Denver Broncos assistant coach Jim Leonhard and longtime NFL assistant Wink Martindale were among eight candidates interviewed by the New York Jets for their vacant defensive coordinator position.
The Jets announced Friday they also completed interviews — all through video meetings — this week with Chris Harris, who served as New York's interim defensive coordinator after Steve Wilks was fired last month, Mathieu Araujo, Ephraim Banda, DeMarcus Covington, Daronte Jones and Jim O’Neil.
Jets coach Aaron Glenn will next shorten the list and meet with remaining candidates for in-person interviews.
New York's defense was one of the NFL's worst during a 3-14 season, Glenn's first as head coach. Wilks was fired after 14 games and Harris, the Jets' defensive backs coach and pass game coordinator, took over the play calling.
“Compatibility is just as important as coachability,” Glenn said last week when asked about what he's looking for in a defensive coordinator. “So, I want to make sure we see things the same way and I want to make sure that we can vibe as far as sitting down and talking about how we see football.”
Leonhard, a former safety who played for the Jets from 2009-11, has some familiarity with Glenn. In Leonhard's final season as a player in 2014 for Cleveland, Glenn served as the Browns' assistant defensive backs coach.
Leonhard began his coaching career as an assistant at Wisconsin, his alma mater, in 2016 before becoming the Badgers' defensive coordinator and later the interim head coach in 2022. After one year at Illinois, Leonhard joined Sean Payton's staff in Denver as the defensive backs coach and pass game coordinator in 2024 before adding assistant head coach to his duties this season.
Martindale was the defensive coordinator at Michigan the last two seasons after a two-year stint in the same role with the Giants. After several college stops to begin his coaching career, Martindale had NFL stints with the Raiders, Broncos and Ravens.
Araujo spent the last four seasons with the Dolphins, first as an assistant defensive backs coach for Mike McDaniel and then as the cornerbacks coach.
Banda coached the Browns’ safeties the last three seasons under Kevin Stefanski after several college stops, including Texas, Mississippi State, Miami and Utah State.
Covington joined the Packers this season as their defensive line coach and run game coordinator after spending eight seasons with the Patriots, including last season as the defensive coordinator.
Jones has spent the last five seasons with the Vikings as the defensive backs coach and also served as the pass game coordinator the last three. He has also had NFL coaching stints with the Dolphins and Bengals.
O’Neil has been with the Lions the past two years, including the 2024 season when Glenn was the defensive coordinator in Detroit. He's a defensive assistant who also coaches the Lions' safeties. He was a defensive quality control coach for the Jets in 2009 and their assistant defensive backs coach from 2010-12. O'Neil also has spent time with the Bills, Browns, 49ers and Raiders.
AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl
FILE - New York Giants defensive coordinator Don "Wink" Martindale during an NFL football game against the Philadelphia Eagles, in Philadelphia, Dec. 25, 2023. (AP Photo/Rich Schultz, File)
FILE - Wisconsin interim head coach Jim Leonhard leads warmups before playing against Nebraska in an NCAA college football game in Lincoln, Neb., Nov. 19, 2022. (AP Photo/Rebecca S. Gratz)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The Artemis II astronauts who ignited a lunar renaissance gave high marks Thursday to their moonship, especially the heat shield, for its performance during reentry.
In their first news conference since returning to Earth, the three Americans and one Canadian said their lunar flyby puts NASA in a much better position for a moon landing by a crew in two years and an eventual moon base. They spoke from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, their home base.
Commander Reid Wiseman later told The Associated Press that he’s been so busy since getting back that he hasn’t had time to gaze up at the moon, let alone Carroll Crater, the name suggested by the crew for a bright lunar crater in honor of his late wife. They shared two daughters whose anxieties and fears over their father’s journey ended with his safe splashdown late last week.
“Being 252,000 miles away from home was the most majestic, gorgeous thing that human eyes will ever witness,” he said in an interview with the AP. But hurtling back through the atmosphere at 39 times the speed of sound, “that is scary and that is risky.” That’s why he yearned for home midway through his flight. “You just want to hold your kids and you just want them to know that you’re safe.”
Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen launched to the moon from Florida on April 1, NASA’s first lunar crew in more than a half-century and by far the most diverse.
They became the most distant travelers ever — breaking Apollo 13's record — as they whipped around the lunar far side, illuminated enough to reveal features never viewed before by the human eye. The sight of a total lunar eclipse added to the wonderment.
Their Orion capsule, which they named Integrity, parachuted into the Pacific last Friday to close out the nearly 10-day voyage. Artemis II's Houston homecoming the next day coincided with the 56th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 13.
Wiseman said he and Glover “maybe saw two moments of a touch of char loss” to the heat shield as Integrity plunged through the fastest, hottest part of reentry. Once aboard the recovery ship, they peered at the bottom of the capsule as best they could, leaning over to view any signs of damage. They spotted a little loss of charred material on the shoulder, where the heat shield meets the capsule.
“For four humans just looking at the heat shield, it looked wonderful to us. It looked great, and that ride in was really amazing,” Wiseman said.
He cautioned that detailed analyses still need to be conducted. “We are going to fine-tooth comb every single, not even every molecule, probably every atom on this heat shield," he said.
The heat shield on the first Artemis test flight in 2022 — with no one aboard — came back so pockmarked and gouged that it pushed Artemis II back by months if not years. Instead of redoing it, NASA opted to change the capsule's entry path to minimize heating. Future capsules will sport a new design.
As the parachutes released right before splashdown, Glover said he felt like he was in freefall — like diving backward off a skyscraper. “That’s what it felt like for five seconds,” he said, adding when the ride smoothed out: “It was glorious.”
Since their return, the four astronauts have endured round after round of medical testing to check their balance, vision, muscle strength and coordination, and overall health. They even put on spacewalking suits for exercises under conditions simulating the moon’s one-sixth gravity of Earth to see how much endurance and dexterity future moonwalkers might have upon lunar touchdown.
NASA already is working on Artemis III, the next step in its grand moon base-building plans. The platform from which the rocket launches headed back Thursday to Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building, where it will be prepped for next year’s Artemis launch.
Still awaiting an assigned crew, Artemis III will remain in orbit around Earth as astronauts practice docking their Orion capsule with one or two lunar landers in development by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.
Artemis IV will follow in 2028 under NASA’s latest schedule, with two astronauts landing near the moon’s south pole.
NASA is aiming for a sustainable moon presence this time around. During the Apollo moonshots, astronauts kept their visits short. Twelve astronauts explored the lunar surface, beginning with Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969 and ending with Apollo 17’s Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt in 1972.
Koch said that since returning, she and her crewmates are “feeling even more excited and just ready to take that on as an agency.”
“We made it happen,” she added.
Everyone will need to accept extra risk to achieve all this and trust that any future problems can be figured out in real time, Hansen noted. “We’re not going to be able to pound everything flat before we go. We're going to have to trust each other," he said.
While everything went smoothly for them, “it was also very clear to us that it can get pretty bumpy,” he said. Future crews will have to "understand it can get real bumpy real fast.”
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
The Artemis II crew, from left, Jeremy Hansen, Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover gather with Hansen as he speaks during a crew return event Saturday, April 11, 2026, at Ellington Field in Houston. (AP Photo/Michael Wyke)
This photo provided by NASA shows the Artemis II crew being hoisted into a U.S. Navy MH-60 helicopter after successfully splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on Friday, April 10, 2026, following their 10-day mission around the Moon. (James Blair/NASA via AP)
In this photo provided by NASA, Artemis II crew members Cmdr. Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency mission specialist Jeremy Hansen are loaded into a raft after successfully splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on Friday, April 10, 2026, following their 10-day mission around the Moon. (James Blair/NASA via AP)
NASA's Artemis II crew - NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen speak during a press conference on Thursday, April 16, 2026, in Houston. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)
