I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again.
There are all kinds of bad teams in the NFL.
For most of 2025, particularly at the end of the season with Brady Cook at quarterback, the Jets were a comedically mismatched bad team. They don’t have the talent or coaching necessary to be competitive with almost any of the other 31 teams.
In 2026 the Jets are still a bad team, but they are a different kind of bad.
The talent level is better. Of course, that’s not saying much. The Jets can put almost any type of roster on the field and still be better than what we saw at the end of last season.
The 2026 Jets are still ranked relatively low in talent compared to the rest of the league. This is especially true on defense. I’m not sure many of the players who took the field in yesterday’s game against the Las Vegas Raiders will see much playing time on a Super Bowl caliber defense. Even most of those who make the cut will almost certainly have smaller roles than the Jets.
There are a number of reasons why the Jets are so short on talent on the defensive side of the ball. Teams have to prioritize which areas they want to improve first in a rebuild, and the Jets have thrown a lot of resources into their offense. There were also some personnel miscalculations, especially in free agency in 2026. I would also say that the way the defense was built showed major flaws. The pass rush seems to be structured entirely around one player, David Bailey, a developing rookie. We’ve seen the kind of up and down season we can expect from a rookie. When said rookie is out of the lineup, it makes things more difficult, even impossible.
Things are looking brighter on offense where the Jets have some young players showing real talent, but overall it would be fair to say this remains a roster closer to the bottom than the top.
Teams like the ones I just described can still win in the NFL. This requires them to be opportunistic. They need to find ways to level the games. Being good in the red zone on offense and stingy in the red zone on defense is important. Ditto for protecting the ball and forcing turnovers. Top special teams play also helps a lot. And through these things and more, quality teaching has a way to fill the gap.
Unfortunately, the Jets are poor in most of the aspects I mentioned. Avoiding turnovers is really the only thing they do well at that point.
These flaws showed themselves in the team’s 38-33 loss to the Raiders.
Teams like the Jets have no margin for error, even against an opponent like the Raiders.
Most of the attention should be given to a rotten defensive performance. There’s nothing you can say to sugarcoat a game like that defensively. The Jets’ lack of defensive talent showed, but that wasn’t all. Even the basics of defense are a struggle. It seems like on several occasions they lost Brock Bowers, which you can’t get over how important he is to the Raiders offense. And for the third straight week, the unit allowed an opponent to grind out the clock on a draining drive late in the fourth quarter.
It was a team loss, though.
A special teams unit that was the best in the league in a lonely 2025 has completely collapsed. Week 8 was another ugly day for Chris Banjo and his group as they allowed a kickoff return touchdown.
On offense the sun is a bright spot for most. The Jets put a season high 33 points on the board. However, they left points on the field, settling for field goals four times in the red zone. This included three stalled drives in the first half.
There are stretches where the Jets can take control of the game if they make plays. Three first half red zone drives ending in a field goal produced 9 points instead of 21. The touchdown gave the Raiders 7. Adding even a few of the lost 19 points would have taken a 23-14 halftime lead in a territory where the Jets had total control of the game.
Geno Smith fumbled two would-be touchdown passes to Garrett Wilson in the first quarter. In the context of what has been a very good day for Smith throwing the ball, I think we can give the quarterback some credit.
A drive stalled before halftime, however, is much harder to defend. That drive was halted before and after the two-minute warning when Frank Reich called for seven straight runs. Reich seemed to prioritize running out the clock so the Raiders didn’t get the ball at the expense of scoring a crucial touchdown. Given how publicized the Aaron Glenn Jets’ cartoonish point differential in the final two minutes of the first half has been over the past two weeks, it’s almost as if the Jets’ coaching staff prioritized not giving the Raiders a chance to score and making that differential worse than winning the game.
As I’ve mentioned in this space before, the best two-minute drill finds the right balance between maximizing points and leaving as little time as possible on the clock for the other team. Of the two, maximizing points should be the higher priority.
The Jets can win games, but they aren’t good enough to overcome their inability to do the little things. That goes for their players and their coaches. And with these mistakes being made over and over again, it seems more likely that the Jets will have a lot of new players and a new coach soon.