Sitting in his office on a Wednesday afternoon, Robert Saleh spills out of a conventional computer chair, long limbs hanging over the armrests, like a parent sitting at a kid’s desk during back-to-school night. Or, perhaps, like a former collegiate tight end crammed into his seat at the back of the plane. That’s where Saleh was on the way home from his team’s stunning 31–30 win over the Browns last week. Taking after former boss and mentor Pete Carroll, Saleh and the coaching staff gave up their first-class seats to players, flying coach back to New Jersey.
In his idealistic crusade to—as he puts it—“leave the Jets better than I found them, whether it’s one year, two years, three years or 15 years,” the job demands an unending attention span and attuned kindness to concerns both large and small. He puts care into a developing wall of photographs that start from the locker room and stretch through the main atrium of the facility, with each panel depicting a portion of the team’s season. The photographs themselves are a small thing. The idea—that the Jets, a team historically consumed by a narrative of negativity and organizational face-planting that seemed to envelop every player and coach who walked in the door for a decade, are actually in control of telling their own story—is a large thing. So is understanding the need to point it out.
Keeping an adjustable basketball hoop in the team’s main meeting room where he sometimes makes coordinators shoot high-pressure free throws to break ties from practice in front of the whole team to make them laugh and keep them competitive? That’s a small thing. Holding firm on an actual open-door policy where he sees every issue brought to his desk as “deserving of the respect of my attention” keeping his hands firmly on the wheel of the NFL’s most sprawling roster rebuild without bailing? That’s a large thing.
