- 15 hours ago
The 2025 Jets never got off the ground
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00:00It's week 18 of the 2025 NFL season and the New York Jets are in Buffalo mercifully closing out
00:06a campaign from straight out of the deepest bowels of hell. Here in the third quarter,
00:11Bills QB Mitch Trubisky tosses a pass right down the spine of the field headed straight toward the
00:17waiting arms of linebacker Quincy Williams as though he's the intended receiver. For a beleaguered
00:22Jets defense, this is a gift. An offering from the football gods and one that couldn't possibly be
00:29more desperately needed. But instead of reeling in a gift-wrapped interception, the ball instead
00:34simply bounces off Williams' hand and harmlessly incomplete. This drop is bigger than just one
00:41play, one guy letting an interception slip through his fingers. This is the toxic cherry on top of
00:47the toxic Sunday known as the 25 Jets, one that will cement a historic, devastating, and bizarre
00:54season-long trend of ineptitude.
01:05The 2025 New York Jets season has to go down as one of the most memorable ever played by any
01:11team in
01:12the history of football. Among their many relics, three jump out as worthy of a deep dissection.
01:18Especially for a team named after a very powerful and dynamic aerial entity. Because if there's one
01:25thing that's crystal clear about the 2025 Jets, one thing you could take to the bank every day and
01:30twice on Sunday, it's this. When footballs were in the air, this team was neither powerful nor dynamic.
01:39One of the three relics is pretty well known that Williams and the rest of the Jets' defense failed
01:44to intercept even a single pass all season, an unprecedented distinction for which they
01:50justifiably received extensive ridicule far and wide. The other two have flown more under the radar
01:56and deserve far more appreciation. Let's start with a look at when footballs were in the air when
02:02coach Aaron Glenn's team was on offense. Amid a year of poor quarterback play, their leading receiver
02:08throughout this 17-game season, Garrett Wilson, had a pitiful total of just 395 yards.
02:15Now, that's not a major indictment of Wilson, whose low output was understandable as a function of
02:21missing 10 games with a knee injury. But you know what usually happens when someone misses 10 games?
02:26Someone else leads the team in receiving. Fascinatingly though, no one else did. So exactly
02:32how pitifully low was 395? Well, for starters, 105 players across the other 31 teams topped that total,
02:41an average of 3.4 per team. Here's how the leading receiver of every team compares, with 30 of the
02:48other 31 clubs employing at least one player with over 300 more receiving yards than New York's leader,
02:54most with way, way more. In fact, even going back to 1978's schedule expansion to 16 games per team,
03:02395 is the fewest number of receiving yards to still lead a team in any full season, despite having
03:08played a 17th game. So congrats to the 92 Bengals and Tim McGee's team-leading 408 receiving yards
03:16getting off the schneid. Even in the strike-shortened 87 season, 395 would have ranked just 80th in the
03:2328-team league, of which all 28 had at least one player with over 125 more yards than anyone on
03:31the 25
03:31jets. Plus, not only was this a season where teams played only 15 games, but with three weeks of
03:37mostly replacement players, it was, for all intents and these purposes, a 12-game season.
03:43Hell, even in the really strike-shortened 82 season, when every team played just 9 games,
03:48in an era much less conducive to passing, nearly 80% of the league's team still had at least one
03:54player
03:54with significantly more yardage than anyone on the 17-game playing 25 jets.
04:01It's also not even just that it's such a puny output compared to other teams' leading receivers.
04:06Here's how it stacks up against the second leading receiver of each of the other 31 teams that season.
04:12Only the Panthers, and only by a few feet, didn't have at least two pass catchers eclipse 395
04:19receiving yards. And that even one other team failed to have multiple such players constitutes
04:25a bit of an anomaly, as most years all do. There are even a plethora of guys who have produced
04:31in
04:31a stretch of just two games more receiving yards than anyone on those 17-game playing jets.
04:37Josh Gordon even did so by over 100 yards in his second season, and it's safe to say he likewise
04:43wasn't exactly the beneficiary of revolutionary quarterback play from the 13 Browns.
04:49I said earlier the fact that Wilson's 395 receiving yards were still enough to lead the team wasn't a
04:55major indictment against him, but it's still kind of an indictment against him.
04:59Sure, it's mystifying that no teammate of his could top that number, but despite missing the
05:04majority of the season, Wilson himself should have been expected to have generated at least a fair
05:09amount more yardage than he did. Because even on a rate basis, Wilson, who'd just signed a lucrative
05:15extension, paying him as a top-tier wideout, managed only 56.4 receiving yards per game.
05:21That was well below average production for a team's leading receiver, ranking only 33rd in the 32-team
05:28league. As previously alluded to, they definitely were the recipients of anemic quarterback play,
05:34with Justin Fields fronting a crew that passed for just 2,784 yards. Even in many 16-game seasons,
05:42no squad came close to throwing for such little yardage. Going back to 2011, when the likes of
05:48Tim Tebow and Blaine Gabbert were given the keys to the car, that's the second lowest mark ahead of
05:53only the 22 Bears, quarterbacked by that very same Justin Fields. But needless to say, they were far from
06:00the first team that got bad QB play, and generally speaking, even those that got worse still had little
06:05difficulty producing at least one player who hauled in way more than 395 yards worth of passes.
