thanks to Joe Willie Namath’s expert quarterbacking. They became the first AFL team to win against the NFL. Since then, it’s pretty much been a horror show.
Namath is remembered much more fondly than he actually should be; statistically speaking, his career was derailed by injuries after that Super Bowl run and he only briefly showed flashes of his past form after the AFL-NFL merger. Yet, every QB the Jets draft or bring in is expected to be the next Namath — and they aren’t. Heck, Namath wasn’t even really Namath, at least in the legendary form Jets fans remember him being.
A whole host of highly touted draft picks in the decades since have fallen short or just plain flamed out. There was Ken O’Brien, a virtual unknown the Jets picked in the 1983 draft while Dan Marino was still on the board. O’Brien had a few good years, to be fair. So did Chad Pennington, but his career was also derailed by injuries. Mark “Butt Fumble” Sanchez and Zach Wilson? Not so much.
(It’s worth noting that the Jets seem to be one constant in these busts; both Sam Darnold and Geno Smith, who also flamed out during their time with Gang Green, have flourished elsewhere. In fact, Darnold quarterbacked the Vikings to the 23-17 win that ultimately ended Saleh’s tenure.)
And then there are the solid veterans who have been brought in to QB the team over the hump and failed. Vinny Testaverde came the closest, but he couldn’t do the trick. Brett Favre, Boomer Esiason, Neil O’Donnell and Ryan Fitzpatrick have all fallen short of expectations. It pains me to say it, but it looks like Aaron Rodgers could join that unlucky club.
As for coaching changes, just remember that this is the team that fired future Super Bowl champion coach Pete Carroll after one 6-10 season because they were in win-now mode. Ownership hired former Philadelphia Eagles head coach Rich Kotite, who proceeded to go 4-28 during his time with the Jets, including 1-15 in his final season.
So, given the franchise’s history, it’s worth using Mr. Mora’s logic on the Jets’ front office — not the media — this time: You think you know, but you don’t know. And with the handling of Robert Saleh’s firing, you’ve proved it yet again.
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