New York Jets players acquired by Joe Douglas tend to fit a specific prototype
The New York Jets’ roster has been ranked highly in many recent NFL-wide countdowns. Some of the takes are more controversial than others.
However, by one cold, hard metric, the Jets’ high ranking is completely unsurprising: Relative Athletic Score (RAS). According to Kent Lee Platte, the creator of the metric, the Jets’ roster has a cumulative RAS of 7.88/10, the third-highest in the NFL.
3. New York #Jets
Avg #RAS 7.88The last several years, the Jets have progressively gotten more athletic, with each roster from 2019 to 2024 being more athletic than the last. They averaged 7.06 in 2019, then 7.21, then 7.29, 7.34, and now a bigger jump to 7.88.
— Kent Lee Platte (@MathBomb) May 23, 2024
Those jumps in the Joe Douglas era are in character. Douglas tends to target highly athletic players. This makes sense given the schemes the Jets have played under Robert Saleh: the outside zone offensive scheme requires highly athletic linemen, while Saleh’s defense emphasizes speed and sideline-to-sideline agility.
Still, the Jets’ major jump from 7.34 to 7.88 this season is somewhat surprising given their change of focus offensively. They brought in Morgan Moses, a notoriously non-athletic tackle with an RAS of 2.16, indicating a likely change to a gap scheme. While John Simpson recorded an 8.53 RAS, he is also known more as a road grader than an athletic mover in space.
Still, here are some of the best RAS metrics posted by key Jets players. (Zack Kuntz posted a perfect 10.00, but he has yet to play more than a handful of snaps for the Jets.)
- Breece Hall: 9.96
- Quinnen Williams: 9.84
- Alijah Vera-Tucker: 9.77
- Tony Adams: 9.76
- Tyrod Taylor: 9.72 (mostly irrelevant at age 35)
- Solomon Thomas: 9.71
- Tyron Smith: 9.68 (not so relevant at age 33)
- Will McDonald: 9.66
- Olu Fashanu: 9.58
- Jermaine Johnson: 9.22
- Haason Reddick: 9.06
Athleticism is far from the be-all and end-all in football, but it’s often a key ingredient for success. There is also a difference between athleticism measured in the Underwear Olympics and on-field athleticism. Still, Douglas usually targets players with strong testing metrics to build the Jets’ roster, and it shows in their composite roster score.
