Likes and dislikes of what the New York Jets did in the 2026 NFL Draft

Likes

Day 2

I have no idea what got into the Jets on Friday night, but for a couple of hours they navigated the Draft the way the league’s most successful franchises typically handle themselves. It was clear early in the night that the board was falling in a favorable way. Quality defensive prospects at positions of need were tumbling down the board. The opportunity cost of trading down seemed small. To be honest, we tend to overrate the cost of trading down anyway. In the early rounds of the Draft, there are going to be quality prospects in front of you no matter where your pick falls. But this was a situation where the Jets could afford to move down a few slots and still have a wide selection of prospects. What was notable for me was the way the Jets rebounded when the guy they wanted The Jets could have panicked early and traded up to make sure they didn’t lose Rodriguez. Instead they led the board come to them. They executed a trade down and netted an extra fourth round pick. Then it came time to pick. They selected D’Angelo Ponds, a cornerback out of Indiana. Really the only negative on Ponds is his size. He’s very small for a cornerback at 5’9” and 182 pounds. That’s right around the minimum threshold for a player to be hold up as an outside corner in the NFL. The question I have with Ponds isn’t about whether he’s undersized, though. It’s whether he can make up for his shortcomings. Every prospect has weaknesses. Some are pronounced. Others are subtler. The players who succeed in the NFL can compensate for their shortcomings. Drew Brees was short for a quarterback. He went on to have a Hall of Fame career. Does that mean height is irrelevant for quarterbacks? No, you need to be able to see over the line of scrimmage. Brees worked around his physical limitations by learning how to subtly slide within the pocket so that his line of sight moved to the gap between where two of his offensive linemen were blocking. The Saints for their part also invested heavily in interior offensive linemen during Brees’ career so he would face less instances where the pocket collapsed, and his line of sight was constricted. If a cornerback is going to hold up at Ponds’ size, he has to make up for it by having explosive athleticism, great instincts, and physicality, Ponds has all three. When it comes to athleticism, I’d particularly note his performance at the NFL Scouting Combine. We all know that Combine results can be overrated and skew evaluations. I think the best way to look at the Combine is to figure out what drills are important for which players. Ponds’ 43.5” vertical jump was one of the best in Combine history. It first of all shows the explosion that is so essential. But it also shows he can get high in the air. It won’t be as easy as you think to beat him all day with jump balls. You might not stick Ponds on Mike Evans, but there’s reason to believe Ponds will play bigger than his frame. Even if all of this is wrong, and Ponds can’t play outside his instincts, burst, and physicality give him a good chance to succeed in the slot or even possibly safety. Of course Ponds actually delivering on this potential is more important than any praise I can give immediately after the NFL Draft, but I can’t find anything bad to say with the way the Jets handled the second night. The only real negative was the lack of a third round pick, which was lost two years ago in the disastrous trade. The general manager at the helm during that fiasco, Joe Douglas, has long since been fired. I’ll admit it was a tad frustrating to see how many prospects who were on the board and could have helped the Jets at pick 68. One of the most praised aspects of the 2024 Reddick deal was that the Jets gave up a 2026 pick. The selection was two years after the deal was made. It was so far in the distance as to make the pick seem worthless. This saga should serve as a lesson that even if you trade a pick in the distant future, the distant future eventually will come. But we won’t let Haason Reddick ruin another night.

No Obvious Reaches

I would assume over the next couple of days that we will see NFL Draft grades come out that give the Jets among the highest marks of any team. That seems natural. With four picks in the top 50, there was every reason to believe the Jets would leave this Draft with four of the consensus top 50 prospects. That is unless they made an egregious reach or two. I know it’s a low bar to praise the Jets for not doing anything outlandish, but this is a team through the years where even the most obvious moves are not guaranteed. We could go deeper into the Draft. As we got into the middle rounds, there were no Arian Smith or Dexter McDougle style selections of prospects three to four rounds ahead of where they otherwise would have been likely to go. Of course sometimes a team veers from consensus and is proven right. But I think most of us can agree that the Jets have a long way to go to earn trust to veer radically in their evaluations from the rest of the league.

Darnell Jackson/VJ Payne

I think that expectations need to be low with day three picks. The odds are against either Jackson or Payne turning into quality players in the league. I just think they were reasonable bets for where they were selected. Good picks on the final day of the NFL Draft come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes they come when you connect on a big swing picking a prospect with tremendous upside. Sometimes they come because you find a player who might fit a limited role. I think Jackson fits the latter category. I don’t think he’ll ever be a star. He probably won’t even be a starter. But can he be a rotational defensive tackle who holds up against the run for 15-20 snaps per game? There’s a reasonable shot. For Payne I’m also going to keep expectations in check. He was passed on 227 times and seven times by the Jets after all. But I expected him to go earlier in the Draft, potentially much earlier. Payne has good physical tools and production lining up all over the field. Could he be an effective special teamer? Perhaps a decent backup or subpackage player? Maybe, and that would be a nice outcome for a seventh rounder.

