I talked to Robert Saleh between swings on Friday—the new Jets coach was using the quickly passing free time he has left, and a rare quiet moment, to hit balls at the range and clear his head a little. And you can bet, since he’s a father of seven(!) on the cusp of his first training camp in charge, there’s a lot going on up there.
But where you might think, for the 42-year-old, that would add up to nerves or butterflies over how it’ll go, Saleh was just more anxious under New Jersey’s July humidity than anything.
Anxious to get in the meeting room. Anxious to get on the grass. Anxious to gather his staff back together. Anxious to see what he thinks was a good spring manifest into something else, one way or the other, in the summer. He’s anxious, really, just to .
“I’m excited for those team meetings, to be able to sit and talk to the guys,” Saleh said. “You think about those meetings; it’s your only chance as a head coach. If you’re a position coach, you’re with them all the time, it’s great. As a coordinator, it scales back some. As a head coach, that’s it. So to be able to get back and go through it and watch these guys grow.
“It’s all of it. It’s the first team meeting. Going on the practice field. The first night before the game. The whole thing is gonna be exciting. We’ve got a super, super young group of guys, and it’s going to be exciting to see them grow because they’re all made of the right stuff, they have a tremendous mindset and their growth is gonna happen. It’s a matter of coaching our tails off and giving them every opportunity to compete.”
Now, here’s the twist—more than anything else, he’s excited to see his Jets fail.
Saleh’s one of the more straightforward, straight-shooting people you’ll come across in the NFL, and he was honest as could be about that. And while it sounds funny to say it that way, it’s also a recognition, covered in self-awareness, of where his Jets program is right now.
Yes, he’ll tell you, his Jets had a wonderful spring. He loves the locker room. The young quarterback fit in nicely. The coaching and scouting staffs, more or less part of a marriage arranged by ownership, have coalesced as both he and GM Joe Douglas hoped they would, and there’s a great feeling in the building.
But as for what they really accomplished the last six months? That, as Saleh sees it, was, and should be, the easy part—and he’s not going to celebrate a proverbial hole-in-one on a mini-golf course. Which is why, more than anything, ahead of his first camp, he’s fired up to see what happens when things get hard.
“Everything’s been awesome,” Saleh said. “Call it the greatest honeymoon in the world, if you want. It’s been great. But I’m genuinely excited for adversity. Because a lot of different things are going to pop up. There are coaches that are going to find out about themselves. There’s the scouts and the GM, there’s myself, the players, the training staff. Everybody’s going to find out a little more about themselves when adversity hits.
“I think that’s when teams have their greatest amount of growth—it’s through adversity. And so with training camp, , that’s what I’m most excited for. I wanna see how people respond.”
Listening to Saleh talk the other day really was a reminder to me. For all the noise over the last six months, the first hint of real football, with pads on and teams locked in, is just a few days away. And Saleh knows his Jets, like the other 31 teams, are only going to be undefeated so much longer.
So this morning, with my first post-vacation MMQB, we’ll dive into how Saleh has gotten his team ready for that, as one of the NFL’s six first-year coaches preparing to open camp.
