The New York Jets stopped dancing around the quarterback question Sunday, and new head coach Aaron Glenn did it with the kind of sentence that doesn’t leave much room for interpretation.
“No doubt about it, he’s our guy,” Glenn told NFL Network at the NFL meetings, the first public declaration from the organization that Geno Smith is the Jets’ starting quarterback.
Smith, acquired in a March 10 trade with the Las Vegas Raiders, now sits atop a Jets quarterback depth chart that currently includes Brady Cook and Bailey Zappe, neither of whom is guaranteed a roster spot. Cook and Zappe have 13 combined career starts.
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The message from Glenn is simple: the Jets didn’t trade for Smith to run a “competition.” They traded for him to start, and even if the Jets draft a quarterback or add another veteran, Glenn’s comments signal the plan won’t change going into camp.
“It means to have a bona fide starter come in and lead this offense to where it needs to go,” Glenn said. He also pointed to Smith’s resurgence in Seattle: “Listen, he’s done it, you know, a couple of years. I mean, those years in Seattle, when he was, I think, Comeback Player of the Year. Man, he was up for MVP early in the season.”
Smith, 35, returns to the franchise that drafted him in the second round in 2013. The trade terms were straightforward: New York sent a 2026 sixth-round pick to the Raiders and received Smith plus a 2026 seventh-round pick. The financial structure is even more telling. The Jets are paying $3.3 million of Smith’s salary, while the Raiders are paying $16.2 million.
This is the kind of quarterback acquisition teams make when they want a starter without lighting cap space on fire. It’s also the kind of deal that makes the follow-up questions inevitable: if Smith is “the guy,” how much runway does he actually have?
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Glenn’s answer, at least publicly, suggests a real runway and it arrives after the Jets removed the only other experienced starter they had in-house. When the Jets executed the Smith trade, the roster still included Justin Fields, but Fields was traded to the Kansas City Chiefs on March 16. From there, the Jets’ quarterback reality became obvious: the next snap that matters belongs to Smith.
The context for the vote of confidence is also the mixed bag that is Smith’s recent performance arc. His best statistical stretch came in 2022 and 2023 with the Seahawks, when he threw for 7,906 yards and 50 touchdowns. The last year has been rougher. In 2025, his only season with the Raiders, Smith threw a league-high 17 interceptions, and Glenn acknowledged the Jets are betting the best years version is still available.
For the Raiders, Smith became expendable as the team moved toward the top of the 2026 draft and is expected to take quarterback Fernando Mendoza with the No. 1 pick. The Raiders were prepared to release Smith, but the Jets chose not to wait for the open market and simply completed the trade.
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