There are genuinely positive signs about the direction of the New York Jets franchise.
The 2026 New York Jets are a bad football team.
I would argue that both of those statements are true, and this team’s 26-19 loss to the Patriots in Week 6 proves it.
This season is not only about wins and losses for the Jets. That statement has been uttered so often that it’s practically a cliche, but there is truth to it. Wins and losses aren’t irrelevant for this team, but there are major implications for this team’s
future that go beyond where the Jets finish in the standings this season.
The most important is the success of the rookie class from the 2026 NFL Draft. The success or failure of a rebuild largely depends on Draft classes being successful.
It’s too early to make definitive statements, but we have seen positive signs from all three picks this team made in this year’s first round. They look like they belong. We can’t declare anybody a star yet, and the class has shown some degree of inconsistency. Still, none has looked overmatched on an NFL field.
More than that, we have seen a monster Kenyon Sadiq game and a monster David Bailey game. Now we have a monster Omar Cooper game. The rookie, playing the first full game of his career, had 6 catches for 103 yards and a touchdown and had a second touchdown taken off the board on a suspect penalty call in the first quarter.
Bad teams come in all shapes and sizes in this league. The 2024 Jets were a team full of overpaid big name players who were past their prime, had massive egos, and didn’t play together. The 2025 Jets were a team that was just completely overmatched from a talent perspective most weeks.
The 2026 Jets don’t resemble either of those squads. There aren’t many big names on this roster, and they no longer look incapable of competing.
Still, while the talent level has improved, this is still a team with a below average base of it. In a league with a salary cap of $301.2 million, the 2026 Jets have an astounding $116.6 million in dead money. Yes, the Jets are being charged over 38 percent of the Jets’ salary cap dollars to players who are no longer with the team.
They don’t tell you about that in the fine print when you decided to go “all in” around a 40 year old quarterback.
Despite their improvements, the Jets remain the less talented team most weeks when they take the field. They have to be due to their cap situation. There was no way to build a top notch football team in 2026.
Teams like the Jets can still win games, but they have a lower margin for error. They need to play smart and opportunistic football. They can’t afford to overcome errors.
Much of that comes back to coaching. It’s difficult to say where the responsibility for players ends and where it begins for coaching when we discuss a team’s success or failure.
When it comes to evaluating coaching, I ask myself a simple question. Are the coaches making this team more likely or less likely to have success?
One test I have is whether you see a team understand how to play situational football. When you’re in a two minute drill or at the end of a quarter, things are moving too quickly for there to be instruction from the sideline. Either the coaching staff has drilled into players what must be done and what cannot be done or it hasn’t.
The Jets were outscored 10-0 in the final two minutes of the first half in this loss, which led Zack Rosenblatt of The Athletic to dig up a truly incredible stat.
Keep in mind that these scenarios take up only two minutes of each game. That stat has been accumulated over 46 minutes of game time, just a little over three quarters of football. I don’t even know how it’s possible to get outscored 100-6 in 46 minutes of NFL action under any circumstances.
But we have seen firsthand the lack of situational football training from the Jets at the end of the half in four of six games. Three times the clock has expired on the offense driving with the ball. In yesterday’s game, a quick three and out that lasted only 23 seconds gave the Patriots the ball back with a chance to get another score before halftime.
In those situations, the smartest teams in the league strike a good balance between trying to score and running out the clock to prevent the other team from having enough time to score in the event of a punt. In yesterday’s game, the Jets didn’t even run the ball once. The Patriots were only forced to use a single timeout on the drive. They ended up scoring a touchdown with 14 seconds left on the clock and no timeouts. I understand that you need to throw more than you run in a two minute drill, but it’s standard practice to run the ball once to melt the clock as a hedge against the other team having too much time if the event of a quick three and out.
What made this more confounding is the Jets spent the bulk of the first half showing an unwillingness to do anything other than run the ball. Three of the first four Jets drives on offense stalled when Frank Reich called four consecutive runs, and the fourth run netted either 1 or 0 yards. It’s always easy to get on playcalling when it doesn’t work, but an essential part of play calling means staying ahead of the defense. When an offense keeps stalling because it won’t stop running and is eventually stopped, it’s pretty clear there’s a degree of stubborness at play that is hurting the offense.
I could go on about the coaching. There is plenty to discuss. We could talk about players not being aware of an obvious hard count situation as the clock is expiring at the end of the quarter or some shaky calls on the other side of the ball.
The bottom line is that the Jets show many signs of a poorly coached football team. While their talent level is better than in the past, they aren’t yet good enough to bad execution and poor situational coaching.
Few Jets fans are going to leave that game feeling very happy. It was an ugly loss.
When it comes to the overall trajectory of the 2026 season, though, it’s perfectly fine to feel a tad conflicted. The Jets are showing some real positives, namely this rookie class. For the first time in four years, it looks like this team is on the verge of hitting a Draft class in a big way.
Still, much work remains. This team is losing more than it’s winning. And its coaching is part of that story.
