Back where it started, on the other sideline
Robert Saleh does not get an easy Week 1. The Jets travel to Nashville on September 13, and the man waiting for them on the Tennessee sideline is the man they sacked five games into the 2024 season.
He spent his press conference this week refusing the storyline everyone handed him. “New York is still a special place,” Saleh said. “Gave me my first opportunity as a head coach. Our desire to win Week 1 and beat the Jets is because it’s Week 1 and nothing more. I am forever grateful for all the opportunity that they gave. I don’t hold grudges.”
Take him at his word or don’t. Saleh has never been a coach who trades in bulletin-board material, and he was not about to start eleven days before an opener.
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A defense stocked with ex-Jets
Saleh is not the only one in the building with New York history. Jermaine Johnson and John Franklin-Myers both landed in Tennessee after spells with the Jets, and both will line up opposite a franchise that drafted or developed them. Asked whether that mix of motives might tip his defense into overplaying, Saleh said he trusts his players to “keep the main thing the main thing.”
That is more than a coaching cliche in this case. Defense is where Saleh built his name, first as a coordinator in San Francisco and then across three-plus seasons in New York, where his units consistently outperformed the rest of the roster while the offense collapsed around them.
The results never followed. Four wins in his first year, seven in each of the next two, then a 2-3 start that cost him the job. No winning season in three full attempts.
What a 1-0 start would mean
Both clubs arrive in Nashville short on recent evidence. Tennessee has spent the past two years rebuilding around a young quarterback and a defense that needed a voice. The Jets have churned coaches and quarterbacks at a rate that makes their own Week 1 identity hard to pin down.
For Saleh, beating them would settle nothing and prove something at the same time. He gets his first game back in charge, against the only club that had ever given him the chair, with two of their former defenders rushing the passer for him.
Kickoff in Nashville is September 13.
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