The 2025 New York Jets were bad.
How bad, though?
Whatever answer you’ve come up with in your head, there is a good chance that you’re underestimating just how ghastly of a product Aaron Glenn put forth for the fanbase he promised to make proud.
In the conversation for ‘WOAT’ status?
Jets fans can agree on one thing: The team had a fantastic special teams unit in 2025.
In fact, it was one of the best special teams units that the NFL has ever seen. New York’s special teams DVOA was 10.3%, which not only led the league, but is the fifth-best mark in NFL history (dating back to 1978, the first season in which the DVOA metric is available).
Yet, the Jets still won only three games. And, in each of those three games, New York won narrowly, with elite special teams production being a key difference-maker between a win and a loss.
It speaks to how bad the Jets looked on plays from scrimmage—the only plays that a coaching staff truly has control over.
Based on DVOA, the Jets finished with the 30th-ranked offense (-27.1% DVOA) and the 31st-ranked defense (19.0%). Combined, they were 46.1 points worse than the league average between offense and defense.
That is the third-worst mark in NFL history:
- 2005 San Francisco 49ers (-51.1%)
- 1991 Indianapolis Colts (-46.5%)
- 2025 New York Jets (-46.1%)
- 2008 Detroit Lions (-45.2%)
- 2009 St. Louis Rams (-45.0%)
While the Jets’ special teams play deserves praise, special teams is easily the most erratic and unpredictable of the three phases. It will be extremely difficult for the Jets to sustain that level of production in 2026. Their performance on offense and defense is a much more accurate reflection of the roster’s execution and the coaching staff’s leadership.
And when focusing solely on the game’s main two phases, the Jets are one of the NFL’s three worst teams of the last 48 seasons.
Is it acceptable?
The Jets were expected to be a below-average team in 2025. Expectations stooped even lower when they traded away Sauce Gardner and Quinnen Williams.
But nothing could justify the team looking this poor.
Every NFL team has enough talent to at least stay semi-competitive in most games. Even the infamously brutal 2020 Jets, led by much-maligned head coach Adam Gase, had a combined offensive/defensive DVOA of -24.7 points. That is over 21 points better than the 2025 Jets, and it isn’t even among the top 100 worst teams of all time. Gase pulled that off with 37-year-old Frank Gore at running back, Chris Herndon at tight end, Jamison Crowder as his WR1, and so on.
When Aaron Glenn set out with a goal to make Jets fans proud, this degree of ineptitude surely could not have been what he was aiming for, could it?
There’s winning three games, and then there’s winning three games while hardly looking like an NFL-caliber team. Glenn’s team has accomplished the latter.
And that’s well below the already-low bar that Glenn himself set for the team.
Glenn and the Jets had plenty of avenues to inspire hope for the future while still losing most of their games. They failed to pull it off.
Now, Jets fans are left grasping at straws for optimism, once again forced to pray that an offseason championship will translate to anything meaningful when the ball is kicked off.
