If it wasn’t completely obvious by the agony he seemed to be facing on the sidelines every week, the pressure of the New York market got to Robert Saleh.
The now-ousted New York Jets head coach came so close to slaying the proverbial dragon, nearly snapping the longest playoff drought in North American professional sports behind shoddy quarterback play.
Once he finally got his quarterback, Aaron Rodgers went down with an Achilles injury and has largely struggled in his six starts (five games) as Saleh’s perceived antidote to a problem that’s plagued the organization since Joe Willie Namath.
It’s what ultimately did him in, as Gang Green’s offensive sputtering in consecutive losses to the Denver Broncos and Minnesota Vikings led to Saleh losing his job. Woody Johnson thought the season—and the championship aspirations—were still salvageable, and he asked Saleh to fall on the sword while making defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich the interim head coach.
But that’s not the only thing that led to Tuesday’s shocking move.
Saleh let the pressure get to him. It was evident when The Athletic posted his story about his level of paranoia about leaks, and it was apparent again on Wednesday when Adam Schefter pointed to it as a reason for his downfall during an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show.
“That’s a hard question to answer because I do think Robert has to take some time,” Schefter said in reply to a McAfee inquiry about Saleh’s immediate coaching future. “I will say this: I do think that working in this market affected him. I think he got a little beat up mentally. I think that wore him down him a little bit. I think it drained some of the enthusiasm that he had for the game. I think that, unfortunately, he let all the outside noise get to him at times.
“And, to do that job in any market requires you to put on the blinders and block out the noise as best as you can. And inevitably, you can’t tune out all that noise. And if you’re a human being, it’s hard not to let it affect you in some type of the way. And in this particular case, I think coaching in New York got to him a little bit. It’s not an easy job to be a head coach in the NFL anywhere, but it’s especially difficult doing it in New York.
“And it’s especially difficult when you’re losing games. And it’s especially difficult when you’re in the New York market, you’re losing games, and you have the owner that didn’t hire you to begin with. You put that all together, and it wears you out.”
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.