The new coach won with the old coach’s players.

It was a popular refrain after the University of Hawaii football team’s historic 1999 turnaround. The new coach, June Jones, won with mostly the same players that Fred vonAppen failed with.

One of them was a linebacker named Jeff Ulbrich.

Now, after he was named interim head coach of the New York Jets on Tuesday, Ulbrich will try to do something similar with an NFL team that went 20-36 under his predecessor, Robert Saleh.

Ulbrich was a junior college transfer who missed about half of his first season at UH in 1998 with a knee injury. Like everyone else associated with the program, he was extremely frustrated with the 0-12 final record.

Then, along came Jones, and Hawaii turned things around — more than had ever been done before by any college team from one season to the next. Ulbrich was the heart of the UH defense when the Rainbow Warriors went 9-4 in 1999, setting a school single-season record with 169 tackles while helping Hawaii to a WAC co-championship and bowl game victory.

Ulbrich was drafted by his hometown team, the 49ers. He played 10 seasons for San Francisco before starting a coaching career with the Seahawks in 2010.

With Tuesday’s move by the Jets, Ulbrich became the second NFL head coach to have played at UH. Jones was the first.

Ulbrich, 47, has been the Jets defensive coordinator since 2021. Despite the team’s losing records, the defense has been good enough for Ulbrich to be mentioned often as a potential head coach somewhere in 2025.

But as of Tuesday, somewhere is New York, and next year right now, with the decision by owner Woody Johnson after the Jets fell to 2-3 with consecutive losses to the Broncos, 10-9, and the Vikings, 23-17.

“Jeff’s going to add a spark of positivity,” Johnson said on ESPN.

The Jets have the same record after five games that they did last year, when they finished 7-10 and with a losing record for the eighth consecutive year. They haven’t been to the playoffs since losing to the Steelers in the 2010 AFC Championship game.

Expectations are higher now because future Hall of Fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers is healthy. He missed all but the first four plays of the 2023 season, his first with the Jets, with a torn Achilles.

It’s hard to tell how much Ulbrich can or will alter the offense, since coordinator Nathaniel Hackett remains at that post. Hackett was also the OC for Green Bay when Rodgers won his third and fourth league MVP awards with the Packers in 2020 and 2021.

“I think everything’s on the table right now,” Ulbrich said at his introductory press conference, regarding possible changes. “We’re not playing to our potential right now. We’re too talented to put the product we put out there the last couple of weeks especially, so we have to take a hard look at everything and be honest with ourselves.”

Craig Stutzmann, Ulbrich’s UH teammate who is now offensive coordinator at San Jose State, said he is thrilled for Ulbrich — and the team he coaches, since Stutzmann was a child in New York and grew up as a Jets fan.

“He demanded everyone’s best, and he was able to, because he was the hardest worker on the team,” Stutzmann said in a text Tuesday. “He was the first in the training room, weight room, practice field … and he was the last to leave. He inspired everyone. I’m not surprised he played in the NFL as long as he did, and he’s coaching at the highest level of our profession.”

It was 25 years ago, and it was college in Hawaii, not the NFL in New York. But Jeff Ulbrich knows first-hand how a change at the top can reverse a team’s fortunes.