When the New York Jets fired head coach Robert Saleh on Tuesday, two days after Saleh's team lost 23-17 to the Minnesota Vikings in London, everybody knew what was up. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that Saleh, a defensive-minded head coach, was the fall guy for an offense that has woefully underperformed, even with the healthy Aaron Rodgers the Jets had for just four snaps last season.
Especially when it came out that Saleh had thought to fire offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett following the Vikings loss, and Hackett has been Rodgers' best bud going back to their days together in Green Bay... well, you understood how that was going to go.
Replacing Saleh with defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich could present futher issues for the Jets, because New York's defense hasn't been the problem, and now with Saleh out the door and Ulbrich entrusted with the 30,000-foot view, who's going to be calling the shots for the one side of the ball that has made sense for that team this season?
Regardless, we are where we are with this. Hackett, who doesn't appear to have any business calling an offense in the NFL, winds up scot-free, and Rodgers appears to be in control of the whole picture. As we have also seen in Cleveland, when you are beholden to your quarterback beyond all rational thought, and your quarterback is not playing well, and your quarterback might be a toxic force behind the scenes, you have several large issues.
Not to compare Rodgers to Deshaun Watson off the field, but Rodgers on the field this season has not been the Rodgers we have come to expect. Rodgers currently has the NFL's seventh-worst passer rating among qualified quarterbacks at 81.6. His Passing EPA of -29.7 is the NFL's fifth-worst, ahead of only Jacoby Brissett, Bo Nix, Will Levis, and the aforementioned Watson. His 61.0% completion rate is seventh-worst in the league, and his Air Yards per Attempt of 6.4 is third-worst in the league.
It's not working, though it's not all his fault, Hackett is not calling a modern offense. Rodgers has just 70 passing attempts with pre-snap motion of any kind this season, and while that makes sense in that he has always preferred to read defenses from a more static offensive picture, he's not bringing the tools to the field anymore that would allow those static pictures to succeed. And Hackett's ideas of route combinations are so staid, there's no help for Rodgers to find open receivers.
Hackett also has Rodgers using play-action more from under center than in the shotgun, and that's a real issue if you're playing a defense like the one called by Brian Flores of the Vikings, and the coverages change so much pre-snap to post-snap. The results all season long, regardless of opponent, have been fairly horrific.
There's also the issue that Rodgers, at age 40, no longer has the pocket movement that once allowed him to stretch the space between the tackles so expertly. Maybe it's age; maybe it's a hangover from the torn Achilles that cost him most of the 2023 season. But it's clear that Hackett is calling plays for a pocket statue that didn't used to be one, and the adjustments have been slow in coming.
Rodgers' first-quarter interception to Vikings edge-rusher Andrew Van Ginkel, who has already created a cottage industry of pick-sixes on hot routes , was especially odd. When Van Ginkel zaps Sam Howell or Daniel Jones with this idea, that's not terribly surprising. When he gets Aaron Rodgers with it, after those other two pick-sixes are already on tape?
Yikes, man.
"Yes, in that play, I was just kind of reading the guard, and he came at me, so I dropped and tried to get into that pocket where basically the hot throw is," Van Ginkel said postgame, when asked if he was supposed to drop into coverage. "Something that we planned on and expected.
"You know, it's kind of reading the quarterback's eyes, kind of anticipating where – expecting the ball where it should go. There's a couple different answers when we show that all-up look. It's kind of a thing, something that I anticipated, and dropped to the right spot."
Rodgers' explanation wasn't quite as detailed.
"You know, they had a seven-up presentation. And you know, we got to something that we had talked about, and I peaked the back side or something to the left to see if we were hot or not. And doing that, I totally lost the angle and he made a nice play."
Not what you want to hear from one of the best processors and pure throwers of the football in pro football when he was in his prime, but again... this is where we are now.
The Jets stand at 2-3 on the season. Their offense isn't much better than it was in 2023 with Zach Wilson, Trevor Siemian, and Tim Boyle as its primary quarterbacks. But the defense is actually playing at a similarly excellent level.
So, of course, let's fire the head coach who had a great deal to do with putting that defense together, and leave the offensive disasters as issues to be named later. Makes all the sense in the world, right?
"Right, well that's the media trying to get a story because you know how that works," Jets owner Woody Johnson said after the firing. "How do we improve the offense? I think one of the reasons that I decided to make a coaching change at the highest level here is exactly that. We need to find ways to win, and so we are not going to do it, we're not going to find those ways by doing the same thing over and over and over, so
"I think that Jeff is going to add something. He's going to add a spark of positivity and all that that goes with somebody, and the trust that the players have in somebody that's been through it, and that they know, and that they respect, and they know that's reciprocal, and those changes that we have to make on offense, we'll make. We're going to make them on offense, and we're going to make them on defense. We're going to try to get better, and so this is a new opportunity for all of us, so that's why I decided to do that today."
And maybe Jeff Ulbrich turns out to be an amazing interim head coach. He's known as a football lifer whose players love him, and perhaps it's time for him to get his shot at the next professional level. But it shouldn't have come at the expense of Robert Saleh, because the Jets' 2024 implosion has not been Saleh's fault.
Instead, the 2024 Jets have become the kind of horror movie where the call is coming from inside the house. You should not expect that to change anytime soon.
Related: Andrew Van Ginkel of the Vikings Continues His Pick-Six Mastery of the Quick Pass
Related: Anatomy of a Play: Packers Safety Xavier McKinney's Historic Interception
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