FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — Robert Saleh hastily walked off the podium and past a kitchen at the Jets facility, the clanking sounds of pots and pans echoing through the hallways as he passed through two doors, both requiring a code for entry. He stopped in an empty room and calmly leaned against the wall.
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Saleh smiled, unbothered by all the questions he was peppered with about Zach Wilson’s knee, or the hubbub he unleashed on social media just after announcing his quarterback won’t be returning until at least Week 4. But Saleh left all of that behind him, in the news conference room. When he jogged onto the practice field a few minutes later, Saleh had already moved on.
In his first year with the Jets, Saleh quickly learned that being a head coach is about more than coaching. It’s also a job of management — players, coaches and expectations. Every word that comes out of his mouth is dissected. Criticism is part of the job. He doesn’t let it bother him. The weight of responsibility that comes with being an NFL head coach in New York never seems to show on his face, or in his demeanor.
That’s true even as Saleh feels the pressure to win after a rough 4-13 debut season — and he’ll be without Wilson for at least three games, leaving the Jets with 37-year-old Joe Flacco at quarterback. The Jets already lost talented offensive tackle Mekhi Becton to a season-ending knee injury in training camp, and Duane Brown (whom they signed to replace him) is out Sunday with a shoulder injury and may need to go on IR.
Still …
Positive vibes only.
“One thing with Coach Saleh, he does such a great job of compartmentalizing,” said Jets cornerbacks coach Tony Oden, a longtime friend. “He never lets it get to us. He lets us do our job. We always see the same person.”
Robert Saleh is in his second year as Jets coach. (Vincent Carchietta / USA Today)Saleh is only human, though. He feels the stress of his job, like anyone would, but he finds ways to keep it at bay. His energy is always positive, his passion and spiritedness, signatures of his sideline coaching demeanor, always bubbling beneath the surface. In the offseason, he plays golf. He loves playing chess. When he goes home — it’s finally a home now, too, after he spent his first year living at a hotel in Florham Park with his wife, Sanaa, and seven kids — he has his family to bring him back down to earth. And when he turns on his phone and opens WhatsApp, he’ll find dozens of messages from his college buddies, ready to needle him, to remind him that he wasn’t always so fiery. Once, 25 years ago, he was a reserved, quiet, 18-year-old who cried when his parents dropped him off at Northern Michigan University.
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“With those guys, we’re all over 40 and when we get together it’s like we’re 18 again,” Saleh, 43, told The Athletic. “It’s just a really, really cool group of guys. If I ever hit rock bottom, they’ll all be there.”
His friends watch him now in interviews. They see clips of him running up and down the sideline, videos of him yelling “SAUCE!” into a phone after the Jets drafted Sauce Gardner in April, or nearly running onto the field to celebrate with his team when defensive end Bradlee Anae rumbled for a 30-yard touchdown in the preseason. He paces up and down the sideline, emphatically shouting when someone makes a play. His motivational speeches have become legendary, both in the Jets building and at his last stop with the 49ers.
“They say volume reflects confidence,” Saleh said.
It took Saleh a long time to find his voice. His college friends knew him before he did.
“All the way through his journey, he’s still just Rob to us,” said Tim Freiberg, aka “T-Free,” one member of Saleh’s core group of college friends.
“He’s still the same guy,” said Matt Tuccini, aka “Wally,” another member of the friend group. “He’s still the guy we locked in the bathroom.”
It’s a seven-hour drive from Dearborn, Mich., to Marquette, Mich. Saleh was a wreck for all seven in 1997, when his family packed up the car and drove to Northern Michigan to drop Saleh off at his freshman dorm. Saleh starred as a tight end at Fordson High School in Dearborn and the idea of following in his uncle’s footsteps and playing for the Wildcats was appealing. But leaving the comfort of his own community frightened him.
Dearborn and Marquette are both in Michigan, but worlds apart. Dearborn, located 15 minutes from Detroit, is home to the largest Muslim population in the United States per capita, and Saleh comes from a Lebanese family. The NMU campus is minutes from the shores of Lake Superior, close to Canada.
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Saleh was “raised in a bubble,” he said. “So just trying to understand different cultures — it was a major culture shock.”
When he got to campus, Saleh said he “finagled” his way to his own room at Gant Hall, where the football players lived for two years. That only further isolated Saleh, something he admits now “wasn’t the greatest idea.” Saleh didn’t have his first beer until he turned 21, so it wasn’t easy to fit into college culture. He’d often go to parties unwittingly.
“I was the sober guy at the party,” Saleh said.
Things started to change once he met football teammates, which included Freiberg and Tuccini. There was also Mark “Chunk” Guzan, Jeff “Yeffy” Sarnowski, Luke “Grumples” Selden, Brad “Mac” MacDonald, Tony “T-Ebs” Ebeling and Jason “Slinky” Heeres. They call Saleh “Rob,” or “Jalal,” his middle name.
