The Detroit Lions are bracing to lose multiple key coaches from their staff in 2025, with one of them being defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn, who is a candidate for several head-coach vacancies around the NFL.
Glenn has interviewed with a handful of teams thus far, and by all accounts he has knocked his interviews out of the park, according to CBS Sports' Jonathan Jones.
In a recent article predicting where head-coaching candidates would ultimately land, ESPN's Dan Graziano pegged Glenn to the New Orleans Saints, a franchise he is familiar with already. Here's what Graziano wrote about that:
Here's one that most of the people I've been talking to seem to agree on. Glenn is expected to land one of the open head coaching jobs this cycle, and he has connections with the Saints and Jets. He played the final season of his playing career for the Saints in 2008 and was the team's defensive backs coach from 2016 to 2020 before following Dan Campbell to Detroit and becoming the Lions' defensive coordinator. He also played for the Jets from 1994 to 2001, and his post-playing career in the NFL started in their scouting department in 2012.
I don't know which job Glenn would pick if it came down to a choice between the Saints and Jets. But based on everything I have heard, I expect the Saints -- whose process seems less expansive so far than the Jets' process -- to make a strong push for Glenn and probably land him.
Adding to Jones' aforementioned report, he said the expectation is that Glenn will be hired by either the Saints or New York Jets, so that tracks with what Graziano says.
Glenn played the final year of his career in New Orleans before later becoming the team's defensive backs coach from 2016-2020, when he also crossed paths with Detroit head coach Dan Campbell.
The problem with the Saints job is that Glenn will have an even steeper hill to climb than most new head coaches have. That's because New Orleans is in total salary cap hell, with the Saints projected to be $52.3 million over the cap in 2025.
New Orleans is projected to have $60 million in cap space in 2026, but that could go down if the Saints push more money to future years to get under the cap in 2025, which is how they got into this mess in the first place.
When it comes to the two teams who appear to be Glenn's top options, the Jets are the Jets, but they don't have the hellish financial situation New Orleans does. That situation could very well derail Glenn's tenure with the Saints, which is why he might actually be better off going to New York.
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