NFL Coaching Legend Raves About Potential New York Jets Coaching Candidate

The New York Jets will have a new head coach in 2025. That’s a given.

The Jets have won one game under interim head coach Jeff Ulbrich and it seems highly unlikely that owner Woody Johnson and the team’s brain trust will bring him back as either the full-time head coach or the defensive coordinator.

That would wipe the slate clean for whoever they hire. With soon-to-be 41-year-old quarterback Aaron Rodgers under center, the Jets will have to consider buying into a coach that can help them develop a new young quarterback.

The ideal candidate would be a coach that has experience developing young quarterbacks. Recently, Sports Illustrated published a list of the 27 top coaching candidates for the upcoming hiring cycle.

The list is filled with offensive coaches that have experience running high-octane offenses. But one potential candidate was working on Monday night — Houston offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik.

Jets fans have already seen Slowik’s handiwork as the Texans visited MetLife Stadium a few weeks ago. It wasn’t quarterback C.J. Stroud’s best night. But, Houston remains one of the best teams in the AFC and Slowik’s star is rising.

He’s only 37 years old. He’s a Princeton, N.J., native, so he’s local. He grew up in Green Bay, Wis., and went to college at Michigan Tech on the state’s upper peninsula.

He’s a member of the Shanahan coaching tree, as he worked for both Mike and his son, Kyle.

Mike Shanahan is one of the game’s legendary offensive coaches who crafted Denver’s offense in the 1980s as an offensive coordinator and later led the Broncos to a pair of Super Bowl titles as head coach.

He did nothing but rave about the young coach, saying that when Kyle Shanahan took the San Francisco job his first piece of advice was, “You better call Bobby.”

“Bobby knows football extremely well,” Shanahan said. “He’s a great person. Very smart. He knows personnel as well as anybody. He’s studied both sides of the football, and if you ever talk to him, you can find out how sharp and on top of things he is.”

It’s the sort of attention to detail the Jets could use from their next head coach. He’s not a secret, either. He interviewed for four head-coaching jobs last offseason.

Slowik was part of the Washington staff under Mike Shanahan from 2011-13, a staff that included four current NFL head coaches — San Francisco’s Kyle Shanahan, Green Bay’s Matt LaFleur, the Los Angeles Rams’ Sean McVay and Miami’s Mike McDaniel.

After Washington let him go, he worked for Pro Football Focus for three years and then joined Kyle Shanahan’s staff at San Francisco in 2017. He eventually flipped to the offensive side of the ball and coordinated the 49ers’ passing game in 2022, during which Brock Purdy rose from “Mr. Irrelevant” to starting quarterback.

The Texans hired him to be their offensive coordinator and to tutor rookie quarterback C.J. Stroud, who was the NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year.