In all the years I have covered the Jets, one thing has been constant. People criticize the coach calling the plays on offense.
Brian Schottenheimer, Marty Mornhinweg, Chan Gailey, Jeremy Bates, Adam Gase, Mike LaFleur, and Nathaniel Hackett all took heaping portions of criticism during their respective tenures. It didn’t matter that all of those coaches faced varying degrees of personnel shortcomings during their respective tenures. Their units failed, and they took the blame.
How much they deserved the blame varied. I’d argue that Gase and Hackett deserved almost all of the criticism they received while LaFleur and Mornhinweg were scapegoated for a team that put raw quarterbacks on the field too early.
I have never seen Jets fans give an offensive coach a free pass for failure just on the basis of the quarterback until Tanner Engstrand. The Jets were dismal on offense in 2025, ranking 29th in scoring. I keep seeing defenses of Engstrand because he didn’t have good quarterback play. I’m not sure where these defenses were in the past for other Jets playcallers who were hurt by their quarterback. I also don’t think these defenses hold up at all under scrutiny.
Engstrand might have been handed bad cards, but he did not play them well.
Before we get into this, I want to acknowledge Engstrand is a young coach who had never called plays in the NFL before this season. His previous play calling experience was at the University of San Diego in college football’s FCS and the DC Defenders of the XFL. Looking back, it was a lot to expect a coach this green to be able to take on a task as monumental as the one he faced in 2025. With more experience in a more stable situation, it is entirely possible that Engstrand grows into a quality NFL offensive coordinator in the future.
I also want to make it clear that this is not a defense of the way Aaron Glenn has handled his coaching staff generally speaking. Firing so many top assistants after one year is a terrible look for Glenn and brings into question his ability to competently build a staff.
I am alos not defending the timing of this decision. There is no reason it should have taken the Jets more than three weeks after the season ended to make this move. It needlessly delayed the hiring process for an important job that was going to be difficult to fill anyway.
I am only here to say that the decision to move on from Engstrand wasn’t just defensible. It was the only move the Jets could make.
The most passionate defenses of Engstrand begin by asking what offensive coach could have succeeded with Justin Fields and Brady Cook starting the bulk of the games at quarterback.
There are a couple of issues with this framing. I’ll start of by saying this. We have to dig deeper than just citing the team’s offensive stats. Of course with the quarterbacks the Jets had, a ranking at the bottom of the league was to be expected. It isn’t a question of saying the Jets were 29th in points so Engstrand was bad. We should also avoid the opposite extreme of absolving Engstrand of all blame just because his quarterbacks were bad.
The issues with Engstrand go deeper, but I question whether Engstrand can truly escape blame for the quarterbacks he had. This wasn’t the situation Sean Payton inherited when he was hired by the Broncos in 2023 where the team was tired to Russell Wilson financially for one more year. The Jets actively sought out Fields in free agency in 2025. He wasn’t just the team’s top choice at quarterback. He was the Jets’ top target period. This was a team with a head coach from the defensive side of the ball. Are we to believe the offensive coordinator wasn’t a driving force in choosing the quarterback the team went after?
When you’re down to your third quarterback, things are always going to be bleak. With that said, Brady Cook lacked any sort of tools to be a plausible quarterback prospect in the NFL. Was he really the best the Jets can do for the role? Again, the offensive coordinator had no role in choosing the team’s developmental project at the position?
Often we underestimate the role coaches have in the personnel team team tries to bring in. You might say the Jets are so dysfunctional that they could have cut Engstrand out of these discussions. I’ll admit that this is speculative to a degree. So let’s move on to the things we actually know.
Justin Fields was a reclamation project entering 2025. There is a reason the Jets were his third team in five years. There is also a reason he had to settle for a $20 million a year annual salary, one of the lowest for a veteran starting quarterback in the league. There is also a reason many viewed even that as a stark overpay. There is also a reason Fields only brought back a late round pick when he was traded from Chicago to Pittsburgh in 2024.
The reason is Fields hadn’t shown himself to be good enough to be a quality starting quarterback in the NFL.
