How will they get bang for their buck?
That was the main question surrounding the New York Jets entering 2025 free agency. While the Jets were not exactly lacking cap space, they were not poised to go on a spending spree.
The Jets are still dealing with (and will continue to deal with) large amounts of dead money from win-now moves they made over the past two years. They have a number of talented young players who are due for extensions soon. They have too many roster holes and not enough cap space to allocate large percentages of it to individual players. Above all, they are not a team that figures to seriously pursue a championship this year.
With all of that in mind, it was widely expected that Jets general manager Darren Mougey would take an economical approach to his first free agency period as New York’s GM. So far, Mougey has (mostly) done just that.
While some of the contracts signed by Mougey are a bit pricier than ideal, he has avoided the blockbuster section of the free agent market, focusing instead on accumulating a vast quantity of low-risk, high-upside deals that fill holes while maintaining the team’s long-term cap flexibility. According to Spotrac, the Jets are responsible for just one of the 20 largest free agent contracts signed in 2025 based on total guarantees, and that was Justin Fields, whose $30 million in guaranteed money places him just 26th at the quarterback position.
The ultimate goal for Mougey in 2025 is to find ways to raise the team’s short-term ceiling without sacrificing long-term assets. To do that, you need to find players with great upside relative to their price. And on Thursday, Mougey nailed it with two signings that fit this bill absolutely perfectly: tight end Stone Smartt and defensive tackle Byron Cowart.
Smartt and Cowart are the quintessential free agent targets for a team in the Jets’ position. They come cheap due to their minimal playing time and meager cumulative production, but their impressive efficiency within their roles indicates they have the potential to provide a fantastic return on investment.
Stone Smartt
At one glance, Smartt’s body of work is completely unexciting. He has one touchdown in three seasons. In 2024, he caught 16 passes for 208 yards and zero touchdowns. Whoop-dee-do. To boot, he is not known as a blocker.
The real measure of potential, though, is efficiency. What a player produces in totality is largely determined by the role afforded to him. The player himself can only control what he does with each of his opportunities.
Smartt crushed his opportunities in 2024. With very few chances to get involved, Smartt emerged as a timely playmaker for the Chargers. He made a stellar impact relative to his playing time and displayed legitimate receiving upside while doing so.
Smartt’s 16 receptions for 208 yards is an unappealing stat line – until you see that he achieved it with just 19 targets. He produced 10.9 yards per target, caught 82.3% of his targets, and generated an 112.3 passer rating when targeted.
In total, Smartt only ran a route on 126 plays. His average of 1.78 yards per route run ranked eighth-best out of 58 qualified tight ends, one spot behind Mark Andrews.
The cherry on top of these numbers is that Smartt looked like a true threat via the eye test while producing these numbers. Small-sample receiving excellence can be achieved on the basis of one or two fluke plays – such as a blown coverage or an easy screen pass – but Smartt looked the part. His film is just as impressive as his numbers.
Here is a reel of every target from Smartt in 2024 (excluding one on a fake punt). You can see the potential; this is not fluky production.
At 6-foot-4 and 226 pounds, Smartt is slender for the tight end position, and he translates it into WR-like skills as a pass catcher. The Chargers frequently deployed him as a field-stretcher, and Smartt maximized these chances, displaying impressive downfield separation on vertical routes. He also shows a wide catch radius, the ability to make catches through contact, and a feel for settling into soft spots of the defense.
Smartt’s field-stretching potential is tantalizing. Despite his minimal playing time, Smartt finished the 2024 season tied for seventh among tight ends with three deep receptions (20+ air yards). His ADOT (average of depth target) was 10.1, ranking sixth out of 58 qualifiers at the position. He ranked one spot behind Dawson Knox and one ahead of T.J. Hockenson.
The details of Smartt’s one-year contract have yet to be reported, but he will likely come cheaper than $3.26 million; that is the cost of the right-of-first-refusal tender, which the Chargers declined to use on Smartt, a restricted free agent.
Smartt comes cheap because, on the surface, he has hardly done anything to warrant getting paid. For all of the advanced data available today, teams still appear to pay players based on box-score stats (hello, Jets’ 2023 Dalvin Cook signing). Smartt’s box score says 16 receptions for 208 yards and zero touchdowns, and he is valued as such. But his efficiency suggests that he could be significantly more impactful when given a larger role.
Would Smartt maintain this elite efficiency with two or even three times as many targets/snaps? Probably not. The Chargers saw him firsthand in practice every day and did not even tender him. In all likelihood, he will never be much more than he is. But for a meager contract, it is absolutely worth finding out whether his flashes are legitimate, especially for a team in the Jets’ position.