They were all from different regions of the Midwest — Wisconsin, lower Michigan, Chicago. None of them looked like Saleh, a tall, skinny, Middle Eastern kid with a buzzed head — he had some hair back then — and goatee, but he felt comfortable around them, like he belonged.
“At first he was a little more on the quiet, reserved side,” said Freiberg, who played quarterback. “But it didn’t take us long to warm him up and become instant friends.”
As juniors, six of them — Saleh, Heeres, MacDonald, Guzan, Freiberg and Selden — moved into a house together, the rest in a house close by.
Saleh was the only one with his own phone line — this was before everyone had cellphones — and used it to communicate with his long-distance girlfriend. One night, Saleh was in the bathroom, on the phone. So Tuccini wrapped an electric cord around the doorknob, tied it around the corner and locked him in the bathroom.
“Then we kept calling him on his phone line from the other phone line,” Tuccini said, laughing. “Until he literally knocked the door off the hinges.”
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The pranks were constant.
Freiberg remembers Saleh always being the last housemate to return from winter break. If there was class (or practice) on Monday morning, Saleh would return late on Sunday night. He always locked the door to his room when he left for break, but one year his roommates noticed he left his window unlocked. So, they climbed through the window, took all of Saleh’s belongings — TV, clothes, furniture, everything — and put them on his bunk bed. He returned close to midnight after that long, seven-hour drive from Dearborn, desiring a good night’s sleep.
“All he wanted to do after driving was go to bed,” Freiberg said. “So he shows up and all his stuff was sitting on his bed. He obviously wasn’t very happy with that.”
But Saleh got in on the pranks, too. His favorite on one of his friends was particularly savage.
The group had driven in separate cars to Detroit to watch NMU’s hockey team, and on the drive back, Saleh discovered that Guzan had left his keys in Saleh’s car. So when Saleh got back to the house before Guzan, he immediately went to Guzan’s car and drove it to a nearby parking lot. The next morning, the football team had a 6 a.m. run — in the snow. Guzan was frantic when he couldn’t find his car.
“I’m like: ‘Dude, what’s wrong?’ He said: ‘My car was right here!’ I told him just jump in (my car), we’ll look for it later,” Saleh said. “So we go to morning running, we come back, his car is still not there. So I’m thinking, s—, I’m going to let him ride this out.”
Guzan called his mother and father, the car insurance company and the police. After a while, he came in and asked Saleh for a ride to the police station — the perfect opportunity for Saleh to fess up to the prank.
Instead: Sure, Chunk!
“I’m letting this all play out,” Saleh said, laughing.
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So they went to the police station, Guzan filed a report and they drove back to the house. When they got inside, Saleh finally tossed him the car keys.
“I don’t think he talked to me for like a week,” Saleh said.
The hijinks helped to crack open Saleh’s shell. And his competitive passion started to show up once they all lived together, too. The two houses would get into tournaments playing darts, and Madden on Xbox. Saleh was so good at Madden, Freiberg said, that random people would show up to their house for the chance to play against him.
“Every now and then some random guy would show up and say: ‘Hey, I’m here to play Madden,’” Freiberg said. “And we’re thinking, ‘Who is this guy?’”
Saleh was a good football player, too, an all-conference tight end — but he didn’t envision an NFL future. Most Division II athletes don’t make it that far, and Saleh, majoring in finance, planned for a future outside of football. At that point, Saleh didn’t really carry himself like someone who would get into coaching, either.
“I don’t want to sound negative, but no, you never would’ve thought that,” Tuccini said. “He was a smart guy and a good athlete. But you didn’t think, ‘Oh man, this guy is going to go on and coach someday. …
“I think he was always a guy that had his stuff together, but he seemed to become more focused on the pursuit of greatness after college.”
The story of how Saleh eventually went down his path of coaching is well-told at this point. After graduating from NMU, Saleh got a job back in Dearborn as an analyst at Comerica Bank. Then, 9/11 happened. His brother David was working at the World Trade Center the day of the attack, but made it out safely. Still, the fear of losing his brother that day served as a light-bulb moment. It made Saleh think about the fragility of life, that he no longer wanted to work at a job he didn’t love. He called his brother one day, crying, saying that he wanted to get back into football. So, he quit that job and got a new one as a graduate assistant at Michigan State in 2002.
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Saleh made seven different stops in college and the NFL before ascending to Jets coach, and his group of friends has supported him every step of the way.
Freiberg, who lives in Wisconsin, went to a University of Wisconsin-Michigan State game in 2002 wearing a Badgers sweatshirt and a Spartans hat.