So, no, Engstrand does not get blame for failing to develop Fields. Still, it should be noted that the quality of Fields’ play went down in 2025. He might not have been good enough in Chicago or Pittsburgh, but he was worse with the Jets. Other than his rookie season, Fields’ play was a career worst in 2025.
| Year | QBR |
| 2021 | 31.4 |
| 2022 | 56.3 |
| 2023 | 46.9 |
| 2024 | 47.4 |
| 2025 | 38.8 |
Any blanket excuse of the coordinator goes out the door when the player’s performance trends downward.
Of course you can’t immediately pin all of the blame on Engstrand without any evidence backing it up. And, no, I’m not going to pin 100 percent of Fields’ regression on Engstrand. The NFL is a complex league, and there are numerous factors at play in something like this.
What we need to figure out is what was in Engstrand’s control.
Fortunately, before the season started
I laid out the sort of offense the Jets needed to run to give the Fields experiment the best odds of panning out.
It should come as no surprise that my list started with leaning into Fields’ ability as a rusher.
In Fields’ best season to date, 2022, Chicago dialed up six designed rushes for Fields a game, which netted 43 yards per. This is in addition to scrambles.
We know that the Jets are not going to succeed if Fields has to sit back in the pocket all day scanning defenses. Even in a best case scenario, this Jets offense will be somewhat limited in what it can do passing the ball. Successful passing plays will need to be replaced with successful rushing plays. That will entail keeping the ball in Fields’ hands.
Did the Jets make designed runs with Fields a central part of their offense? To put it simply, no.
Compared with the 6 designed runs Chicago ran for him in 2022, Fields excluding scrambles had 4.6 rushing attempts per game with the Jets this past season.
Taking it a step further, I looked through Fields’ entire career to see what percentage of his team’s offensive plays came on designed runs.
| Year | Team | Percentage of Fields snaps that were designed runs |
| 2021 | CHI | 4.1% |
| 2022 | CHI | 9.9% |
| 2023 | CHI | 9.8% |
| 2024 | PIT | 11.0% |
| 2025 | NYJ | 8.4% |
Even with Fields’ struggles as a passer, they called designed quarterback runs at a lower rate than any of his other teams with the exception of his rookie season.
Now I will concede that the drop from 6 rushing attempts a game to 4.6 or from 10-11% to 8.4% are not enormous. Still, given the circumstances, I would have expected the Jets lean into Fields’ abilities as a runner more frequently than his teams did in the past, not less.
It also seems worth nothing that the Steelers, a team with a reputation for top notch coaching, had Fields run at the highest rate of his career in 2024.
In that same article where I laid out what the Jets offense under Fields should look like, I mentioned that Jets needed to lean into screens and run-pass options. Fields had not shown great aptitude in the conventional passing game. Even his biggest fan heading into the season would likely have admitted that an offense that required him to drop back and read the field constantly would be a struggle.
Run-pass options typically require the quarterback to read a single defender rather than the full field or half the field. Screens don’t require the quarterback to read the defense beyond making sure the intended target is open.
I didn’t explicitly mention play action in the article, but it is another method of simplifying the game for the quarterback. A well-executed fake run draws defenders up, creating big passing windows. Combined with less receivers typically going into patterns on these concepts, play action tends to simplify the reads a quarterback needs to make.
I crunched the numbers looking at each quarterback with at least 100 passing attempts during the 2025 regular season. My goal was to find what percentage of passing attempts came on plays that were either RPOs, play action, or screens.
All three Jets quarterbacks rated near the bottom. Of 47 passers who qualified, Brady Cook rated 38th, Fields rated 39th, and Tyrod Taylor rated 42nd.
For a veteran like Taylor something like this is less important, but quarterbacks like Fields and Cook need their concepts to be as simplified as possible. Engstrand instead did this at one of the lowest rates of any coach in football.
If we take the percentage of designed runs, RPOs, play action, and screens as a of percentage combined rushing and passing attempts, the usage of Fields becomes a tad more favorable. He rates 29th. Cook rates 37th. Taylor ranks 46th.
People ask, “What was Engstrand supposed to do with Justin Fields and Brady Cook starting most of his games?”
My answer would be pretty simple. Start by leaning into Fields’ abilities as a running instead of reducing his rushing opportunities. And if you have quarterbacks as shaky at reading the field as Fields and Cook are, don’t run passing concepts that reduce the complexity of their reads around the lowest rate in the league.
