The New York Jets fell to the Miami Dolphins 28-25 on Sunday, a loss made more striking because Miami entered the game winless and had not even held a lead all season. Afterward, head coach Aaron Glenn pointed the finger at himself, citing a clock-management decision late in the first half that may have cost his team.
“When it comes to this game, highly disappointed,” Glenn said. “Disappointed in myself, first and foremost.”
With 8:44 remaining before halftime, the Dolphins led 14-7 and then put together a long drive, moving from their own 9-yard line to the Jets’ 32 with about two minutes left before the break. Glenn held all three of his timeouts but did not use any of them as the clock wound down.
When reporters asked about the decision, Glenn initially seemed unsure which sequence they meant. “Yeah, I think that’s one they were already down in the red zone, correct? That’s the one you’re talking about?” he asked. In fact, Miami was not in the red zone — the Dolphins were at New York’s 25-yard line with 1:16 remaining when the clock kept running.
By the time Miami ran its next play, only 35 seconds remained. The Dolphins scored again before halftime, and the Jets got the ball back with just six seconds left, enough only to kneel down.
“Man, we felt like we were going to stop them,” Glenn said. “And maybe we should have called our timeouts to get it back, but at that point, we just felt like we were going to stop them and be able to get the ball back. That’s something that we should have done is use our timeouts.”
The Jets rallied in the second half but still lost by three points, raising the question of whether a first-half field goal — made possible by better clock management — could have changed the outcome.
The loss drops New York to 2-5. Glenn’s teams have struggled badly in the minutes before halftime throughout his tenure, having been outscored 107-6 in that span across his 24 games as head coach.
Jets owner Woody Johnson has not offered Glenn the kind of public vote of confidence he gave at a similar point in the 2025 season. Johnson declined to speak with reporters at last week’s NFL League Fall Meeting.
“We all have to get better, from coaching to playing to everything that we’re doing, we have to get better,” Glenn said. “We know what’s going to happen from the outside in, we accept that, and it is what it is. This is a time where our guys, we’ve got to lock arms to make sure that everything that we get as far as energy and connection is going to be built from within, and we understand that. But we’ve got to play better, and our fans deserve better than that, and that starts with me.”
