It might seem odd to accuse an NFL regime of being “overconfident” before winning a single football game. But in the case of the New York Jets, we are seeing red flags suggesting the franchise’s new brass might be a little too cocky about its capabilities.
There is plenty of football left to be played. Two weeks in, though, a certain theme is emerging around the Jets’ roster-building decisions.
The Jets may need to be more pragmatic with their player evaluations
New York is 0-2. Numerous players and coaches can share the blame for that record, but if we had to narrow it down to the top three culprits, there is little doubt that these would be the consensus choices among Jets fans:
- Xavier Gipson
- Micheal Clemons
- Brandon Stephens
Gipson was responsible for the costliest blunder in New York’s narrow season-opening loss, a lost fumble on a kick return, which led to his release after the game. Gipson also blew an opportunity to score a touchdown on another well-blocked kick return.
The Jets’ Week 2 loss to Buffalo was too one-sided to come down to one play, but if there was a turning point, it was Clemons’ roughing the passer penalty in the first quarter, which turned a long field goal attempt into a Bills touchdown. Clemons has also been one of the worst players on the team overall, ranking as the NFL’s second-worst edge rusher (min. 70 snaps) according to Pro Football Focus.
Stephens has been one of the most picked-on corners in the NFL. His allowed passer rating of 145.4 is the third-worst mark among 64 cornerbacks who have been targeted at least eight times.
New York’s starting cornerback had a plethora of costly mistakes in the season opener, including two allowed touchdowns, a dropped interception, and a costly pass interference that set up Pittsburgh’s game-winning field goal. Against Buffalo, Stephens was again exploited throughout the afternoon, and he could be seen giving a lackadaisical effort on a James Cook touchdown run.
While only one of these three players was acquired by the Jets’ new regime, all three have two things in common:
- Their early-season performance is entirely predictable, as it lines up with their career track record
- The Jets had many opportunities to add players with better track records for equal or lesser cost
New York kept Gipson despite his nine fumbles in 34 career games. It was entirely expected that he would have another costly fumble at some point.
New York kept Clemons despite having more penalties than sacks in his career, ranking as one of the league’s worst edge rushers in 2024, and committing another bone-headed penalty in the preseason. It was entirely expected that he would continue to play at a bottom-tier level and commit another costly penalty at some point.
New York signed Stephens to a three-year, $36 million deal despite the fact that he allowed the second-most yards among cornerbacks in 2024. It was entirely expected that he would continue to be a liability in 2025.
The regime could be let off the hook if the Jets had no realistic alternative to trusting these players, but Glenn and Mougey (some combination of the two) consciously decided to give key roles to each of them. Gipson and Clemons were embroiled in roster competitions and had entirely cuttable contracts. Stephens was a relatively expensive free agent pickup on a market where players with better production (of which there are many) earned less money.
Yet, Gipson was tabbed as a starting punt and kick returner, Clemons is playing more snaps than Will McDonald, and Stephens is a starting cornerback on a top-25 salary at the position.
Why would the Jets make all of these decisions despite the overwhelming evidence that these players were not very good?
The prevailing hypothesis: Overconfidence in their ability to develop talent.
It’s overconfidence, not foolishness
Pointing out the Jets’ failures with Gipson, Clemons, and Stephens requires more nuance than merely pointing out that the players are performing poorly and the team is foolish for keeping them.
The Jets are not dumb, nor is any NFL team. These puzzling decisions do not happen because the decision-makers are inept. All of the people involved in these decisions have spent a lifetime in football. Plenty of detailed research goes into each decision.
However, at the end of the day, these are still humans. And, sometimes, humans get a little too optimistic about their capabilities, causing them to make illogical decisions.
The human element is what causes teams to make moves that would otherwise be deemed outlandish if they relied solely on sheer logic. Smart teams know how to balance their gut with the information, never leaning too far to either end.
Trust the information too much, and you will overlook numerous variables that are ignored without watching film or understanding who players are as people. Trust your gut too much, and you will make mistakes that could have easily been avoided if you properly valued the facts at your disposal.
The Jets’ new regime seems to have leaned too far toward the “trust our gut” end of the spectrum. It’s the culmination of a path that can be traced back to their initial mission statement as they set out to repair the mess that was left for them.