Do I blame Engstrand for Fields and Cook not being good enough? Of course I don’t.
But do I think the decision to keep or fire a coordinator is based on who is most to blame? I do not.
A better question is whether a coordinator adapts his play calling to the skillsets of his players, both strengths and weaknesses. It is also worth asking whether a coordinator could have gotten more out of his players if he ran his offense differently.
I don’t think it’s easy to argue that Engstrand adapted his offense to deal with limited passers. And it’s clear a coach could have gotten more out of Fields since the coaches in Chicago and Pittsburgh did get more out of him.
Of course evaluating a coordinator also goes into specific game situations.
It’s easy to absolve a coach when Fields looks as miserable as he did at his worst. The game the Jets lost to the Broncos in London is likely at the top of the mind of any Jets fan remembering how miserable the season was for Fields. In that game the quarterback ended with an inconceivable -10 passing yards.
It’s obviously not easy to call plays when your quarterback looks like that. I would submit, however, that in some ways a struggling quarterback provides a truer test of coaching ability than a dominant quarterback.
You or I would probably look great if we got hired to coach Josh Allen. He doesn’t need help.
Fields did, particularly in that game. There’s only so much coaching can do. Engstrand couldn’t go out there and throw the ball for Fields. What did he do to help his quarterback?
Again, the screen is a high percentage pass. It is designed to come out quickly and doesn’t require the quarterback to think much. In the Denver game as Fields was holding the ball too long and taking sack after sack, overthinking was clearly a problem. A running back who is skilled as a receiver is an ideal player to target.
The Jets have such a running back in Breece Hall. He did not have a single target in a game where the Jets’ passing game was completely stalled.
We could also discuss the usage of Garrett Wilson in the loss to Denver. A struggling quarterback often looks to a number one receiver as a security blanket. Unfortunately for the Jets, Wilson drew cornerback Patrick Surtain II, an elite player at the position who has always been a headache matchup for Wilson.
In the aforementioned article I wrote before the season, I mentioned that Engstrand needed to figure out ways to free up Wilson since he would be the focal point of coverage schemes. It can be difficult to quantify something like this, but one way to get a receiver away from a tough matchup or at least give more room to operate is by putting him in the slot.
Fields wasn’t often comfortable as a passer in 2025, but one exception was throwing to Wilson in the slot. Charting Garrett’s targets, I found that Fields completed over 80% of his passes to Garrett when aligned in the slot.
A big part of being a successful offensive coordinator means understanding the opponent and the specific situation you find yourself. Sometimes that means adapting how you do things for one game. This was clearly a game where it would have made sense to up Wilson’s slot usage. He needed the help against Surtain. Fields needed a security blanket.
For the season, I charted Wilson aligning in the slot 34% of the time. Against Denver, he was in the slot on 31% of his snaps.
Hand in hand with adjusting to your opponent is situational play calling. One of the most important jobs of a play caller is to come up with the right play in specific game situations tailored to the strengths and weaknesses of your opponent.
If we are going to be honest, evaluation of play calling is frequently too driven by results. If a play works, people say it was a great call. If it doesn’t, people say it was a terrible call. In reality a bad call can work if the players execute, and a good call will fail if they don’t.
It’s ultimately very subjective. I try not to be overly critical of play calling for that reason, but time after time Engstrand just made situational calls that made no sense.
Take this play from the final minute of the first half in the Jets’ Week 14 loss to the Miami Dolphins. The Jets faced a 3rd and 13 from the Miami 19 yard line.
On this play the Jets have John Metchie try to run a double move to shake free against cornerback Rasul Douglas. Metchie throttles his route down well short of the sticks hoping Douglas will drive on him.
The hope is that Douglas will drive down on Metchie, and Metchie can blow past him.
Douglas doesn’t, though. He stays deep and picks Metchie up down the field, ultimately intercepting the pass.
This is the sort of play that I think encapsulates both the limitations of the Jets quarterbacks and the flaws of the quarterbacks.
Make no mistake about it. This was a very ill-advised pass by Cook. He can’t make this throw. The interception is not on the coordinator.
