When you watch a team like the 2026 New York Jets take the field, I think you need to judge them simultaneously in parallel ways.
Of course the result of that day’s game matters. You would rather win than lose.
But the Jets are also focusing on the long term, attempting to finally launch a successful rebuild after a decade and a half of failure to do so.
The Jets this season are unlikely to have a winning record. They just don’t have the talent to win more than they lose. There are different types of
losses, though. Sometimes you can take legitimate positives from a defeat.
So often in recent years with the Jets the concept of “moral victories” comes up when the Jets fall short on the scoreboard. I generally don’t believe in moral victories in the NFL. But when I say that I think it’s important to explain how I personally define a moral victory.
To me a moral victory is being happy with a loss because the team can’t do any better.
That’s not how I feel after most Jets losses, and that isn’t how I feel after their Week 3 defeat to Detroit. There are many areas where the team fell short in the game.
For starters, I think we can say that anybody declaring the Jets an elite defense before this game got way ahead of themselves. Shutting down the hapless Titans and the struggling Packers is one thing. Against one of the best collections of offensive talent in the league, the Jets played a quality first half on the defensive side of the ball. However, the second half was ugly. It wasn’t just that Detroit had more talent than the Jets. The Jets just didn’t play effective or smart football. Detroit’s success was as much about the Jets’ failures as its own execution.
There were failures elsewhere from special teams to the offensive line. The Jets just didn’t make enough plays in what turned into a coin flip game.
This team should be frustrated and disappointed for letting a winnable game get away. Moral victories should be off the table.
With that said, I don’t think noting several positive indicators from this game for the future constitutes a moral victory.
The biggest was arguably the play of rookie tight end Kenyon Sadiq. The Jets desperately needed Sadiq to step up with three major contributors at wide receiver and tight end sidelined by injury. Sadiq had been kept on a pitch count in the early phases of the season recovering from his own injury. This was a true breakout game. Sadiq made a spectacular 24 yard touchdown catch in the second quarter. It was just the start. Sadiq made play after play in the game on his way to a 7 catch, 105 yard game, joining Garrett Wilson as the Jets put a pair of receivers over the century mark.
This Sadiq breakout is important for the Jets for reasons that go beyond the generic, “We want our rookie tight end to look good,” hopes (although those are important too).
The Jets are a team likely to pick a quarterback in the early rounds of the 2027 NFL Draft. If there is one thing that the New York Jets have proven as a franchise over the past two decades it’s that the surroundings of a young quarterback matter a lot. College offenses just don’t train quarterbacks to be successful in the NFL. Without a strong infrastructure, most young quarterbacks will fail in the pros.
If Sadiq reaches his potential and becomes a true matchup nightmare on this level, the Jets will be able to put a young quarterback into an offense with a dynamic one-two punch of Kenyon Sadiq and Garrett Wilson. That could provide critical support to an inexperienced signal caller.
Just as significant is what Sadiq represents for the franchise’s long-term health. The Draft pick used to select Sadiq in April did not appear out of thin air. The Jets traded one of their best players, Sauce Gardner, eleven months ago to get it along with an additional first rounder. The team also traded another of its best players, Quinnen Williams to get two additional Draft selections.
These picks are at the heart of the Jets’ current rebuild attempts. As seasoned NFL fans know, it is nice to extract good value in Draft pick compensation trading away star players. At the end of the day, though, how you use the picks is the most important thing. Early signs are the Jets have nailed the Sadiq selection, which should inspire confidence in a regime that had a very shaky first year, albeit under trying circumstances.
Another positive that comes to mind is simply the way the Jets fought back in this game to tie it up after the Lions took a two touchdown lead in the fourth quarter. Seasoned watchers of the Jets could have been forgiven for feeling like they had seen this story before. The Jets give a superior opponent a tough game for two and a half to three quarters and then fade. The game gets out of hand. It felt like we were headed in that direction. Then the Jets mounted a rally.
For me it was how they mounted a rally. A year ago, the Jets overcame a 20 point fourth quarter deficit in Week 3 against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to briefly take the lead, but it felt more like the Tampa Bay’s conservative play and a flukey field goal block were bigger contributors to the comeback than anything the Jets did.
One year later, we saw another Week 3 comeback, but this was different. The Jets were making plays and looked like a professional football operation, executing plays against a respected opponent. In a year where showing competence is at the top of the list for objectives, this comeback should be notable for that reason.
I’m sure some of you are reading this and asking yourself, “Didn’t you just complain about the team’s play last week against the Packers because they lost? What’s the difference?”
Well reasonable people can disagree, but I wasn’t overly impressed by Green Bay. Past success aside, I saw in the Packers what looked like a mediocre football team through the first two weeks of the season, and the Jets let a winnable game get away. I don’t think what happened on Thursday night did much to change my view. Almost any team would have been competitive against Green Bay last week the way that team played.
Detroit in Ford Field is a different story. Plenty of past Jets teams would have been run out of the building in this game. Winning this one was a tall order.
That isn’t to say the Jets should be satisfied by losing. Merely I will say that what we want to see from this season are big time Sadiq performances and the Jets playing professional football. The performance the Jets showed in Week 3 will win them games against lesser opponents.
That matters in a season like 2026 for this team.
