First-year special teams coordinator Chris Banjo has carried the 2025 New York Jets.
Despite enjoying the monumental success of Banjo’s unit, which is on pace to be one of the best in NFL history, the Jets have a 3-11 record.
In fact, it’s easy to imagine the Jets being winless without Banjo’s wizardry. In each of their measly three victories, New York’s special teams unit performed at an elite level, and yet, the Jets still won by one score against a sub-.500 team. With league-average special teams performances in any of those games, the Jets would have lost.
It begs the question: Just how bad is this football team if you take out Banjo’s special teams unit?
The answer isn’t something that Aaron Glenn wants you to see.
Aaron Glenn’s team is historically terrible on plays from scrimmage
The DVOA metric (defense-adjusted value over average) is one of the best all-encompassing metrics for evaluating the efficiency of a unit. On each play, it accounts for factors such as down, distance, field position, score, time, and the strength of the opponent to provide an accurate measure of a team’s play-by-play efficiency relative to the league-average expectations.
Based on DVOA, the Jets’ special teams unit has a chance to finish as the best in NFL history.
After Sunday’s loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars, New York has a special teams DVOA of 10.8%, which is on pace to finish fourth-best in league history (going back to 1978, the first season of DVOA data). The NFL record is 11.8%, held by the 2002 New Orleans Saints. New York was above that mark going into Sunday’s game and can reclaim the throne in the final few weeks.
Offensively and defensively, it’s a much different story. The Jets are 29th in offensive DVOA (-21.9%) and 31st in defensive DVOA (18.5%). Combined, they are 40.4 points worse than average between offense and defense, the worst mark in the NFL this season.
That’s pretty awful. How awful is it historically, though?
The answer: It is currently the 10th-worst mark in NFL history out of 1,457 teams, and the worst in Jets franchise history.
Yep.
As of Dec. 15, 2025, these are the worst NFL teams since 1978 in combined offensive and defensive DVOA:
- 2005 San Francisco 49ers (-51.1%)
- 1991 Indianapolis Colts (-46.5%)
- 2008 Detroit Lions (-45.2%)
- 2009 St. Louis Rams (-45.0%)
- 2002 Houston Texans (-43.7%)
- 2009 Detroit Lions (-43.0%)
- 1992 New England Patriots (-41.0%)
- 2004 San Francisco 49ers (-40.6%)
- 2007 San Francisco 49ers (-40.6%)
- 2025 New York Jets (-40.4%)
Before this year, the worst mark for a Jets team belonged to Robert Saleh’s 2021 squad at -27.2%. To find that on the leaderboard, you have to go all the way down to the No. 78 slot.
Yikes.
While Glenn absolutely deserves some credit for the Jets’ special teams excellence—he hired Banjo in the first place, and Glenn has consistently demonstrated a high valuation of special teams through his roster decisions—it is daunting to see just how terrible the Jets have been when removing their special teams production.
Special teams play is erratic, both from game to game and year to year. In many respects, it’s completely random. It also carries much less weight than plays from scrimmage, since its plays represent a much smaller portion of the total snaps compared to offensive and defensive snaps. These are the reasons why organizations invest minimal capital in special teams.
For the Jets to be carried this heavily by special teams shows how inept they have been on offense and defense, the only two phases that truly matter when evaluating the sustainable health of a football team. And between those two phases, the 2025 Jets are one of the 10 worst teams in recorded NFL history, and the worst team in franchise history.
