Jets fans hadn't heard from first-time offensive coordinator Tanner Engstrand since his hiring by head coach Aaron Glenn. But it should come as no surprise that Engstrand loves his new role with the offensive players he has already started to coordinate.
"Absolutely ready, I'm excited to be in it," Engstrand told reporters about his new gig following Thursday's OTA session at the Atlantic Health Jets Training Center. "I've been in a coordinator role before at multiple different places, obviously not in the NFL, but I think nine years or something like that as a coordinator. So I feel 100 percent confident. I'm excited for this opportunity."
Much of the excitement is getting to work with dual-threat QB Justin Fields as the point man on his offense, and Engstrand likes the player a lot and has no qualms about shifting gears from a more pocket-presence QB in Jared Goff for the previous three years when he was the Lions' pass game coordinator.
Fields, he said, "is just a talented individual in all facets. He's obviously a physically talented player, right? Everybody talks about the running. Well, the guy's got an arm, too, and he does a great job with that. Mentally, he's phenomenal. He's been absolutely phenomenal so far. And we expect more out of that. There are just a lot of things that you can do with that type of player that is going to put stress on the defense and make that defensive coordinator stay up late at night."
Engstrand, despite his lack of experience as an NFL coordinator and his changeup in the styles of his starting QBs, has a résumé to excite any fan of offensive football. In his SoCal phase, he moved seamlessly from backup QB at San Diego State to the University of San Diego, where he moved from graduate assistant (under Jim Harbaugh) to position coach to OC from 2011-17, with his Toreros offenses averaging a healthy 33.0 points/game over his 70 games as coordinator.
Then, after a one-year reunion with Harbaugh as an offensive analyst at Michigan and a UFL pit stop cut short by Covid in '20, he entered his Detroit years with four seasons on the same Lions staff as then-DC Glenn and the past three seasons as their pass game coordinator under OC Ben Johnson. So the NFL rankings are not all just Engstrand's (Johnson, now the Bears' HC, and Goff figured prominently as well). But Engstrand still contributed to the Lions' total offense (4th-3rd-2nd), pass offense (8th-2nd-2nd) and scoring offense (5th-5th-1st).
He knows offensive football and, besides Fields, he likes what he's "inherited" on the Jets.
"That is a blessing, to come in and already have weapons in place," he said of his skill players, mentioning two in particular in RB Breece Halland WR Garrett Wilson. "Breece has shown in his career that he can run the ball, whether it's between the tackles or outside, and he's caught a ton of passes in his career, which is very beneficial for us.
"Garrett has shown to be an explosive player and we're going to hopefully continue to do that. I know AG talked about, 'Hey, what are we going to do with Garrett? We're going to give him the ball as much as we can.' And you know what? I'm in on it. And so I feel really good about that, about those guys."
See signal caller Justin Fields and the rest of the Jets on the field during the second week of OTAs within the voluntary portion of the offseason program.
Then to punctuate comments from some of the Jets' players the past two weeks, Engstrand is also in on what Glenn is preaching to the Jets.
"Obviously, he's really a take-charge type of guy, and what you're seeing him bring to this building, he's setting the tone for the standard of what this building is and what the expectation is," Engstrand said. "And he's truthful about it. He's not going to sugarcoat it. ... We're not going to beat around the bush. It's going to be this is the expectation, this is the standard and here it is, you take it or you leave it. And this is the way we're going to go.
"And I think guys are buying into that. You know, guys are seeing it and they're going, 'Yes, I like this. I know where we're going and I can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel.' And, and he's done a phenomenal job with that."
By all signs, Engstrand is starting to work some magic, too, although the proof will be in the offense he and Glenn are putting on the field from September forward. Until then, the new OC detailed without hesitation what he expects the first NFL offense that he can call his own will look like.
"We want to play fast, right?" he said. "We want to be physical. We want to be aggressive. We want to be explosive. We want to be detailed. We want that to show up on tape each and every week when somebody looks at our tape.
"And that's what we're going to shoot for."
