Robert Saleh returns to MetLife Stadium living his best life with the 49ers

Robert Saleh downplayed his return to MetLife Stadium.

The three things he said he wants to do during his stay here — his 49ers play the Giants on Sunday — are: “Get some pizza. Go to the visiting locker room. And hopefully have a good day.”

But when he embarks on his usual pregame routine of running the stairs of the building where the contest is being played, it’s hard to imagine that he won’t be struck by the familiarity of those specific steps, the opportunities and obstacles he had here, the way his tenure as head coach of the Jets ended so abruptly.

And because of the way MetLife is designed, the visiting locker room he referenced will be just down the green-painted hallway next to the space he used to occupy. Memories will be inescapable.

Not all of them good ones, of course.

So perhaps he’ll even consider whether he is better off where he is now than where he was then.

A little more than a year after he was fired by the Jets, Saleh is the defensive coordinator for the 49ers, having returned to the position he held when the Jets first hired him. He runs a unit that is ranked eighth in points allowed (20.5 per game) and 22nd in yards allowed (337.1) for a team that has a record of 5-3. That’s more wins than the Jets and Giants have combined this season.

More significantly, he seems to be satisfied and content working for an organization that wants him, respects him and avoids the missteps that dotted his time here.

“Obviously, I’ve gone through the head-coaching stuff, and you learn a lot going through that,” he said when he first came back to San Francisco. “But I’m happy to be back in this chair where I get to coach a little bit more football.”

Happy.

Yes, that’s the word that best fits Saleh now.

He’s the same coach he always was.

“It’s the ‘all gas, no brakes’ style, if you will,” Giants coach Brian Daboll said of Saleh’s 49ers, a tip of the cap to the phrase that used to appear on signs and T-shirts all around Florham Park but now has landed with the 49ers.

But there are wrinkles to his schemes now, naturally. Saleh learned plenty during his three-plus seasons with the Jets, and taking a broader view of a team while getting a better understanding of how offenses try to function certainly is tops among those lessons.

And there are wrinkles to him, too. The Jets gig allowed him to develop a keener eye for the kinds of jobs he wants to pursue and where he might accept them. He was a candidate for several head-coaching vacancies in January and turned down a few significant defensive coordinator offers before returning to San Francisco. The Athletic reported that he was presented a record-setting contract by the Raiders that would have made him not only their defensive coordinator but their head coach-in-waiting behind Pete Carroll.

Stability is important. People are important.

Oh, and having a quarterback? Yeah, that’s important too.

Saleh, whose time with the Jets saw him shuffle through a deck of mostly jokers at that position before and after his one ace, Aaron Rodgers, crumbled to the turf four plays into their relationship,  seems to think the Giants have one of those in Jaxson Dart.

"He's uber-talented,” Saleh said. “I understand why Daboll went to the blue tent. I would've gone, too. Kid's good. I think New York hit on this one big time. This kid is going to be special.”

It was a reference to Daboll’s violation of the NFL’s concussion protocols earlier this month, for which the Giants were fined $200,000 and Daboll $100,000.

Daboll and Saleh were head coaches together in the same market — in the same stadium — but their relationship goes back longer than that. Both were graduate assistants at Michigan State very early in their careers.

“I've known Coach Saleh for a long time, and I just think he's a really good football coach,” Daboll said. “He's just a good person who I have a lot of respect for. We've talked, we've practiced against one another, obviously things like that, but I’ve got a lot of respect for him.”

Saleh is complimentary of the way Daboll has groomed Dart.

“They are doing a really good job with him,” he said. “There are certain things they are asking of him. I’ve always thought Daboll has done a really good job, him and [offensive coordinator Mike] Kafka. They put a lot of strain on defenses and this kid, he’s going to be special.”

Saleh probably will be a head coach again someday. Like his mentor Carroll, whom he learned under in Seattle and who held the Jets’ head-coaching job for one season (1994), he eventually might look back on his time with the Jets as a laughably insignificant asterisk to his career.

But it doesn’t feel as if he’ll ever see his time with the 49ers — neither that first stint nor this one — that way.

So he’ll come here and eat some pizza and run some stairs and see some familiar faces.

Then he’ll go back to San Francisco, back to a coaching life he so clearly is appreciating and enjoying again.