The New York Jets fired head coach Robert Saleh after more than three seasons of putrid results, but Joe Benigno believes there may have been a different motive behind the decision.
With a 20-36 record and no playoff appearances, the Jets and their owner Woody Johnson have seen enough from Saleh to decide he doesn’t deserve to be their head coach. Despite the large sample size, there are still conspiracies surrounding Saleh’s firing.
FS1 analyst and former Jets head coach Eric Mangini believes Johnson may have fired Saleh because he was embarrassed in front of his London friends Sunday afternoon. Meanwhile, WFAN host Joe Benigno wonders if Saleh was fired for wearing a Lebanese flag patch on his arm during the Jets loss to the Minnesota Vikings in London. Benigno was on-air with Jake Asman when news of Saleh’s firing broke, ultimately leading to his Lebanese flag patch theory.
Joe Beningo thinks Saleh was fired for donning a Lebanon flag on Sunday pic.twitter.com/Jpp5wtpZe4
— Jared (@jaregss) October 8, 2024
“I hate to get political,” Benigno told Asman. “But I have to in this case. Saleh had the flag of Lebanon on his shirt the other day in London. Now, we all know what’s going on in the Middle East, there’s no sugar-coating what’s going on in the Middle East. We all know about Hezbollah firing all these rockets out of Lebanon and into Israel.
“And I wonder…I think Saleh, we know he’s Muslim. I think he’s representing the people of Lebanon, because I don’t believe the people of Lebanon are happy with Hezbollah, I mean I don’t think that’s the case at all. And I wonder if that has played into this in a way as well.”
Saleh did wear a patch with the Lebanese flag below the Nike logo on his sleeve during Sunday’s game in London after Lebanon experienced Israeli airstrikes. The now-former Jets head coach, however, also wore the Lebanese flag patch last season during the NFL Heritage program in weeks 7 and 8.
Saleh is the son of Lebanese immigrants and became the NFL’s first Muslim American head coach when he was hired by the Jets in 2021. That coaching search was led by Jets co-owner Christopher Johnson while his brother Woody Johnson was finishing up his role as United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom in the Trump administration.
Woody fired Saleh Tuesday morning, less than two days after the Jets lost to Minnesota in London. But if Johnson felt Saleh gave the 2-3 Jets their best chance to win a Super Bowl, he would not have made a head coaching change. The decision to fire Saleh seemingly has much more to do with his performance as head coach than his support for Lebanon, the country of his ancestors. Benigno, however, will be able to share his conspiracy with Saleh. Last season, Benigno admitted he texts Saleh regularly and even sparked widespread drama around the Jets by misinterpreting one of those texts and relaying the false information on WFAN.
Despite conspiracies surrounding Saleh’s Lebanese flag patch, his firing has been widely supported from a football perspective. In a league that demands instant results and has no issue moving on from futile head coaches after one or two years, Saleh defied the norms by making it to year four without a playoff appearance. Firing a head coach after five weeks is early, but with three losing seasons already on his head coaching resume, Saleh has done little to prove he’s capable of righting this 2-3 ship.
