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The New York Jets haven’t made the playoffs since the 2010 season. But second-year head coach Aaron Glenn believes a veteran Geno Smith can return the franchise, which he notably struggled with to start his NFL career, to success — and not just any kind of success, either.
“I just feel like he's the guy that's going to lead us to the promise land,” Glenn said Tuesday of the 35-year-old quarterback at the NFL’s annual meeting in Phoenix, via SNY.
"He's the guy that's going to lead us to the promised land"
- Aaron Glenn on Geno Smith pic.twitter.com/NK13KNXj5P
Just about 13 years after drafting him, the Jets brought Smith back to New York at the start of the league year on March 11, acquiring him in a trade with the Las Vegas Raiders. They sent Vegas a 2026 sixth-round pick in exchange for Smith as well as a seventh-round pick in this year’s draft.
The Jets are reportedly paying only $3.3 million of Smith’s $18.5 million salary. It was a low-risk deal, and Glenn clearly sees some high upside.
"Listen, I know he had his struggles," Glenn said Tuesday, per ESPN. "I think a lot of quarterbacks, they have their struggles.
"But I do know this: He understands exactly what happened last year. I don't want to get too far into that because I wasn't there, obviously, with the Raiders. But I do know that, man, there are some things that he knows he can correct. He's at fault on some of those, but there are some things that he knows that he's going to get better at, and I look forward to him doing that.”
The Jets selected Smith with the No. 39 overall pick in the 2013 draft out of West Virginia. He spent his first four seasons in the league with franchise, starting a combined 29 games across the 2013 and 2014 campaigns.
In 2015, what then-Jets head coach Todd Bowles described as a locker room “sucker punch” fractured Smith’s jaw. He needed surgery, and he wound up sitting behind Ryan Fitzpatrick the entire season, as Fitzpatrick guided the Jets to 10 wins and a second-place finish in the AFC East.
Smith got another shot at serving as the team’s QB1 during the 2016 season, but that opportunity was short-lived, as a torn ACL landed him on injured reserve. The next year, he began his journey as long-term NFL backup, making one-season stops with the New York Giants and the Los Angeles Chargers before finding a new home in Seattle with the Seahawks.
After backing up Russell Wilson most of the 2019-21 seasons, Smith became the Seahawks’ starting signal-caller in 2022. That’s when he resurrected his career. He made the Pro Bowl his first two seasons leading the Seattle offense, notably winning NFL Comeback Player of the Year and posting the league’s highest completion percentage in 2022. In 2024, the Smith-led Seahawks won 10 games but missed the playoffs for the second year in a row, that time under Mike Macdonald.
Smith reunited with Pete Carroll in Vegas, as the Raiders traded for him and then inked him two a two-year extension reportedly worth $75 million.
Smith, and the regime he was playing for, didn’t last long in the Sin City. Offensive coordinator Chip Kelly was fired midseason. Carroll was canned after the Raiders’ disastrous 3-14 campaign. And Smith, who threw 17 interceptions and was sacked 55 times — both league highs in 2025 — was soon no longer part of the franchise’s future.
Since, his career has come full circle in New York with the Jets, who traded Justin Fields to the Kansas City Chiefs this offseason. The Jets also believed in what Fields had to offer, and that transaction didn’t change the franchise’s tune.
The Jets hold the No. 2 and No. 16 picks in the first round of this year’s draft, which features a thin quarterback class. They could take Alabama’s Ty Simpson. Or they could wait to draft at the position.
For now, Glenn and Co. seem focused on Smith and what he can do to elevate an offense coordinated by Frank Reich.
