Jets coach Aaron Glenn's decision to cut Xavier Gipson a good indication that he means what he says
Jets coach Aaron Glenn looks on during the first half against the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sept. 7 at MetLife Stadium. Credit: Jim McIsaac
The spirited talks in meeting rooms and one-on-one. The live tackling drills. The intense practices in training camp and since. They were all signals that things had changed for the Jets under their new and decidedly old-school leadership.
But it wasn’t until this week that the seriousness with which coach Aaron Glenn is taking this change in culture truly came into focus.
After Sunday’s game against the Steelers, Glenn declared that players “will not be on the field with this team if you are going to cause us to lose games.” Then, on Wednesday, the Jets cut Xavier Gipson, whose fourth-quarter fumble on a kickoff return had led to a Pittsburgh touchdown in a two-point loss.
It would have been easy for Glenn to simply back away from his postgame remarks and keep Gipson on the team. He could have simply benched him or taken away some of his special teams responsibilities (although to be fair, he didn’t have many beyond those roles). He could have chalked the fumble up as a mistake and let it slide.
Instead he made a statement — about himself, about this team, about this organization. He said, without actually saying it, that anything or anyone who gets in the way of his vision for this franchise will be eliminated.
Meet the new boss . . . not even close to the same as the old boss.
If there is any lingering doubt that the Jets hired the right man for the job when they picked him to clean up the mess the team had become, those are gone now too.
This is Glenn’s ship. He’s the captain of it. He says what goes. If you disagree, the life rafts are over there.
“The stakes are high,” receiver Garrett Wilson said of the message sent to the locker room with that roster move. “I don’t want anyone to take this the wrong way, but that’s just what is being asked of us from our staff. As competitors and players, we are expected to be at that [level]. I’m going to do my job to make sure I am ready to go each week knowing what is at stake.”
Added Marcelino McCrary-Ball, the Jets’ special teams captain: “It’s just accountability. It’s just about everyone understanding their part and upholding the standard.”
Glenn has bristled in the past when it’s been speculated that his coaching mirrors his mentor, Bill Parcells. “I’m Aaron Glenn, not Bill,” he said during training camp. “I have my own style of coaching . . . I learned a lot from Bill, but Aaron Glenn is going to show up on the field, on the grass, with the players, every time. My personality is going to show up on the field every time.”
In this instance, though, it was hard not to feel the echoes of Tuna’s wrath reverberating in Glenn’s leadership. But even if Glenn doesn’t see it that way, that’s a good thing.
No one was happy these things had to happen — neither the fumble nor the cut. Gipson’s now-former teammates spoke highly of him and maintained confidence that he would land with another NFL team in short order — and he did, claimed off waivers by the neighboring Giants. Even Glenn went out of his way to distance the decision from a single play by saying there were numerous factors that went into his call.
“I want it to be known that decisions that are made are not rash decisions,” he said on Wednesday.
Perhaps one other incident was a first-quarter kickoff return in which Gipson brought the ball out to the 45 but was knocked over by his own player and never tackled by a Steeler. He dropped the ball on the field and McCrary-Ball was heads up enough to pounce on it. It was not officially ruled a fumble, but if a Pittsburgh player had recovered it, the Steelers certainly could have had it reviewed and likely would have been awarded possession.
The fact that it wasn’t rash is what makes it and the message behind it even stronger. Emotions, disappointment, frustration, they too are things that can clog the path toward winning. And they had nothing to do with this. It was a cold calculus that Glenn and the front office chewed on for at least a little while before reaching their verdict.
We — players, fans, media — still are in the get-to-know-you phase of our relationship with Glenn. This week gave us all tremendous insight.
It wasn’t just the Gipson decision that peeled back a layer but the way he navigated the loss. This was his first game as a head coach at any level and there were a lot of eyeballs watching to see how he would react to it.
“Obviously, he was not happy with how we finished and the outcome of the game, but in this game, even on a loss, you have to find the beauty in it and improve on those things,” Wilson said. “Sometimes a win can be a false sense of ‘we’re good.’ No, no, no. Those same things are showing up whether we would have won that game or lost . . . There are things as players we know we messed up on. Now we have an opportunity to fix it.”
Well, most of them do.
“We all know what we signed up for,” McCrary-Ball said.
Anyone who didn’t certainly does now.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
