The Jets’ historic choice to lead them out of the Adam Gase era has stated that his path to the NFL truly began when his brother nearly was killed in the World Trade Center during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Robert Saleh, the son of Lebanese parents and believed to be the first Muslim head coach in NFL history, grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, a city that boasts one of the largest Muslim populations in the United States. He already was the first Arab-American to serve as a defensive coordinator for an NFL team.
“Unfortunately, the perception of our culture and of Arab-Americans who were born in this country and worked tirelessly to assimilate, goes unnoticed,” Saleh told Sports Illustrated in 2017. “All some people can see is what they think they know from what they see on TV. One bad apple spoils them all, fair or not.”
Saleh’s older brother, David, was in New York beginning a training program as a financial advisor for Morgan Stanley on the 61st floor of the South Tower, on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when the North Tower was struck by American Airlines Flight 11 at 8:46 a.m.
David Saleh told SI in the same 2017 feature that he and several coworkers ignored a supervisor’s advice to stay put. He grabbed his belongings and started to make his way down a packed stairwell.
David Saleh had reached the 24th floor when he felt the effects of United Airlines Flight 175 striking the South tower above him. He eventually made it to the ground level and outside, as firefighters and other first responders moved past him in the other direction.
The former high school football player ran for several blocks, and with no cell phone service, he stopped in a nearby store to call his family back in Michigan.
David told SI that he wasn’t aware that planes had struck the building until his father, Sam, informed him. “You don’t know what’s going on? It was these son of a guns. They flew planes into the building!” Sam Saleh told his son.
On his walk back to his hotel, David Saleh watched the South Tower collapse just before 10 a.m.
“Everybody was stopped dead-smack in the streets, just watching everything,” David told SI. “I want to say it was a cab driver, he had his radio on. Then some lady comes on, ‘The Pentagon was just hit. A plane just crashed into the Pentagon. Ladies and gentlemen, we are under attack!’ I was like, ‘What the f— is going on?’ It was nuts.”
The Saleh family in Dearborn had no further contact with David for several hours. When 22-year-old Robert Saleh returned home from his new job at Comerica Bank in Detroit, his crying mother informed him that David had been “in one of those buildings.”
“That was the start of a very long day,” Robert Saleh said. “We watched the news. Every minute that passed by became more and more anxious. I can’t begin to describe the stress level for the house. Especially when I looked at my mom. It was not an easy day, not a great day to reflect on.”
David Saleh called his family around 4 p.m. to let them know he was OK, and he drove a rental car of a family friend back to Dearborn on Sept. 13.
Robert Saleh returned to work at his new job as a credit analyst, but he quickly decided that he wanted to pursue a different passion.
Saleh had been an all-conference tight end at Northern Michigan, taking after his father who had played football at Eastern Michigan decades earlier. Sam Saleh even received an invite to a training camp with the Chicago Bears before suffering a serious knee injury.
A few months later, after watching Tom Brady and the New England Patriots win their first Super Bowl title, Robert Saleh decided he needed to pursue his own NFL dream.
“The Super Bowl was just done, and he calls me up in my office. He’s crying profusely, he can’t even speak,” David told Sports Illustrated. “I’m like, ‘What? What’s going on? What’s happening?’ I told him, ‘Just call me back…when you catch your breath,’ and I hang up. I’m calling people to see what’s going on, if anything bad is going on. Nobody’s answering.
“He calls me back and says, ‘I can’t stand this s–t. I have to be on the football field,’ and I’m like, ‘What? Buddy, you didn’t go to the combine, you didn’t enter any of the drafts,’ He’s still in that crying voice telling me he doesn’t want to play—it hurts, it hurts too much, he’s sick of icing everything. I’m like, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ He says, ‘I’d rather coach.’”
David Saleh suggested Robert speak to his former coach at Fordson High School in Dearborn, Jeff Stergalas, who helped him arrange a graduate-assistant position at Michigan State through another Fordson alumnus.
Stints as a defensive assistant at Central Michigan and Georgia followed, before Saleh was hired as a defensive intern with the Houston Texans in 2005. He was promoted to defensive quality control coach and then assistant linebackers coach before moving on to the Seattle Seahawks as Pete Carroll’s defensive quality control coach in 2011, winning a Super Bowl ring in 2013.
After a two-year stint as Jacksonville’s linebackers coach, he was named the 49ers’ defensive coordinator in 2017, with whom he reached Super Bowl 54 last year.
“He knew exactly what he wanted to do. Mapped out from beginning to end,” 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan told SI. “It was a fool-proof plan, and you could tell he’s been thinking about it for a long time.”
Saleh’s thoughts also remained with his hometown, which boasted 30 percent Arab ancestry in 2000 and over 40 percent by 2010, according to SI. Saleh said many Arab-American residents, including members of the football team, were subjected to racial taunts after the terrorist attacks.
“After 9/11, those kids couldn’t recover,” Saleh told SI. “The racial backlash they faced, I don’t know if you can imagine it, but for a kid to go through what those kids went through was not fair.
“In our culture we believe it takes a village to raise a child,” he added. “There are a lot of people back in Dearborn who have helped me.”
