Joe Douglas was praised for the majority of his moves in the 2024 offseason, but there was one move that many people questioned before anybody took a snap in 2024: the decision to swap Quinton Jefferson for Javon Kinlaw at nearly twice the cost.
Firstly, let’s look at the resumes of Jefferson and Kinlaw entering the 2024 free agent market. Here are their stat lines in the 2023 season:
- Jefferson (14 games): 8 sacks and 29 pressures on 240 pass-rush snaps (3.3% sack rate, 12.1% pressure rate), 14.0% pass-rush win rate (14th of 98 DTs), 14 run stops
- Kinlaw (17 games): 4 sacks and 35 pressures on 361 pass-rush snaps (1.1% sack rate, 9.7% pressure rate), 10.3% pass-rush win rate (39th of 98 DTs), 10 run stops
Seems quite obvious who the better player was, no?
The only advantage in Kinlaw’s favor was that he was four years younger, but Jefferson was the substantially more productive player. Both were considered subpar run defenders, but Kinlaw was merely an above-average pass rusher while Jefferson was one of the most efficient interior pass rushers in the entire league. On top of that, Kinlaw had a poor track record of durability, missing 26 games over his first three seasons until he finally played a full 17 games in 2023. Jefferson had only missed three games over the course of Kinlaw’s time in the league.
The Jets’ handling of these two players made little sense in relation to their on-field production. New York signed Kinlaw to a one-year, $7.25 million contract with $6.91 million guaranteed. Meanwhile, they watched Jefferson walk to the Cleveland Browns on a one-year, $4 million deal with $3.66 million guaranteed.
This player-for-player swap would be difficult to justify even if the prices were identical. But letting Jefferson go and replacing him with a less productive player for nearly twice the money is malpractice.
That is a poor process by Douglas regardless of the result. However, it’s clear what the Jets were doing: they were betting on Kinlaw’s upside. As a former first-round pick who battled injuries for three years, they thought his fourth-year leap in 2023 could be followed by another leap in 2024, especially as he reunited with Robert Saleh in a scheme that values explosive defensive linemen.
While that was an understandable perspective, it does not change how unwise of a decision it was. It is arrogant to bet on your own team’s player-development skills over a player’s proven track record. Sure, you can roll the dice on developing a player if you can snag him for a bargain price, but paying for a projected leap in production – especially when you’re replacing a player who was proven to be better – is a reckless usage of cap space.
Fast forward to November 15, and this move has aged as poorly as you would expect when a team overpays for production that does not exist.
In 2023, Jefferson racked up 8 sacks and 29 pressures on 240 pass-rush snaps for the Jets. Kinlaw has nearly played the same number of pass-rush snaps to this point: 219. His production? 2 sacks and 19 total pressures. On top of that, he has 5 penalties, tied for the most among DTs and more than double Jefferson’s 2 penalties last year. He is also in the middle of one of the worst run defenses in football.
So, the Jets paid nearly twice the money for substantially worse production. This would be a survivable drop-off if the Jets were paying Kinlaw pennies; they would have expected it, knowing they signed up for it in exchange for extra cap space to allocate toward upgrading a different part of the roster. But it’s a killer for your roster if extra money is leading to worse results.
To be fair, Jefferson has underwhelmed in 2024. He had just 1 sack and 6 pressures in five games before the Browns cut ties with him. However, he was quickly scooped up by the much more competent Buffalo Bills, and in his first game back in Buffalo, Jefferson posted 1 sack and 2 pressures on just 17 pass-rush snaps.
Just because Jefferson struggled in Cleveland this year, it does not mean he would have performed at the same level had he stayed in New York. Jefferson proved he was a fit in New York’s system. It’s entirely possible that Cleveland was simply not a fit for him, and if he stayed with the Jets, he could have been just as productive as he was in 2023. Jefferson looked just fine in his first game back with the Bills, a team he was productive for in the past. Nobody has looked good for the Browns this year.
Speaking on the importance of the environment in a player’s production, the Jets’ gamble on Kinlaw’s upside was especially arrogant due to the team he was coming from. It’s not as if he was coming from a downtrodden organization that was known for wasting talent. He was coming from the San Francisco 49ers, one of the best teams in the NFL at developing defensive linemen. He got to play next to Nick Bosa and Javon Hargrave last year. How could the Jets give him a better chance to succeed than the 49ers did? It never made sense to think there was much untapped potential left in a 27-year-old player who had four years to develop in arguably the best situation a defensive tackle could ask for.
This situation highlights another one of Douglas’s most significant problems as a general manager: he seemingly does not place much importance on analytics. And I’m not even talking about nerdy math-major stuff here, where you divide a player’s WAR by the square root of the radius of the sun to calculate their mean plus-minus quotient. I’m just talking about basic research. All you need is a surface-level dive into Jefferson and Kinlaw’s metrics, and it would be clear as day that valuing Kinlaw at twice the money was foolish, no matter how much the coaching staff raved about his upside.
It marked the second consecutive year Douglas overpaid a veteran free agent whose analytical profile screamed that he was not a valuable player. Douglas did it last year with Dalvin Cook, paying $7 million for a running back who had gaudy box-score stats but looked woeful in just about every metric that went deeper than fantasy points or total rushing yards. You can also point to Douglas’s decision to stick with Duane Brown as Aaron Rodgers’s starting left tackle in 2023 despite Brown’s hideous pass-blocking production in 2022.
This also extends back to Douglas’s very first draft pick, when he surprised many by making the decision to take Mekhi Becton over Tristan Wirfs in 2020 (Wirfs was OT1 on the consensus big board while Becton was OT4). The primary defense of the pick was the immense hype surrounding Becton’s seemingly rare athletic upside, but Wirfs, although he was not as uniquely large, had an almost identically elite athletic profile (9.74 RAS to Becton’s 9.85) and far better college production (his 2019 pressure rate was less than half of Becton’s, and his PFF run-blocking grade was 12 points higher). Time and time again, Douglas falls into the trap of reckless optimism when he could have been saved from making a ridiculous move if he simply looked at basic data.
A swap of veteran, non-star defensive tackles is far down the list of the most consequential mistakes Douglas has made, but the Jefferson-Kinlaw situation is near the top when it comes to Douglas’s most egregiously bone-headed moves. It was a poor process that led to poor results. Justifying the move was difficult at the time it was announced, and nothing has happened since then to make Douglas look smarter. Therefore, it is one of the best examples to point to as a reason why Douglas is not worth bringing back in 2025. It serves as a glimpse into how unsound his player evaluation process is when the decision is not as obvious as selecting an elite prospect with a high draft pick.