New York’s path to overconfident decisions
The Jets took an economical team-building approach in the first offseason of the Aaron Glenn-Darren Mougey regime. Coming off two years of win-now moves from their predecessors, the Jets wanted to clean up the long-term cap sheet, make the roster younger, and put their personal stamp on the team’s identity and culture.
With these goals in mind, they avoided lucrative investments in the offseason, besides extending in-house players.
Justin Fields was the Jets’ most expensive free agent signing at two years and $40 million, while Stephens was New York’s only outside signing to a contract of three-plus years. New York also avoided any noteworthy trades for veteran players until late in the summer, when Byron Cowart’s injury forced their hand at defensive tackle, and even then, the trade costs were minimal.
Having elected for this type of approach, the Jets wound up with a roster that did not look exciting on paper to anybody outside of Florham Park. Besides a few building blocks who were inherited by the new regime, the roster was littered with holes. Many positions on New York’s depth chart lacked players with proven track records of success.
But the Jets were fine with that, because they trusted their coaching staff to get the team’s unheralded additions to perform beyond their expectations.
That’s all well and good. The best organizations in the NFL are built upon talent development. Franchises like Baltimore, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Green Bay, and Buffalo have achieved sustained success because of their coaching staffs’ ability to continuously develop a multitude of low-investment players from within to fill holes. This is what allows them to stay afloat when they are forced to part ways with big-name players due to cap constraints.
The Jets have long struggled to sustain this talent-development pipeline. The new regime has come into Florham Park with the intention of proving they can build this type of system.
That’s a smart and well-intentioned concept. But there is still a line that cannot be crossed when attempting to execute it.
The “I can fix him” fallacy
Having confidence in your ability to develop talent is one thing, but arrogantly ignoring years of information is a completely different thing. In many cases, the Jets’ new regime took the latter approach with its 2025 roster decisions. Even if players’ bodies of work suggested they likely were solidified as NFL liabilities, the Jets believed their staff was good enough to turn those players into something more.
That’s how you end up with guys like Gipson, Clemons, and Stephens costing you games.
Gipson entered the NFL as a UDFA, which means he was already valued by the league as a fringe NFL-caliber player coming out of school. Then, Gipson played 34 games across two seasons. With that very large body of work, Gipson was nearly twice as likely to fumble (9 times) as he was to rip off a 20+ yard punt return (5 times), and that’s with 66 punt return attempts.
That is more than enough information to know that Gipson is extremely unlikely to be a player worth having on your roster. Yet, Glenn kept Gipson simply because he didn’t muff any punts in practice. This is a perfect example of the Jets being overconfident that they fixed Gipson through his work on the practice field, when they had multiple years of in-game data to show that his sure-handedness in a comfy practice environment was probably a fluke.
In the case of Clemons, he entered the 2025 season with 49 career games played, and over that stretch, he had more penalties (8) than sacks (7.5). Sacks aside, run defense was supposed to be the big defensive end’s calling card, but he ranked 119th out of 130 qualifiers in PFF’s run defense grade during the 2024 season.
Even more importantly, Clemons is already 28 years old, which means he is closer to the point where players begin to decline than the point when their performance is expected to improve. It would be different if he were still 23 or 24, but… he is older than Quinnen Williams.
On top of that, Clemons was due to have a $3.6 million cap hit in 2025, of which the Jets could have $3.4 million by cutting him. This negates any argument that the Jets didn’t (or don’t currently) have better options than Clemons. While their edge depth was/is certainly poor, they can easily find someone off the scrap heap who can do just as much for half the price. That’s basic NFL economics.
Not to mention, Clemons committed a foolish penalty in the preseason only days after Aaron Glenn said Clemons needed to work on that aspect of his game. It presented a golden opportunity for Glenn to make an example of Clemons, backing up his messages about accountability, but Clemons stuck around.
Once again, this is not a case of the Jets being “dumb.” Rather, the Jets’ strange affinity for Clemons is probably due to his extremely appealing physical profile. He looks the part of a beastly defensive end. Clemons is tall, broad, immensely strong, and plays hard. He looks like a raging bull on the field. This is the type of guy who football coaches see and think, “I can fix him.”