Home-run free agent signings often come from places like this: Taking low-risk bets on unproven players who did a lot with very little and giving them a chance to do the same in a larger role.
Byron Cowart
Cowart (28) is two years older than Smartt (26), so his ceiling probably isn’t as high. Nonetheless, just like Smartt, Cowart is a player who did a lot with limited reps in 2024, suggesting he can make a larger impact than you would think based on the meager surface-level numbers that probably diminished his market value.
In 15 games for Chicago last season, Cowart posted 26 tackles, four quarterback hits, and 2.5 sacks. Meh.
But when considering Cowart only played 335 defensive snaps (99th among defensive tackles), his per-play production is actually quite good – and he did it in both phases.
Cowart recorded 14 run stops on 176 run defense snaps, an 8.0% run-stop rate that placed 30th out of 145 qualified defensive tackles (min. 200 defensive snaps). Meanwhile, he had 12 total pressures on 156 pass-rush snaps, a 7.7% pressure rate that placed 53rd of 145.
The two-way efficiency displayed by Cowart is rare. Among the 145 qualified defensive tackles, he was one of just 14 who had a run stop rate of at least 8% and a pressure rate of at least 7.5%. Other players in the group include Calais Campbell, Cameron Heyward, Leonard Williams, DeForest Buckner, Jeffery Simmons, Kobie Turner, Vita Vea, Zach Allen, and Nnamdi Madubuike.
Like Smartt, there is good stuff on film that suggests Cowart earned his numbers.
As a run defender, Cowart is decisive in attacking gaps. He explodes off the ball and complements it with good technique to quickly clear blockers and make splashy plays in the backfield. Here, he back-doors the left guard and beats with a club-swim to get the TFL.
Showing the same traits as in the previous clip, Cowart fires into the A gap and beats the left guard with a rip. He impedes the pulling right tackle, blowing up the play. Cowart stays with the play, fights through the traffic, and swallows up the cutback for a TFL.
I consistently noticed an impressive motor from Cowart. He gives 110% on every play and will absolutely book it to chase down a play from across the field. A nonstop motor is crucial for defensive tackles to generate on-ball plays at a high rate.
Cowart will never be the most dynamic pass rusher (he seems more proficient in the run game), but his motor allows him to make plays in that phase. His initial rush fails here, but he stays with the play, throwing a spin move to shed his blocker and then pursuing Geno Smith for the sack.
Cowart ranked in the top-60% of his position in both run stops per snap and pressures per snap. That means a whole lot more than how many total sacks or tackles he had. As a team that completely lacks reliable defensive tackles beyond Quinnen Williams, it is worthwhile for New York to take a low-risk bet on Cowart to see if he can translate that efficiency into a larger role.
Is it likely Cowart does that? Just like Smartt, the answer is no. Cowart will be 29 when the season begins. The Jets are his seventh team. He never had a season like 2024 before; it is even possible that 2024 was a fluke and he declines in 2025. If he hasn’t broken out before, why now?
This is what you’re dealing with when it comes to players in this price range. They are never supposed to be studs. If they were supposed to be studs, they would be paid like it.
Most of these signings will come and go without making much of a mark. They will play up to their pay grade as competent backups and find a new team. But every once in a while, you get a Zack Baun, someone who defies the odds to enormously outplay their contract and their reputation. Whenever these players emerge, it is difficult to explain why – hence the fact it was unexpected – but when you look back, the signs of potential were there.
Those signs are there with Smartt and Cowart. They each generated excellent per-snap production in 2024. Smartt was as efficient as some of the best tight ends in the NFL and looked the part while doing it. Cowart provided two-way playmaking that is rare for the position.
In all likelihood, both of their 2024 campaigns will go down as flukes, and the duo will go down as forgettable players in Jets history. But if there is some sliver of a chance that a player’s season can be expanded into something greater, and that player can be acquired on a low-risk contract, the Jets should be all over him.
The Jets are not going anywhere fast. Now is the time for discovering diamonds in the rough to strengthen the infrastructure of the roster for cheap, while they save their premium assets to make splashy investments when they are closer to competing. Signings like Smartt and Cowart are precisely what Mougey should be focused on right now.
The more Smartts and Cowarts the Jets sign, the more likely that one of them emerges as a steal. They exemplify what teams should look for in low-risk investments: efficient per-play production that flashes possible untapped potential.
