Aaron Glenn doubles down with another awful take defending Justin Fields

Maybe it's me. Maybe I don't fully grasp the game of football. But during these first six New York Jets games, I haven't thought that Justin Fields has played well in most of them. Has he been an abject disaster in all of them? Maybe not. Has he been bad in most of them? I thought so.

But according to Aaron Glenn, that is not the case. In fact, not only has he not played poorly for most of the season, Glenn insists he's only played poorly in one game. This past Sunday against the Denver Broncos, Justin Fields and the Jets' offense finished the game with a grand total of -10 net passing yards.

No, nothing is wrong with you. You read that right. No need to refresh the page or look up my credibility. That is a real statistic and a real thing that happened. And it took every negative of that shocking stat line for Glenn to acknowledge Fields played poorly.

But outside of Sunday, according to his latest remarks, Glenn refuses to admit that Fields has been bad at any point this season.

Justin Fields has been bad for more than just one game in 2025

After the game on Sunday, Glenn bristled at even the question of whether Fields would be the starter next week. "Come on, what kind of question is that?" he groaned. On Monday, prompted by the press, he attempted to contextualize his thoughts on the matter further.

"I thought about the question that was asked. When you look at what Justin did the games that he played, I didn't think he was bad at all. I actually thought he did some pretty good things in those four games. In this fifth game, he took a step back, I'm with you guys 100%. And we can't have that... I don't think you just try to bench a player after having one true bad game. Because I thought the other games he played fairly well."

Aaron Glenn

The good news is that these games are filmed. We have recordings of what happens, which then turn into reported statistics. And in 2025, we have a whole company (Pro Football Focus), devoted to diligently watching tape of every single play and then grading every single player on every single play.

Let's dive into both PFF's grades and more standard metrics to see if Justin Fields has been bad, or if Aaron Glenn is correct.

In five games this season, Fields has eclipsed a 70.0 PFF passing grade only twice. In each of these games (Week 1 and Week 5), his grade was excellent at 90.4 and 76.8, respectively. In the other three games, though, he finished with a 28.9, 50.3, and 49.0. He has five turnover-worthy plays and only three big-time throws.

His yards per attempt have gone down pretty consistently. After starting off with a bang at 9.9, he proceeded to rattle off 2.5, 8.4, 6.2, and 2.6. He's made a living out of standing in the pocket too long and taking sacks to artificially hemorrhage yards. Granted, nothing is worse than the nine-sack day he just had, but just the week prior, he took five sacks for 49 yards.

He's yet to complete a pass longer than 33 yards. And with all this ineptitude via his arm, you'd hope the speedster would at least be making use of his legs as an alternative weapon to move the ball. Unfortunately, he's only eclipsed 50 rushing yards in one game this season.

So, based on all of that data, it appears Fields has been bad pretty much all season. Could you argue that Week 1 and Week 5 were alright? Sure, you could attempt that argument. Neither game was historically bad, that's true.

But realistically speaking, it's been bad from start to finish. I'm hesitant to be too hard on Fields, given his positive attitude and evident work ethic. That doesn't mean his head coach should straight up lie about his performance, though.

I don't know how the rest of the season will unfold. I'm not sure if Fields will find a way to turn things around. Maybe all of this will be a funny memory when the Jets are 7-8, headed in the right direction.

But what I do know is that Justin Fields has played more than one bad game. And Aaron Glenn gains exactly nothing from lying to fans and insulting everyone's intelligence. So much for accountability.