FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — Garrett Wilson longs for the kind of football he grew up watching. He thinks about the Sundays on his father’s couch in Austin, Texas. He’d watch the wide receivers and marvel at what they could do.Even now, he still thinks about the life Terrell Owens got to live as a star wide receiver. Things were simpler then. If a coach had Terrell Owens, he’d build his offense around getting the ball to Terrell Owens.“Guys like that, you don’t see as much anymore because it’s more schematic now,” Wilson told The Athletic. “It doesn’t have to be. That’s what it moved toward, but it doesn’t have to be.”Modern offenses, he says, have become overcomplicated, bright-eyed masterminds trying to show everyone how smart they are. Wilson thinks they sometimes fail to see what’s right in front of them. “With receivers like Terrell Owens, his coaches knew they had a special talent,” Wilson says. “We’re not going to overcomplicate it. It’s man coverage, let’s throw a fade to Terrell Owens. The last 10 years you’ve seen that fall off and it’s all about everyone’s plays.”To Wilson, early days with New York Jets offensive coordinator Frank Reich have felt like a blast from that past. Reich is coaching the kind of football Wilson always dreamed of playing. He felt it from their first conversation, when Reich had clearly already studied him, understood which routes and plays best suited his skill set, and shared his plan to deploy the star receiver. He showed Wilson film of other wide receivers to come through Reich’s offense, like T.Y. Hilton with the Indianapolis Colts and Alshon Jeffery with the Philadelphia Eagles. He’d be showing old clips, but in an offense that Wilson sees as timeless.How Aaron Glenn pulled Frank Reich back into NFL coachingZack Rosenblatt“When he’s pulling clips up to show us examples, some of the clips are from like 2014 or ’15, and he don’t gotta say anything, but we all notice it. The clip is blurry as hell,” Wilson says. “This isn’t a complicated game, and I think Frank gets that. The schemes that have worked for a while will work.”This isn’t a complicated game.Wilson sees Reich calling aspects of an offense that simply — there’s that word again — uses “five good players” running routes designed to win versus man coverage or Cover 3.“You don’t gotta recreate the wheel,” Wilson says.“That’s the league I grew up watching and loving. That’s the receivers I grew up watching. That’s what it was. Frank reminds me of the league that I grew up watching.”Reich walks into a meeting room and looks … lighter. He’s no longer carrying the weight of being a head coach. Jelani Woods has seen it. The tight end laughs in team meetings sometimes, looking around, thinking about how this is the only version of Reich his Jets teammates have ever experienced.Reich was Woods’ first NFL head coach, the one who drafted him in 2022 with the Indianapolis Colts. That was at the end of his tenure, when things were a bit more tense than they’d been at the beginning. Reich was fired midway through that season. The coach had always carried himself with a level of grace and professionalism, but Woods never saw him particularly loose. Back then, Woods saw him as “stern” and “strict” — not in a bad way, but not exactly the Energizer Bunny.When Woods was a rookie, Reich put a lot of work into getting him ready for the NFL. He was hard on him. “He was on me,” Woods says.“Frank is a little different now. Frank then, he was a head coach so it’s a little different mindset. He still has some of that now, but he’s not leading the whole team, just the offense. Now he’s still stern — but he’s a little more laid back. I can see the fun he’s having. I can see the joy in him again.”Reich was fired and replaced by Jeff Saturday midway through that 2022 season. He was fired again in an even more dysfunctional situation, with the Carolina Panthers a year later. That experience — with a meddling owner questioning his decisions at every turn — dimmed some of the light he had carried with him as a beloved and respected NFL figure since his playing days.The plan was to retire until Andrew Luck came calling, asking Reich to take over as Stanford’s interim head coach for the 2025 season. Reich would coach for one last season, then sail off into the sunset. Instead, even in a 4-8 season, Reich felt his football itch once again. When the opportunity expired, he was open to returning to the NFL, but he wasn’t going to just take any job. He turned down some opportunities with close NFL friends, like a job working with Eagles coach Nick Sirianni.That’s when Aaron Glenn called. The two were teammates 30 years ago for a 1-15 Jets team led by Rich Kotite, just before Bill Parcells arrived to change the culture and set a moribund franchise back on the right path. Glenn wanted his old friend to help him do the same thing.“As soon as AG called, I knew right away this was something I wanted to do, mainly because of him, but also because of the challenge and the opportunity to be a part of a staff and be a part of a team and organization that has an opportunity to do something special and turn something around,” Reich said in May. “At this point, I love that idea and I’m excited about that, and I feel like I got something to offer.”