DVOA
DVOA measures a football team’s play-by-play efficiency compared to the league average, adjusted for opponent strength and game situation. Through five weeks, the Jets rank:
- 22nd Overall
- 17th in Pass Offense
- 19th in Rush Offense
- 11th in Pass Defense
- 26th in Rush Defense
- 16th in Special Teams
Overall, these metrics are fairly consistent, ranging anywhere from average to mediocre. Which, honestly, is a big step forward from last season.
EPA/Play
For EPA, I’ll use Ben Baldwin’s Weighted EPA from RBSDM. EPA captures the net value of an individual play by calculating the change in a team’s expected points from before the snap to
after the whistle. It’s also fairly predictive.
Through five weeks, the Jets rank:
- 19th in Passing EPA
- 22nd in Rushing EPA
- 19th in Overall Offense
- 9th in Overall Defense
- 13th in Passing Defense
- 10th in Rushing Defense
ESPN Analytics
From an efficiency standpoint, the Jets rank:
- 20th Overall
- 23rd in Offense
- 14th in Defense
- 11th in Special Teams
Overall Takeaways
Overall, the Jets show up fairly consistently across all of these performance metrics. That shouldn’t be surprising, as most of them are correlated to some extent. Still, a few takeaways stand out.
The Rushing Offense Needs to Be Better
The Jets’ rushing offense needs to be a bit better. We saw glimpses of what it can do against Cleveland, but I’d venture to guess that not many people in the organization thought the passing offense, with Geno Smith on essentially a minimum level deal, would outrank the rushing offense through five weeks.
There’s still room for this unit to improve, and getting more consistent production on the ground would go a long way toward helping out the passing offense as well.
The Defense Has Been a Nice Surprise
The Jets’ defense has been a nice surprise overall. Going into the season, I think we expected the defense to be much improved (how could it not be?), but there were still major questions about the secondary in general and how much the edge room would be able to contribute immediately.
The weather has likely contributed to the overperformance, but this hasn’t been a unit that has relied on turnovers yet, either. If they can start forcing some interceptions, there could be room for this unit to keep up its strong level of play.
So, What Are The 2026 Jets?
Overall….we still don’t know. What we do know is that through five-weeks, the Jets have been meh…which honestly represents a big upgrade from what we saw in Aaron Glenn and Darren Mougey’s first year.
While I don’t think anyone is running to call the Jets good, there has been a noticeable improvement and if you’re a fan looking for progress with this new regime I think it’s hard to argue there hasn’t been some.
Whether it’s enough meaningful progress for Aaron Glenn to keep his job? I don’t know yet. But if the Jets continue to play like this, they should be able to largely compete the majority of weeks, even if they’re not quite a playoff-caliber team yet.