“I got the weirdest looks,” Freiberg said. “But wherever he’s coached, I’ve been a big supporter of his teams.”
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Once Saleh got into coaching, he slowly started to find his voice. Tuccini noticed Saleh’s signature intensity — it would only really manifest in college when Saleh got pranked — coming out when he started becoming hyper-focused on his fitness.
“Right after college, he just got really focused on everything he did,” Tuccini said. “He started getting really intense with his physical fitness. And I think he was just at a point in his life where he got very intense with everything he did.”
Saleh spent two years at Michigan State, then one day made a 70-mile drive from East Lansing to Mount Pleasant and sat outside the Central Michigan football offices for hours, waiting for head coach Brian Kelly. He convinced Kelly to hire him in 2004 as a defensive assistant.
That’s where he met Oden, who was at CMU for only a couple of months before getting hired away by the Texans. But a 25-year-old Saleh made a lasting impression. He was still on the quieter side at that point, but Saleh taught himself how to use Microsoft Visio, a diagramming application that became a go-to playbook tool for NFL and college teams.
“I was only really there (at CMU) for a cup of coffee but you know someone is good right away,” Oden said. “It doesn’t take much to see someone’s different in a positive way. He was organized, he knew (Visio), he was showing me the ins and outs. He was very detailed with it, knew how to communicate and coach me through it. He was meticulous in his drawings. You knew he was going to be something special.”
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When Oden got to the Texans, he was doing the job of two people, so he went to head coach Dom Capers, asking if they could hire someone else to lessen the workload — and he pitched them Saleh. So Saleh, who had taken a job at Georgia at that point, was hired on at first as a defensive intern.
He taught all the coaches in Houston how to use Visio, too.
There was that energy again.
Texans coaches “fell in love with him,” Oden said. “The passion was always there. When he was teaching me, there was passion. With most people, they say volume reflects confidence. That’s what happens. It showed in his teaching, his energy, him saying: ‘This is easy! You can do this!’ It’s the same way he talks about football now. That’s who he is: He’s a giver. Some people are energy vampires, he’s an energy giver.”
After a 2-14 season in 2005, Capers and his staff were fired. Saleh, though, was retained by new head coach Gary Kubiak, elevated to a defensive quality control coach and then assistant linebackers coach.
Oden and Saleh wouldn’t work together again for 15 years, but they stayed in touch. As time passed, Oden could sense Saleh becoming comfortable in his own skin, forming into the coach the Jets hired last year.
“We bounced ideas off each other and I could definitely see how fast he was growing,” Oden said. “The questions changed, his demeanor changed. He was a coach now, he wasn’t just quality control. He had it.
“I could tell by his words.”
As a sophomore, Saleh woke up one morning in his NMU dorm room in a panic. He just remembered he had to stand in front of his speech class and orate “something about health,” he says now. On the 30-minute walk to class, he prepared something in his head — and didn’t write anything down.
“I just winged it,” Saleh said.
He aced it. That success was something Saleh carried with him as he sojourned through his coaching journey, but he never really had the confidence — or position — to enact it until much later in his career. Speaking in front of a classroom of strangers is different than standing in front of a room of football players and trying to motivate them, too.
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If the “volume of your voice comes with confidence,” as Saleh often says, he was still speaking quietly until he left Seattle. He spent six years with the Texans before getting hired to Pete Carroll’s staff with the Seahawks as a defensive quality control coach in 2011. His three years in Seattle turned into a crash course in leadership. It’s where he found his voice, and figured out what kind of coach he was going to be. He credits members of that staff — Carroll, Gus Bradley, Ken Norton Jr., Kris Richard and Rocky Seto — with cracking open his shell, like his college buddies once did in Marquette.
“That group of men helped me identify who I was, who I am, and helped me become comfortable in my own skin,” Saleh said. “That helped me. I was still quiet in Seattle, but — and Pete has said it before, too — once I left Seattle, I opened up. The credit goes to (those Seahawks coaches) because I think when you identify with yourself and become secure in your own skin, and you really, really understand your thoughts and how you want things to play out — your volume increases and your true character will come out.”
Once Saleh was hired as the linebackers coach with the Jaguars, flashes of his personality — the sideline running, emphatic shouting — started to show up on Sundays. When Kyle Shanahan hired him as defensive coordinator with the 49ers in 2017, it became his signature coaching style. His players loved it.
Saleh was 49ers defensive coordinator from 2017 to 2020. (Stan Szeto / USA Today)“He always had that ‘all gas, no brake’ mentality,” said Jets linebacker Marcell Harris, who played for Saleh in San Francisco from 2018 to 2020. “When you actually get on the field and make a play, he’s always hyped for you. It’s definitely dope. It gives you another boost as a player because you’re out there battling, so when you’ve got a head coach or a defensive coordinator out there hyping you up the same way your teammates are, that really gives you an extra boost of motivation.”
