It can be argued that no NFL offense over the last four years has been as reliant on two skill-position players as the New York Jets have been on Breece Hall and Garrett Wilson.
Since Hall and Wilson were drafted together in 2022, the Jets have racked up 19,731 yards of total offense. Hall and Wilson are responsible for 8,693 of those—44.1%!
Yep: Of every 9 yards gained by the Jets, 4 were picked up by one of two players.
Think about how mind-blowing that is. We’re talking about four years here, even with Hall and Wilson both missing over half of a season.
Sure, it’s easy to envision two players combining for nearly half of a team’s offense in a single game, perhaps even well above half. But to maintain that percentage over a four-year span, several caveats must be met.
Both players need to stay on the team. Both players must consistently perform at a high level. Perhaps most importantly, both players must remain the focal points of the offense, with limited competition from other players.
It’s that last point that raises the question: As impressive as the 44.1% mark is for Hall and Wilson, should the Jets really want it to continue?
Is Jets’ Hall-Wilson reliance a bad thing?
On one hand, the 44.1% mark speaks to Hall and Wilson’s talent, highlighting their remarkable consistency despite the lack of help around them.
Hall has been able to generate a plethora of home-run plays despite opponents stacking the box in most of his NFL games. Wilson continuously accumulates receptions at a high volume despite defenses having no other receiving threats to fear—and having to deal with quarterbacks who are both inaccurate and indecisive.
On the other hand, it can be argued that the Jets’ extreme reliance on Hall and Wilson is the perfect encapsulation of why their offense has struggled.
For all of the success Hall and Wilson have enjoyed as individuals, the Jets have scored the fewest offensive touchdowns in the NFL since they were drafted (111, which is just 1.63 per game). New York’s offensive formula has been a complete dud.
This isn’t Hall and Wilson’s fault, of course. They’re just doing what the Jets are asking of them.
Rather, it’s an indictment of the Jets’ inability to surround Hall and Wilson with complementary pieces. No matter how good their two best players are, any offense will be easy to stop if the defense only has to worry about two threats.
Stack the box, shade help toward Wilson, and dare the Jets to beat you any other way—simple as that. Defenses have been using this formula for four years, and the Jets have never been able to crack it, because they haven’t had a single viable answer when forced to look beyond their star duo.
In Hall’s career, the Jets are 2-20 when he has under 70 scrimmage yards (compared to 18-16 when he hits that mark). In the two victories, Wilson combined for 158 yards and three touchdowns to compensate for Hall’s low production.
It shows just how helpless the Jets have been if their lone two offensive weapons struggled. There has not been a single time when the Jets have pulled through despite Hall and Wilson both having quiet games.
With Hall and Wilson locked down for the foreseeable future, this cannot continue. If the Jets want to make the playoffs at some point in Hall and Wilson’s tenures with the team, they have to be able to win games without one or both players putting on a world-beating performance.
This is the mark of a Super Bowl-caliber team. Take the reigning champion Seattle Seahawks, for example.
Jaxon Smith-Njigba will go down as the face of the 2025 champs after racking up 1,793 receiving yards in the regular season. What people won’t remember is that he had 19 yards in the team’s divisional victory and 27 yards in the Super Bowl.
When the Philadelphia Eagles ran to the Super Bowl in 2024, their top receiver, A.J. Brown, had just 163 receiving yards across four playoff games. That includes three receptions for 24 yards across their wild card and divisional wins.
Football is a team sport. The Jets can tout Hall and Wilson’s gaudy individual stats until the cows come home, but all of those fantasy points won’t translate to real-world victories until New York has other players that defenses have to give two hoots about.
Luckily for Jets fans, the franchise is finally showing that it cares about surrounding Hall and Wilson with competent weapons. In the 2026 draft, New York became the first team since the 1969 Los Angeles Rams to select a tight end (Kenyon Sadiq) and a wide receiver (Omar Cooper Jr.) in the first round.
This comes a year after the Jets selected tight end Mason Taylor in the second round. Taylor did not have flashy box-score stats as a rookie, but his 78.6% contested catch rate trailed only George Kittle among qualified tight ends, suggesting he has the potential to be the type of complementary weapon that Hall and Wilson have lacked.
The talent is finally there. Never before has New York invested this type of capital into the skill-position group around Hall and Wilson.
In previous offseasons, their investments were limited to the likes of Allen Lazard and Day 3 running backs. You can throw in the 2024 mid-season Davante Adams trade, if you like, but that was more of a publicity stunt.
Now, though, the Jets are bursting with young, athletic weapons who will make defenses pay for leaving them with one-on-one opportunities, be it in jump-ball scenarios (Taylor), open-field YAC battles (Cooper Jr.), or both (Sadiq).
Now that they have added the necessary talent, the next step is to employ the proper strategy to maximize that talent. The key? Leveraging Hall and Wilson’s gravity to make everyone else better.
Until the Jets prove otherwise, opponents will expect them to rely heavily on Hall and Wilson. Offensive coordinator Frank Reich must use this expectation against opposing play-callers to set up New York’s young weapons for success.
To leverage Hall’s success, Reich’s go-to change-up should be to roll out 12 personnel on first or second down and call play action, getting the defense to bite due to their expectation of the run. Couple Hall’s heavy career workload with Reich’s personal tendency to lean toward the run between the 20s, and the veteran OC has an unmissable opportunity to constantly dupe opposing defenders into biting on run fakes. Defenses will be sitting all over the Jets’ early-down run game.
This gives Reich a chance to cook up some extremely favorable downfield shots on first and second down. Making those shots especially appealing is that the defense will often be in a heavier personnel package due to the Jets’ 12 personnel look and the early-down run expectation. It will lead to Sadiq and Taylor drawing matchups against linebackers, which New York will expect them to win consistently.
Wilson can be leveraged to clear out space for his teammates to work underneath. Defenses will be rolling their deep coverage to Wilson’s side until New York shows that there is another vertical threat worth caring about. Reich can use this against the defense by running Cooper on short-to-intermediate in-breakers underneath Wilson’s vertical routes, positioning Cooper to maximize his special YAC skills.
Once Cooper’s short-to-intermediate game becomes an established threat, defenses will feel less comfortable about leaning so heavily toward Wilson. When the defense finally adjusts to Cooper, that’s when New York can take advantage of one-on-one shots to their acrobatic WR1.
Every football game is built around this chess match.
The Jets just haven’t had the pieces to play.
They’ve had their king and queen. They had a row full of pawns. But they could never find their rooks, knights, and bishops… so they filled out the back row with more pawns, and tried to defeat world-class opponents with this makeshift crew.
That was never going to work.
But now, they have an acceptable roster of pieces that won’t elicit laughter from opponents. At last, they’re ready to sit at the big kids’ table and have a serious match.
All they have to do now is the hardest part: maneuver the pieces correctly.
