No coaches allowed: Aaron Glenn had his players lead a recent Jets walkthrough practice

By Dennis Waszak Jr.

FLORHAM PARK, N.J. (AP) — Aaron Glenn was unhappy with the New York Jets’ performance in their preseason loss to the Giants last Saturday night and insisted his squad would get things cleaned up in a hurry.

So, Glenn got his players together the next day for their walkthrough practice — but added a unique twist.

There were no assistant coaches involved. It was players only, with Glenn overseeing the session while quarterback Justin Fields led the offense and linebacker Jamien Sherwood the defense.

“That’s a first time for me,” safety Andre Cisco, in his fifth NFL season and first with the Jets, said Wednesday.

Wide receiver Garrett Wilson first told “Overtime” during an interview with the sports media company this week that the team got together for the player-led session on Monday — the Jets later clarified it was Sunday, a scheduled walkthrough with no media access — and “went at it” for about an hour.

“Yeah, (an) ownership thing and also just us owning the calls, owning the defense and really leaning into what is it that our coaches are going to be calling and why are they calling it, and can we even step in and kind of predict it as a defense?” Cisco said. “So Sherwood kind of took over those duties on that day. And it was just player-led from that standpoint.

“So we gathered ourselves, we took ownership of how many reps we were going to get, and then just holding guys accountable, how we were getting to the ball, executing the calls. And so it was effective.”

Cornerback Michael Carter II said the practice was “nothing crazy,” but echoed Cisco’s sentiments that the players enjoyed being held responsible for the play calls during the session.

“They’ve said it, you know, the great teams are those player-led teams,” Carter said, referring to a commonly referenced vision shared by Glenn. “And the players are accountable and we understand what the standard is and how we need to get things done and how things should operate. And so we got a chance to go out there and kind of prove it for the first time, just it being us.”

Glenn is a first-time head coach and a longtime assistant who has played for Bill Parcells and coached under Sean Payton and Dan Campbell, among others, while working his way from being a player for 15 NFL seasons to being a leader on the sideline.

Glenn has acknowledged taking bits and pieces from some of the approaches of his mentors and tweaking them to form his own coaching philosophy. He was Detroit’s defensive coordinator under Campbell in 2022, when the Lions held a similar player-led practice during training camp.

“Yeah, it was personally different for me because I’ve never experienced that, just not having coaches out there,” said cornerback Brandon Stephens, who’s in his first season with the Jets after spending the past four in Baltimore. “But I think it was great for us to lead the groups by ourselves. We didn’t have a coach to put us through like a little, slow tempo individual (drills).

“So it was cool for us to just like jell and just go out there and do what we love to do.”

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