With that said, I don’t see how this play was ever going to work. Douglas is protecting the sticks and the end zone in this situation. It’s third down. He would love for the Jets to throw this pass because he can wait on it and still fly up the field to tackle Metchie short of the first down. He’s a nine year veteran. He was never going to bite on this and fly up the field for no reason on a double move.
So many times we there were calls like this which weren’t tailored to the opponent or the situation.
Perhaps by now you’ve seen that bad quarterback play and a poorly coordinated offense weren’t mutually exclusive to the 2025 Jets. Maybe, though, you still are in the mindset that Engstrand’s missteps can’t be separated from the quality of the quarterbacks.
Here’s the thing. The issues with this offense’s construction go beyond the quarterback.
I think back to a comment Nathaniel Hackett made late in the 2023 season.
Nathaniel Hackett on Breece Hall: “ I don’t think I was ready for him to be as productive as he was in the pass game. That’s something that has added a whole dimension to things that we can do.”
#Jets
— Al Iannazzone (@Al_Iannazzone)
January 4, 2024
This quote was passed through the fanbase and widely mocked. It was treated as the ultimate evidence of Hackett’s incompetence. He didn’t realize he could use Breece Hall as a receiver.
In context, though, Hackett was just trying to pay Hall a compliment. It was the classic boilerplate, “You don’t realize how talented this guy is until you coach him,” type comment that a large percentage of coaches make a some point. Of Hackett’s many, many flaws, a comment like this shouldn’t even rate on the list.
One reason Hackett didn’t deserve the grief he got for the comment was that he actually utilized Hall quite a bit in the passing game. Hall finished 2023 with the second most targets of any running back in the league in the passing game. Only Christian McCaffrey had more. Hackett might not have known much about offense, but clearly he did know it was a good idea to throw to Breece Hall.
In this context it’s amazing to me how many people who ridiculed Hackett for his comment now defend Engstrand’s job performance. Hackett made vague reference to underestimating how talented of a receiver Breece is. Engstrand actually reduced his load in the passing game.
Under Hackett in 2023, Hall had 95 targets in 17 games, an average of 5.5 per contest. In 2025 under Engstrand, Hall was targeted only 48 times in 16 games, an average of only 3 per game.
You can question the talent Engstrand was given. Sure, it was largely deficient. But this was one area where he was actually given talent, and he didn’t utilize it. It’s not like the Jets had a bunch of other great options in the passing game. This was a team that didn’t have a single 400 yard receiver. In fact, this is even more egregious when you consider that the 2023 Jets had Garrett Wilson, a target magnet, for the full year. The 2025 Jets lacked Wilson the second half of the season.
After trading for John Metchie prior to their Week 10 game against the Cleveland Browns, the Jets threw as many screens to Metchie for the rest of the season as they did to Hall. Hall is an extremely dynamic player in space. Metchie is not.
During that stretch, if you add screens and handoffs, Metchie had just two less than Isaiah Williams, an explosive player who produced 3 touchdowns on special teams during the season (one of which was called back on a penalty). Engstrand seem to view the two as equal threats to take it the distance since he schemed up equal touches in space for the two. To be charitable, I think it’s very difficult to see how Metchie and Williams were in the same ballpark in ability to hit a homerun.
I could go on, but I think you have the idea here.
I’m not trying to annihilate Tanner Engstrand here. Again he’s a young coach who took on a very difficult task. In hindsight it was probably too big of a job to expect success from any first time offensive coordinator. With more experience and with a more stable offensive infrastructure, it isn’t impossible to imagine him having more success in the future.
But I can’t agree with the premise that he shown a lot of ability as an offensive architect in 2025. You can’t blame him for the Jets offense being bad. I think you can, however, blame him for getting less out of Justin Fields than Luke Getsy, not even attempting to scheme up easier throws for Brady Cook, or taking advantage of the few pieces that were at his disposal.
That last point is key. While Engstrand didn’t have much talent, nothing he showed suggested that even if he got more talent in the future, he wouldn’t be able to maximize it.
I’m not going to defend the long delay it took for the Jets to come to their decision to move on from Engstrand or the way Aaron Glenn is handling his coaching staff, but moving on from Engstrand itself is completely justified.
