The Jets owner made his opinion clear on Justin Fields and the team’s quarterback situation.
The Jets head coach then brushed off those comments and intentionally opted for ambiguity regarding the team’s starting quarterback for Week 8.
Aaron Glenn said he knows who will be the Jets’ QB on Sunday in Cincinnati but declined to announce whether it would be Tyrod Taylor or Justin Fields, who was ripped by Woody Johnson a day prior.
“He made a comment, and he has every right to his comment,” Glenn said at Jets practice Wednesday about Johnson, who had essentially blamed the Jets’ 0-7 start on Fields.
Glenn and Johnson feel, though, that Glenn has every right to determine which quarterback will start.
Glenn had stood behind a struggling Fields all season until Sunday’s loss to the Panthers, when Taylor was inserted for the second half.
There are seven games of evidence and critical Johnson comments that would seem to give the edge to Taylor this weekend — though Taylor is day to day with a knee injury — but Glenn is hoping a lack of clarity would help his team.
“I wouldn’t want to give [the Bengals] a competitive advantage,” said Glenn, who disputed Johnson’s gist that this disastrous start is the fault of Fields.
In his first year with the Jets, Fields has been dreadful and shown little signs of improvement for a team that is last in the NFL in passing yards and has gone two straight games without a touchdown.
But Glenn maintains there are “a number of things” that have held back the Jets, including a defense that wasn’t “playing well early” and a running game that “we got to get … going where it needs to go.”
Spreading around the responsibility to the entire team was a stark contrast from Johnson’s comments Tuesday at the fall owners meeting in Midtown.
“If we could just complete a pass, it would look good,” Johnson said about a Fields-led offense. “You have to convince them that you can do something, otherwise it’s hard to have a game that you can win. … You can’t run the ball if you can’t pass the ball. That’s Football 101.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
