New York Jets fire head coach Robert Saleh after disappointing season start

First-ever NFL Arab American and Muslim coach also was seen wearing Lebanese flag patch at football game

New York Jets head coach Robert Saleh walks on the field before an NFL football game. AP

The New York Jets have fired head coach Robert Saleh, the club said on Tuesday after the team lost three of their first five games of a National Football League (NFL) season they began with Super Bowl aspirations.

Saleh, as the son of immigrants from Lebanon, made history when he became the first Arab American and Muslim head coach in the NFL's one-hundred-year history.

He was seen wearing a Lebanon flag patch on his shirtsleeve, while on the sidelines of a football game this weekend.

Saleh took over as coach of the Jets in 2021 after spending four seasons as the San Francisco 49ers' defensive co-ordinator and the team have gone 20-36 during his tenure while failing to make the playoffs each year.

New York began this season with high expectations given the return of quarterback Aaron Rodgers, a Super Bowl champion and four-time NFL Most Valuable Player who returned from an Achilles injury suffered in the 2023 season.

“This was not an easy decision, but we are not where we should be given our expectations, and I believe now is the best time for us to move in a different direction,” Jets Chairman Woody Johnson said in a statement.

The decision marked the third in-season head-coaching change in Jets franchise history, Reuters reported.

More than 2,000 people in Lebanon have been killed in Israeli air strikes, the country's health ministry says, and more than one million people have been displaced.

Israel and Iranian-backed Hezbollah have exchanged in deadly aerial and ground combat along the Israel-Lebanon border since the Hamas-led October 7 attacks last year.

The Jets also announced that defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich will serve as the team's interim head coach for the remainder of the NFL season.

New York lost to San Francisco in their first match, then beat the Tennessee Titans and New England Patriots before losing consecutive games to the Denver Broncos and Minnesota Vikings.