Dislikes

Round One

I don’t have any major quibbles with picking David Bailey number two overall. Bailey isn’t quite the quality of your typical pass rushing prospect at number two overall, but this was an unusual year. There weren’t really any choices the Jets had that would match the quality of a normal second overall pick. There were a lot of flawed but ultimately defensible choices. Bailey for his part was a prolific pass rusher in college. His 2025 season at Texas Tech was dominant. But it quietly wasn’t even that different from what he did his final two years at Stanford. His Stanford sack totals were much lower, but his pressure rate and sack rate per pass rush snap weren’t far off from what he did at Texas Tech. Stanford just had him rush the passer far less. Combining his production with his athletic profile, there’s every reason to believe that Bailey is likely to be an above average NFL pass rusher at minimum as long as he stays healthy and keeps his head on straight. The Jets made two subsequent picks in the first round. While I certainly wouldn’t preemptively declare either pick a failure, I do have some concerns, particularly with the thought process that went into the two selections. ***Kenyon Sadiq*** Over the last couple of days in this site’s comments section, I mentioned my uneasiness with picking Sadiq. A few people have said in a good natured joking way that they can’t wait to Sadiq to dominate so they can remind me about what I said. That implies that I’m calling Sadiq a guaranteed bust. I’m not. I think Sadiq’s career trajectory is virtually impossible to predict. If it all clicks for him, I he could be the best tight end in the NFL. If it doesn’t, he won’t have much of a career. The range of options here is what makes me uncomfortable. Sadiq put up historic numbers in the drills at the Combine. Simply put, a man of his size should not be able to move with such ease. If he learns the nuances of the tight end position, he’s going to be impossible to cover. Those nuances do exist, though. Oregon’s offense gave him a fairly limited route tree. Thus he will need to learn how to learn a ton of routes from scratch or close to it. There are other nuances that will likely take time to develop. It’s one thing to have blazing speed. It’s another to know how to use it. A pitching prospect in baseball might know how to throw 100 miles per hour, but he won’t dominate until he masters changing speeds. That 100 mile per hour pitch is a lot tougher to hit when it comes immediately after a pitch in the 80s. On the same note, great receivers in the NFL don’t only blow past defenders by hitting that second gear immediately. They know how to slow down to lull coverage players into a false sense of security and blow past them. Sadiq’s production was also more limited than your typical tight end prospect picked this high. In fact Sadiq had the fewest yards per game of any tight end prospect picked in the first round in the last decade and a half. You could fairly note that Oregon’s offensive system is designed to spread the ball around rather than focus on one player. You could also note that breakouts for college tight ends tend to happen deeper into a college career than Sadiq played in Oregon. But none of this guarantees that the breakout was actually coming. I’m far from an expert in the field of psychology, but picks like Sadiq make me think about how we view the world. It strikes me many people hold a perception that higher risk automatically equals higher reward. It isn’t always the case, though. The book *Moneyball* is one of the most influential pieces of writing in the history of professional sports. It describes how the small market Oakland Athletics competed and thrived against teams with payrolls many multiples bigger. It led every baseball team and eventually professional sports team to change how it conducted business in small and large ways. One chapter noted how the Athletics handled the baseball draft. In baseball both high school and college players can be drafted. The A’s focused almost exclusively on college prospects. It wasn’t because there was anything inherently superior about college prospects vs. high school prospects. It was simply that college players had a larger sample size of production against higher level competition. Thus projecting their future had less uncertainty. It didn’t completely eliminate the risk. The A’s still got plenty of picks wrong. But the relatively safer college prospects they chose had every bit the upside as the high school ones they passed on. Oakland built a competitive team against strong headwinds in part because of this approach. Reduced risk did not create reduced reward. You could take this concept into other fields as well. Warren Buffett is considered one of the greatest business investors of all-time. His results were achieved through a fairly simple philosophy. Buffett spent his career investing in companies whose upward trajectories were easy to predict. He sought out businesses with proven profits, demonstrated growth, and brand loyalty. Some investors get rich putting money into early stage companies that have exponential growth, but those are much tougher to project. More people who try to do that end up losing more. I could even take you to a classic scene from Family Guy to further this point. This scene is obviously very funny. Peter Griffin has the choice between a boat and a mystery box. He chooses the mystery box because he reasons it might contain a boat. While this example is absurd, it shows the main point. The fact the contents of the box were unknown made Peter Griffin believe it inherently had a higher reward. For a team that is loaded with talent like the Eagles, I could get behind picking a player like Sadiq in the first round. If he hits, it takes an already good team to the next level. If it doesn’t work out, you are still in a good place. The Jets find themselves in an entirely different situation. They are trying to emerge from the league’s cellar. The early picks they have this year and next are the primary assets that can help them do so. If they miss on these picks, they will confine themselves to an even longer run at the bottom of the league. Therein lies my concern with this pick. The Jets went high risk-high reward. I’m just not sure the reward would have been much lower with a number of other prospects who were easy to project. I’m sure the Jets know more than I do about Sadiq. I’m sure he’s a hard worker. Maybe in their workouts with him they saw that he was a quick study picking up some of the nuances of route running. I caught Sadiq’s press conference, and for whatever that is worth I thought he came off as one well-spoken and classy dude. But I’ve seen plenty of teams who were convinced that they would have no problem coaching up the uber athletic tight end prospect and refining him into a superstar. Frequently this is easier said than done. Time will tell whether this is true of Sadiq and the Jets, but I would have preferred a player who is easier to project. ***Omar Cooper*** For weeks there was buzz that the Jets were very high on Cooper’s potential so I did a deep dive on him. Since I knew there was a good chance he would be a Jet, I really wanted to like him. I just couldn’t get to place where I was confident in him. With Indiana dominating college football in 2026, I caught plenty of their games. I never really had the impression that Cooper was their top receiver. Elijah Sarratt seemed like the guy to me. I also have concerns about Cooper only having one season of big college production, which was a year four breakout. That can be a warning sign. I don’t think Cooper is a hopeless pick. I could see him being a useful slot receiver. He seems pretty tough to bring down after the catch with a compact yet sturdy build and good balance as a ball carrier. In some ways I almost view him as the prospect was supposed to be. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe he can refine his route running to the point where he’s also a weapon as an outside receiver. Obviously there’s a boom scenario where all of this works out for the Jets. Sadiq and Cooper could both be high caliber players. But I don’t think it’s fair to change my opinion after the fact just because the Jets drafted these players. If you told me heading into Thursday night that the Jets would end up picking a project TE at 16 and trading up for WR5 in a weak class, I don’t think I would have told you that was the best plan. As always, maybe the Jets know something the people up here don’t.

