The New York Jets came into the 2025 league year with only three defensive tackles on their roster: Quinnen Williams, Leonard Taylor III, and Phidarian Mathis. With Williams being the only one who has proven enough to be guaranteed a roster spot, it was obvious that defensive tackle would be one of the team’s top priorities in the 2025 offseason.
Unsurprisingly, the Jets have already been active at defensive tackle, adding three new players. Their moves have mostly focused on the back end of the depth chart, however, as their three additions combined to start just 11 of their 45 appearances in the 2024 regular season.
Byron Cowart, Jay Tufele, and Derrick Nnadi are the three new defensive tackles signed by New York in free agency thus far. Cowart offers intriguing upside after posting impressive two-way efficiency as a rotational player in 2024. Tufele is a career backup who has done little of note from a production standpoint and is probably nothing more than a camp body.
Nnadi is the most fascinating wild card of the bunch. In some ways, his resume jumps off the page. He was a 2018 third-round pick who lasted seven seasons with the three-time Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs, starting 87 of his 115 regular season games and 12 of his 18 playoff games. That sounds like the resume of a trusted starter who should step right in and fill a hole for the Jets’ porous defensive line.
However, when you peel back the layers of Nnadi’s individual resume, he seems less appealing. In fact, the 28-year-old’s career arc is an unusually puzzling one to fathom.
Does Derrick Nnadi boost the Jets’ defensive line?
The 6-foot-1, 317-pound Nnadi is in the NFL for his run defense. Period.
With minuscule totals of five sacks, eight quarterback hits, and 66 total pressures in 115 career games, it is obvious that Nnadi has only lasted in the league because of his impact in the run game. If NFL coaches let you start over 80 games in the league despite hitting the quarterback once every 14 games, it is because they love your run defense.
Early in his career, Nnadi made enough of an impact against the run to be a valuable player despite his lack of pass rushing. Check out his yearly metrics as a run defender through 2020 (percentile ranks among defensive tackles with 100+ run defense snaps):
- 2018: 76.8 PFF run defense grade (72nd percentile), 7.8% run-stop rate (66th percentile)
- 2019: 71.9 PFF run defense grade (66th percentile), 7.2% run-stop rate (52nd percentile)
- 2020: 81.7 PFF run defense grade (95th percentile), 8.9% run-stop rate (82nd percentile)
*- Run-stop rate: Percentage of run defense snaps recording a “run stop,” which is a tackle that constitutes a failed play for the offense.
Through three seasons, Nnadi established himself as one of the most consistent run-stuffing defensive tackles in the NFL. His 2020 season was a true breakout year, putting his run-game production in the company of players like Quinnen Williams and Cameron Heyward. Since then, however, Nnadi has experienced an extremely steep decline.
In 2021, Nnadi dropped to career lows of a 52.6 run defense grade (47th percentile) and a 5.9% run-stop rate (36th percentile). He became a free agent after the year, and despite his strong first three seasons, he could only fetch a one-year, $2.75 million deal to stay in Kansas City.
It was a reasonable cost for a one-dimensional run-stuffer who had three solid seasons in the books but was coming off a concerning decline. The Chiefs gave Nnadi a chance to bounce back in 2022, handing him his third career opening-week start.
Nnadi took another steep nosedive in 2022, posting a 38.8 run defense grade (13th percentile) and a 2.9% run-stop rate (2nd percentile). Suddenly, he was one of the worst run defenders in the NFL. And since he still wasn’t getting after the quarterback in the slightest (he had zero sacks, zero hits, and five hurries in 17 games), he was about as much of a liability as an NFL player could be.
Yet, the Chiefs still started Nnadi for all 17 games in 2022. They did shrink his snap percentage to a career-low 34%, including a gradual decline throughout the year as his struggles continued (down to 25% over the final two games). Still, that is quite a hefty role for a defensive tackle who, across 388 defensive snaps, could not hit the quarterback a single time and only picked up five run stops.
Shockingly, the Chiefs re-signed Nnadi once again in 2023, inking him to a one-year, $1.2 million deal that was mostly guaranteed. Even more shockingly, they again started him for all 17 games. Not only that, but they rewarded his brutal 2022 season by boosting his snap percentage back up to 46%, tied for the second-highest of his career.
Nnadi responded with another stinker. In 2023, he had a 40.9 run defense grade (15th percentile) and a 5.0% run-stop rate (27th percentile). At least he recorded one sack this time.