06:12So there was clearly a bigger confluence of forces at play to unlock the ability for a number as low
06:18as 395 to somehow represent an NFL team's receiving leader, especially in a season as long as 17 games.
06:26It's a phenomenon we're exceedingly unlikely to see ever again.
06:30There was also not only the combo of just how subpar the per-game production of their best
06:36receiver was and just how much of the season said receiver missed, but also just how underwhelming
06:42their revolving door of other skill position players was. To the point that no other single
06:47individual could capitalize enough on the increased opportunity provided by Wilson's absence to
06:52exceed his total of a mere 395 yards. Rookie tight end Mason Taylor was targeted a very healthy
07:0065 times, but whereas the average NFL pass attempt in 2025 generated a little over 7 yards, the average
07:07pass to Taylor generated fewer than 5.7, which kept him at sub-Wilson yardage. That was still significantly
07:15higher than Adonai Mitchell's 5.2 yards per target, whose chances of clearing the low, low bar of 395 were
07:22further undermined by not having arrived in East Rutherford until a week 10 trade. And none of the rest of
07:28their mishmash collection of wideouts registered as even a blip on the radar screen.
07:34Now let's take a glance at what was going on when footballs were in the air when Glenn's team was
07:38on
07:38defense. So in 2025, the other 31 NFL defenses saw a combined 16,924 passes thrown against him, of which
07:48they intercepted 380. That amounts to an average of about one pick for every 44 and a half passes thrown
07:55against him. The Jets defense, on the other hand, saw opponents throw 515 passes against him.
08:03515 different opportunities to get their mitts on a pass and haul it in for an interception.
08:09And they didn't do so even one single time. For perspective, since interceptions started officially
08:15being tracked in 1933, there were only 11 prior instances of a team recording as few as five
08:21interceptions in a season. And only seven of those occurred in a season where they played more than
08:26nine games. While nobody can ever forget the 34 Reds and Gunners having done so, of the other 31 current
08:33NFL teams, 25 have never had a season so rotten that they failed to snag more than five picks in
08:40a full
08:40season. Only the 18 Niners picked off as few as two passes, with no team having ever suffered the
08:46embarrassment of just one interception in a season. Then the 25 Jets came along, and across 17 games
08:53found a way to get completely goose-agged. There were also only 10 prior instances of a team playing
08:59a season where they failed to intercept a pass for even eight consecutive games. 22 of the other 31 clubs
09:05have never had a single such streak. And yet the 25 Jets authored back-to-back eight-game picklist
09:11streaks with a leftover game taboo. Perhaps you noticed the 24 Jets appear here as well.
09:18This means that across the 2024 and 25 seasons, the Jets were the not-so-proud owners of not one,
09:25not two, but three completely unique eight-game picklist streaks when the other 31 teams combined
09:31for just one such streak in this time. Last but not least, this extreme lack of aerial prowess on both
09:38sides of the ball conspired to produce five consecutive losses to close the season, each by at least
09:4423 points. No other team lost five such games all season, let alone consecutively. Half the rest of the
09:52league's teams didn't lose one such game all year, a group which even includes their fellow dreadful
09:58MetLife co-tenants. And no one else except the Bengals even suffered back-to-back such losses,
10:03let alone back-to-back, to-back, to-back, to-back. It's also not even just that pooping the bed
10:12so
10:12badly in five straight games was unprecedented throughout all of NFL history, but going all
10:17the way back over a decade before the advent of the Super Bowl, no one but the 72 Pats had
10:22such a
10:23streak swell to four games. But perhaps the most outrageous juxtaposition is that they reached a
10:29level of futility in each of five consecutive games that Bill Cowher's Steelers once went 165
10:35consecutive games, not ever reaching. Cumulatively, they were outscored by 134 points in this time,
10:43comfortably the very worst five-game stretch in the very mediocre history of the franchise.
10:48In fact, going back 40-plus years, only one five-game stretch by any NFL team was worse,
10:54and that was accomplished by the openly tanktastic Dolphins to kick off the 2019 season.
11:01When the Jets wrapped up their 2025 schedule with that majestic five-game stretch, you'll be
11:06shocked to know their playoff invitation got lost in the mail. As if the beauty of their season wasn't
11:12enough, in missing the postseason for the 15th straight year, they were ultimately able to secure
11:18sole possession of the longest active playoff drought in North American pro sports.
11:22What a spectacular way to do so by the most poetically named team that could ever exist.
11:29When footballs were in the air in 2025, the New York Jets became grounded, devolving into levels
11:35of dysfunction and incompetence we might only expect to see in a game of Madden on rookie mode.
11:40And instead, we saw it out of a real-life NFL team. The Jets could not catch footballs. In so
11:48doing,
11:48they pulled off feats that I never would have thought I'd ever live to see. They ought to be
11:53celebrated for stretching their great rubber band of ineptitude further than anyone could have thought
11:58possible, and serving as a reminder of all the wondrous, seemingly impossible accomplishments in
12:04sports could always be lurking just around the corner. Those 25 Jets were truly and magnificently
12:11special. May they forever live in our hearts.
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