When Harris hit free agency this offseason, he had interest from other teams but was waiting for the Jets to come calling. He wanted to play for Saleh again, and he wasn’t the only one. Jets defensive tackle Solomon Thomas and linebacker Kwon Alexander also played for Saleh in San Francisco. Offensive lineman Laken Tomlinson knew him with the 49ers, too, and Brown was with the Texans when Saleh first started out.
When Saleh was hired by the Jets, he brought that signature “All Gas, No Brake” motto with him. Jets players and coaches often wear shirts with the “AGNB” acronym on it. There are also “positive vibes only” shirts and, new this season, ones that say “60%.” That comes from the Navy SEALs, the idea that a “fight or flight” response doesn’t kick in “until you’ve achieved 40 percent of what you’re capable of,” Saleh said last month. “Everyone’s 40 percent is different. When you’re on the field and you feel like you’ve gone far enough, you’ve only accessed 40 percent of what you’re capable of and you’ve got 60 percent more. To get into it, you’ve got to go to a dark place.”
From left to right: Tony Ebeling, Jeff Sarnowski, Tim Freiberg, Saleh, Brad MacDonald, Luke Selden, Jason Heeres and Matt Tuccini before the Jets’ home opener in 2021. (Courtesy of Freiberg)These are the sort of things Saleh talks about when he’s speaking to the team, before practice, before games, at halftime, in the postgame locker room. It’s become the stuff of legend around Florham Park. It’s part of what sold general manager Joe Douglas and Jets ownership on Saleh as their head coach last year — along with his attention to detail, and the success he had as 49ers defensive coordinator, helping lead them to a Super Bowl appearance in 2019.
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“I’ve referenced his team meetings and how great they are,” Douglas said. “I love Robert’s consistency, his consistent energy, every day.”
Those speeches “get us going,” safety Jordan Whitehead said.
“It’s like a fire is lit up inside you,” Harris said. “He’s the captain of our whole team. At the end of the day, you’ve got a head coach giving us that little fired-up speech before the game, or at halftime, and it gives you a fire in your heart.”
Once everyone in Saleh’s friend group got cellphones in the early 2000s, they started a group chat in WhatsApp. Even with the advent of iPhones, they’ve kept that same group message alive. Many of the members of that friend group declined to be interviewed by The Athletic. Tuccini said that’s out of fear of getting made fun of in the group text. That made Saleh laugh.
Even as Saleh has become more famous, his college friend group has stuck together. They meet up just about every year in some fashion.
The 49ers played at the Vikings in the preseason one year while Saleh was on staff. Freiberg made the drive with his father, a retired CPA, to see Saleh, and they met at the team hotel the night before the game. Saleh “spent most of the time talking to my dad about taxes,” Freiberg said.
Football never comes up when they all hang out, or when they’re texting. It’s a respite for Saleh, from the stresses of his day job.
Last year, Freiberg took Saleh, his wife and Jets defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich out for Mexican food before a preseason game against the Packers. At one point, Sanaa turned to Freiberg and said: “You know, Rob can be himself around you guys. He doesn’t have to put on a facade, he doesn’t have to put on the coach face, the media face,” Freiberg said. “It’s just us hanging out. Especially with the high-profile and high-pressure job he has, we can just give him a little bit of a reprieve from that, a break, even if it’s for one minute.”
Saleh (far right) in June 2018 with his Northern Michigan friends at their college house. (Courtesy of Tim Freiberg)In 2018, they all reunited in Marquette and took a visit to their old house. Last year, the entire friend group — T-Free, Wally, Chunk, Yeffy, Grumples, Mac, T-Ebs and Slinky — made the trip to New Jersey for Saleh’s home opener as Jets coach, without wives or kids. The whole group — minus Saleh — stayed in a house together near Florham Park, roommates again. Saleh gave them a tour around the Jets facility. It wasn’t until Sunday that it sunk in exactly what was happening.
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“You know, it was neat going to the facility, like: ‘OK, yeah, cool, here’s your office,’” Tuccini said. “That was pretty cool. But it’s when you’re in the stadium and there’s tens of thousands of people and then your buddy from college walks out and he’s leading the team and then you’re like: ‘Wow. He’s running the show.’ That definitely struck me.”
Most of the group will return this weekend for the Jets’ season-opener against the Ravens, too.
“We’re all super into it,” Tuccini said. “All of us, we’re always wearing Jets stuff. People are always asking: Why do you have a Jets hat?
“Well, my buddy’s the coach.”
(Top photo courtesy of Luke Selden)
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