Things start to get really fishy at this point, because the Chiefs again re-signed Nnadi to a one-year deal in 2024, this time giving him a raise to $2 million ($1.8 million guaranteed).
However, at the very least, Kansas City made the overdue decision to cut Nnadi’s snap count. While Nnadi played 17 games in 2024, he started just one game: the Week 18 finale in which the Chiefs rested their starters. His snap percentage for the year was a career-low 20%.
Even with fewer snaps, Nnadi was a liability once again, putting out a 40.3 run defense grade (15th percentile) and a 2.4% run-stop rate (1st percentile). His pass rushing reached a new low that should be unacceptable for an NFL defensive lineman in any role. Over 90 pass-rush snaps, he had zero sacks, zero hits, and one hurry.
So… what exactly does Nnadi bring to the table?
Production-wise, it would be difficult to find an NFL player at any position with a less appealing resume. His first three seasons were solid, but he has now gone four consecutive seasons of doing next-to-nothing as a pass rusher while struggling immensely at stopping the run, which is supposed to be the specialty that cancels out his non-existent pass rushing.
Some might defend Nnadi by claiming his impact occurs off the stat sheet. That could be a reasonable defense of run-stuffing DTs in some cases, but this is why his PFF grades are worth including in the analysis. As faulty as the PFF grading system can be at times, it usually does a decent job of capturing off-the-stat-sheet impact for defensive tackles.
For instance, the Chargers’ Poona Ford had the seventh-highest run defense grade (78.8) among defensive tackles in 2024 despite ranking in the 35th percentile with a 5.4% run-stop rate. In English, he was graded as an elite run defender despite recording tackles at a below-average rate.
PFF’s grading system accurately captured that Ford made a huge off-the-stat-sheet impact. His open-market value corroborated this, as he netted a three-year, $27.6 million contract from the Rams in free agency.
If Nnadi were consistently making plays like the one Ford did above (blowing up a run without making the tackle), it would likely show up in his grades.
As always, a review of the film is necessary to confirm what the stats (especially PFF grades) are claiming. And when you watch Nnadi’s film, you can see plenty of blatant mistakes that show why his stats against the run are as poor as they are.
Pre-snap, Nnadi has play-side leverage, but he allows the center to cross his face and execute the reach block, which concedes the A gap that he was responsible for. Bijan Robinson scores a goal-line touchdown through Nnadi’s gap.
Nnadi goes for a lazy arm tackle and lets the runner power up the gut for a 7-yard gain that should have been stuffed near the line.
Nnadi is manhandled by the right tackle, getting driven multiple yards downfield. He luckily still gets a chance to make the stop as Jalen Hurts runs straight past him, but he misses another arm-tackle attempt.
Nnadi gets reach-blocked by Laken Tomlinson, conceding an 11-yard run up the middle. Jets fans know how rare it was to see plays like this from Tomlinson.
These are plays where run-stuffing DTs like Nnadi should be making an off-the-stat-sheet impact by clogging up the running lane, even if he doesn’t get the tackle. Instead, his inability to fulfill his responsibility leads to a negative result. Racking up plays like these is how you end up with poor stats against the run, both in terms of your grade and your run-stop rate.
Despite his lousy metrics, Kansas City continuously re-signed Nnadi and gave him a role in their defense. This begs the question: Are the stats lying about Nnadi?
As ghastly as Nnadi’s stats are, it says something that the NFL’s most successful franchise of the past decade wanted to continue using him in their defense. Maybe he is better than the numbers suggest.
That might be the case, but Nnadi’s production is too consistently poor to brush aside. He has amassed four years, 68 games, and 1,558 snaps of below-NFL-caliber production. This is not a player that should be trusted to handle any role in an NFL defense, regardless of a Super Bowl-winning team’s fondness for him.
Nnadi’s contract details are yet to be revealed. If the Jets are wise, this will be a minimal, non-guaranteed contract that gives him an opportunity to compete for a roster spot. In that case, it is a completely harmless and worthwhile signing. If the risk is zero, why not find out what the Chiefs saw in Nnadi?
Anything more would be a careless misstep, one caused by overlooking Nnadi’s body of work and overvaluing his pedigree as a starter for a winning organization. Scout the player, not the uniform.
The Jets should not view Nnadi as a solution to their lack of run-stopping on the interior. As they enter the NFL draft and continue monitoring the free agent market’s leftovers, this roster hole remains a dire one.
