It can be argued that luck plays a larger role in football than in any other sport.
Whether it’s the bounce of a fumble, an opponent missing a field goal, or a pass bouncing off a defender and into a receiver’s hands, there are many ways for football games to swing in one team’s favor without any degree of skill required.
Over the course of full seasons, luck is often responsible for altering a team’s record by multiple wins. It can be the difference between missing the playoffs and making it, or playing in the first round and earning a first-round bye.
Strength of schedule, opponent field goal kicking, opponent drops, and fumble recovery rate are just a few uncontrollable factors that can add up to have a significant impact on a team’s final record across 17 weeks.
With this in mind, let’s turn our attention to the New York Jets and identify five stats that are due to flip in 2026—both positive and negative.
1. Fumble recovery percentage
The Jets recovered just 35.5% of live balls in 2025, ranking second-worst in the NFL ahead of the Detroit Lions (28.6%).
This is due to swing in the Jets’ favor next year. For the most part, fumble recoveries are a product of luck.
The only controllable factor in fumble recovery rate is the type of fumbles that tend to occur in a team’s games, i.e., a strip-sack is more likely to be recovered by the defense than a botched snap. If you force significantly more high-turnover-probability fumbles than your opponent, you will improve your odds of having a high fumble recovery rate.
It is true that the Jets were poor in this regard, as they hardly forced strip-sacks and yielded plenty to opponents. New York’s defense forced just one strip-sack all year, coming on Baker Mayfield in Week 3 (which was recovered by the Buccaneers), while the Jets’ quarterbacks fumbled five times on sacks (losing three).
Still, a 35.5% recovery rate is extremely low and should trend up next year, even if the Jets remain a bad football team.
The only reason not to expect a regression to the mean is the Jets franchise’s inexplicable track record of bad luck in this category. These are the Jets’ yearly rankings in fumble recovery rate since 2016:
- 2025: 35.5% (31st)
- 2024: 52.4% (10th)
- 2023: 38.1% (32nd)
- 2022: 40% (30th)
- 2021: 35% (31st)
- 2020: 40% (27th)
- 2019: 42% (29th)
- 2018: 45.5% (25th)
- 2017: 50% (14th)
- 2016: 45.7% (23rd)
Only once did the Jets recover more than half of available fumbles, and even then, they barely eclipsed 50%. For the most part, they have been near the bottom of the NFL.
It seems unfathomable for a team to struggle this consistently in a largely luck-based category, but this has been the Jets’ reality for a decade now, so it is impossible to brush aside, as inconceivable as it may be.
Nonetheless, an uptick from 35.5% is likely, as even the star-crossed Jets fared better than that in eight of their previous nine seasons.
Who knows? Perhaps the football gods have mapped out a plan in which the past decade of league-worst fumble luck is scheduled to be balanced out by a full decade of tremendous luck.
2. Special teams production
The Jets’ dominant special teams unit was the only thing separating them from a very real shot at a winless season.
According to FTN Fantasy, the Jets had a special teams DVOA (a metric designed to capture the overall efficiency of a unit relative to league average) of 10.3%, which led the NFL and is the fifth-best single-season mark since 1978. They were impeccable, establishing themselves as one of the greatest units in league history.
This excellence helped mask the nearly unprecedented extent to which the Jets struggled on plays from scrimmage.
The Jets had the 30th-ranked offense (-27.1% DVOA) and the 31st-ranked defense (19.0% DVOA). Based on the DVOA system, they were 46.1 percentage points worse than the league average between offense and defense. It’s the third-worst mark in NFL history, beating only the 2005 San Francisco 49ers (-51.1) and the 1991 Indianapolis Colts (-46.5), while ranking marginally ahead of the winless 2008 Detroit Lions (-45.2).
Everyone knows the 2025 Jets were bad, but it goes even deeper than the 3-14 record. They put forth some of the lowest-quality offensive and defensive play that the football world has ever laid witness to. If their special teams weren’t so stellar, it would be more glaringly obvious how atrocious the 2025 Jets were when ranked across NFL history.
But at least the Jets can hang onto their special teams moving forward, right?
Not so fast.
Special teams production is extremely erratic from year to year. There is a reason NFL teams invest far less money into it than the offense and defense: It simply isn’t sustainable.
Over the five-year span from 2020 to 2024, NFL teams saw their ranking in special teams DVOA fluctuate by an average of 8.8 spots compared to the previous season. That means a team ranked 16th in special teams DVOA was expected to rank anywhere from 25th to seventh in the following season—not exactly a reliable projection.
The fluctuation tends to be especially strong for teams that excel on special teams. What goes up must come down.
The top five special teams units in 2024 combined for an average ranking of 15th on the 2025 leaderboard. The top five groups from the 2023 season fared even worse, combining for an average ranking of 19th in 2024, with none ranking higher than 14th.
A great special teams unit can win you one game, and it could even be a consistent advantage throughout one season, but it is very rare for teams to sustain special teams excellence on a season-to-season basis. The unfortunate reality for the Jets is that the one thing responsible for making them look like a professional football team in 2025 is due for a nosedive next year.
3. Interceptions
Picking off zero passes in an NFL season should be impossible. It is still surreal to fathom that the Jets achieved it.
It would be noticeably poor if the Jets intercepted one, two, three, four, or even five passes; the next-worst team in the 2025 season (three tied) had six interceptions. Getting zero feels like something that could only happen if a team actively attempted to do so.
I’m not accusing the Jets of intentionally dropping interceptions. But if they did, they would have done just as good a job as they did when trying to get them.
Fortunately, luck should tilt the Jets’ way in 2026.
There is, of course, plenty of skill involved in generating interceptions. It is not as much of a luck-based category as fumble recovery rate, for example. Pressure and ball skills are necessary for snagging picks. The Jets struggled mightily in these areas last year.
With that being said, the fact that the Jets had zero interceptions, instead of a respectably bad five or six, is certainly the product of bad luck.
A ball hitting off an offensive lineman’s helmet, a Hail Mary heave at the end of either half, a third-and-25 arm punt, a route miscommunication causing a layup for the safety—it is borderline impossible not to have one of these gifts fall into your lap at least once across 17 games.
If you re-simulated the 2025 season 100,000 times, I am willing to bet that there would not be a single simulation that featured zero picks.
Even if the Jets’ defense is equally bad or worse in 2026, I would still feel confident stating that they will grab at least five interceptions. We’re not even talking about a huge pendulum swing here; just enough to nearly catch up with last year’s second-worst team.
However, if history is any indication, the Jets could go much further than that.
Here is a look at the following-year interception totals posted by the five other teams in NFL history that finished a season with fewer than five interceptions:
- 2018-19 Niners: 2 to 12 (+10)
- 2020-21 Texans: 3 to 17 (+14)
- 1982*-83 Oilers: 3 to 14 (+11)
- 2024-25 Browns: 4 to 11 (+7)
- 2008-09 Lions: 4 to 9 (+5)
*- in 9 games
All five of these teams jumped by at least five interceptions, and the average increase was 9.4.
Of course, it must be considered that each of those teams got at least two interceptions; the Jets couldn’t even get one. We have an unprecedented situation on our hands.
At least a handful of interceptions in 2026 should be a lock, though.
Right?
