It would be wise to exclude these prospects from your NY Jets mock draft

Joe Douglas’ New York Jets draft picks tend to meet one of two criteria, and these 2022 prospects fail to meet either of them

We’ve spent the past week identifying some trends that could help us identify the 2022 NFL draft prospects who have the highest likelihood of being drafted by Joe Douglas and the New York Jets.

Today, we’ll turn the tables and try to identify some prospects who might have a very low chance of being drafted by New York.

I wanted to see if I could find any must-have traits amongst the players drafted by Douglas and the Jets between the 2020 and 2021 drafts. Is there anything that a prospect needs in order to become a Jet?

As I dug through the profiles of Douglas’ 19 draft picks, I noticed that 17 of them met at least one of these two criteria:

• Had a Relative Athletic Score (RAS)* above 7.55, which was the 2020-21 NFL average among drafted players
• Was a team captain in college

*RAS is a 0-to-10 rating that takes into account a player’s performance in various testing drills relative to their height, weight, and position. When multiplied by 10, the player’s RAS indicates where their athleticism ranks all-time among players at his position; i.e., a 9.0 RAS ranks at the 90th percentile.

Almost every single one of Douglas’ draft picks was either an above-average athlete, a team captain, or both. Only two of his 19 picks failed to meet either of the two conditions listed above.

Those two exceptions were California safety Ashtyn Davis and Auburn linebacker Jamien Sherwood.

Davis wasn’t a team captain, but he likely would have made the RAS cut if he completed enough testing to earn a score. However, because he did not participate in drills that offseason, a RAS could not be calculated for him.

New York drafted Davis as a project-type player who offered high upside thanks to his supreme athleticism. A track star for the Golden Bears, Davis’ speed was his most commonly praised attribute on film. So, we can comfortably say he meets Douglas’ athleticism criterion despite not having official confirmation.

That makes Sherwood the only true exception to this rule. Sherwood performed poorly in pre-draft athletic testing with a RAS of 4.24 and was not a team captain for the Tigers.

Seen below is a list of each Jets draft pick in the Douglas era. You can see that they all checked at least one of the two aforementioned boxes except for Davis and Sherwood.

Douglas has actually drafted only two players who checked both boxes: Alijah Vera-Tucker and Jonathan Marshall. What we’ve tended to see is that he doesn’t necessarily care whether a player is a team captain if he has excellent athleticism, but if he is going to draft a lesser athlete, he strongly prefers for that player to be a team captain.

Of Douglas’ seven draft picks with a sub-7.55 RAS, six of them were team captains.

Anyway, the bottom line is this: 89% of Douglas’ picks thus far had a RAS above 7.55 or was a team captain (95% if you throw in Davis), so if you’re a 2022 draft prospect who fails to check one of those two boxes, you probably don’t need to start browsing the real estate market in Morris County.

I scanned through the top 200 prospects on the consensus big board at NFL Mock Draft Database and identified 48 players who did not meet either of the two criteria we’re looking for (I excluded players who did not complete enough testing to qualify for a RAS).

These prospects seem to have a minimal chance of being drafted by the Jets.

Interestingly, the highest-ranked player on the list is Arkansas wide receiver Treylon Burks at No. 22 overall. None of the Jets’ realistic options in the top-10 are eliminated by these criteria. But once we get into round two, we can start using the list to cross off some possibilities when the Jets come onto the clock.

Burks joins Penn State wide receiver Jahan Dotson and Auburn cornerback Roger McCreary as some of the most highly-regarded prospects who might not rank as high on the Jets’ draft board as they do for other teams.

Will Joe Douglas stick to the criteria he established over his first two drafts or will he open his mind to more non-elite-athlete/non-captain prospects in this year’s draft?

Just ten more days of speculation remain until the 2022 NFL draft finally kicks off in Las Vegas.