Cade Klubnik

If you read the last section, my hope is that you felt it was a respectful and nuanced take on a pair of quality prospects. I personally would have gone in a different direction from what the Jets did, but I see a path where Sadiq and Cooper end up being excellent picks. I will show no such deference when discussing Cade Klubnik. I think the Jets lost momentary control of their senses on Saturday when they not only picked Klubnik but actually traded two fourth round picks to move up for him. The expression, “Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it,” comes to mind. Through the pre-Draft process I stated on many occasions that I felt the Jets should roll the dice on a developmental quarterback on day three. The odds of hitting are low, but the rewards are so great as to make it worthwhile. At the very least you avoid the risk of putting an undrafted free agent like Brady Cook on the field late in the season when the team is out of the Playoff race. I didn’t mean trading up to pick a prospect like Cade Klubnik high in the fourth round. What were the Jets thinking here? This was still the stage of the Draft where there was a reasonable chance to find competent role players, and they lit not one but two picks on fire for Klubnik. I don’t know what the Jets see in Klubnik. His physical tools aren’t overwhelming. He doesn’t have an inordinately sophisticated understanding of passing concepts, and he just had a very disappointing season at Clemson. His best shot at sticking in the NFL is if he becomes a master of deciphering defensive schemes presnap, but I don’t see what gives him a better shot at doing this than any other prospect who was available in round four or much later. I mean do the Jets think Klubnik has upside because a few writers were ridiculous enough to put him in the first round in really early mock drafts last year? I really can’t understand what they were doing here.

Trading Up Too Much

The Jets traded up three times during the course of the Draft and only traded down once. And the bounty they acquired in the trade down was spent to move up for Klubnik. There’s nothing wrong with a well-timed trade up, but doing it over and over displays a lack of discipline. The teams that draft well aren’t moving up every single time they want a prospect. They let the board come to them, understanding that there are quality prospects across the Draft. They also avoid overconfidence in their own evaluation ability. Sometimes teams get it wrong, and a trade up means that you have sunk multiple picks into a mistake. Beyond that, one thing that has been shown over and over by people who study the Draft is the teams that have the best results tend to be the team with the highest quantity of picks. The NFL Draft is an inexact science. Even the smartest GMs make mistakes. Extra picks allow you to overcome them. Trading up reduces your number of picks. Trading down adds to it. I want to point particular attention to the Jets trading up twice on day three. It’s one thing to give up a fifth round pick to move up from 33 to 30 as the Jets did on Thursday night. It’s another to make moving up in the late rounds a habit. That’s the stage of the Draft where teams should be at their least confident. Any prospect in the late round likely has flaws. The best way to find a gem is to load up on as many Jackson/Payne prospects with legitimate upside as possible. Darren Mougey has now been at the helm for two Drafts. In both he has traded up multiple times on day three. An increasing body of evidence suggests the Jets have yet another general manager who does not appreciate the value of late round picks, and that will make it harder to find the day three steals that are essential to building a good team.