That, right there, is the fatal error.
It is imperative to ignore that inclination and trust the body of work. As dominant as Clemons may look in a tank top on the practice field, he offered three seasons of information to tell the Jets that he is not a useful NFL player – especially not at a $3.6 million cap hit.
Stephens, though, may be the Jets’ most blatant example of overconfidence. In this instance, they thought they knew better than one of the most successful organizations in the NFL.
For the first four years of his career, Stephens played with the Baltimore Ravens, who may be the best franchise in the NFL at developing defensive backs. Baltimore has consistently churned out elite pass defenses and Pro Bowl DBs throughout John Harbaugh’s 18-year run. That’s plenty of time to trust that the Ravens’ evaluations of their own DBs are probably accurate.
So when Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta essentially said “hasta la vista” to Stephens in January, the Jets should have heeded the warning.
When asked about Stephens after the Ravens’ season ended, DeCosta bluntly responded, “We’ll have to see what happens with him. He’s probably gonna have a chance to test the market and see what his value is.”
Translation: We don’t want him.
In 2024, Stephens allowed the second-most yards in the NFL among cornerbacks, and it was largely due to his struggles with basic fundamentals of the position, such as tracking the ball, playing the ball, and not committing penalties, to name a few. This was Year 4 for Stephens, and he was already 27 years old.
But for whatever reason, the Jets figured that maybe they could teach Stephens how to play cornerback in his age-28 season, despite the fact that he couldn’t figure it out over four years with the Ravens of all teams.
Perhaps Stephens would have been a justifiable flier on a low-risk contract, but on a three-year, $36 million deal with $23 million guaranteed, the Jets were wildly overconfident in their ability to coach him up to his pay grade.
Jets’ young regime must learn to take smarter risks
Tricking yourself into thinking you can fix players like Gipson, Clemons, and Stephens is how you become a bad football team.
This is not to say that teams should never trust their guy and should only add players who have strong track records of production on paper. That isn’t always plausible. There are only so many productive players to go around, after all. Not to mention, you will miss out on plenty of steals with that rigid line of thinking.
NFL teams should always take some chances at developing players who have struggled in the past. There are many stars in the NFL today who would not have gotten the chance to shine if a team did not roll the dice on them based on intuition and the eye test, electing to overlook past struggles. Sometimes, a change of environment or scheme could turn a player into something they have never been before.
However, there has to be something there to justify the dart throw. No coaching staff is good enough to make any player look good, let alone a brand-new staff that has yet to establish its schemes.
Glenn and Mougey made many roster decisions that seemed unjustifiable at the time based on past track records. So far, the on-field results have been predictable. Surprisingly, these low-ranked football players have not magically transformed into studs just because Glenn is their coach.
There are 15 games left for the Jets to turn things around – particularly the core roster decisions made by Glenn and Mougey. Perhaps these words will be stuffed down my throat in due time as Stephens goes on to make his first Pro Bowl.
Going forward, though, it already feels safe to say that New York must be more pragmatic with its player evaluations in the future. While the Jets should trust their staff’s talent development abilities to a certain extent, it is arrogant to think they can fix anybody. The Jets treated too many players like moldable clay when they were really just dried-out Play-Doh.
There are smarter ways to bet on talent development, such as the following.
- Give an expanded role to a player who showed promise in limited sample sizes but was buried on the depth chart; Jowon Briggs is a great example of this.
- Buy low on a player who was playing at a high level until injuries derailed them, and see if they can rebound.
- Bet on the bounce-back of a player who thrived for multiple seasons until their stock plummeted with one massive down year.
- Take a chance on an undervalued player who struggled on another team (or perhaps under your team’s previous staff) but perfectly fits your scheme.
It is unwise to pretend your coaching staff is so good that it can make someone play at a high level even if they have never really shown they are capable of it. You need legitimate flashes of potential to justify your faith in the player.
As this young regime grows, it must do a better job of trusting the information at its disposal. Gut instinct and confidence should always be parts of the equation, but if theoretical projections take complete precedence over practical analysis, the Jets will end up with more players like Gipson, Clemons, and Stephens on the field.
