The New York Jets are loaded with young, highly drafted talent. They have eight players who were chosen within the top 52 picks of the last three drafts.
One of those players, though, was chosen by the Jets’ previous regime: offensive tackle Olu Fashanu, the 11th overall pick of the 2024 draft.
Despite not being handpicked by the Darren Mougey-Aaron Glenn regime, the Jets’ new leaders have still held up high expectations for Fashanu. He entered each of the last two seasons as the team’s starting left tackle with no competition.
That’s no small role. The quarterback’s blindside protector is arguably the second or third-most important player on offense, depending on who you ask.
After the first six games of 2026, though, Fashanu has not been up to snuff for such a critical job.
In Sunday’s loss to the New England Patriots, Fashanu was charged with allowing two sacks, per Pro Football Focus, bringing him to a whopping seven sacks allowed on the season. Not only is that the most of any player in the NFL, but it’s two more than the second-ranked player, Indianapolis’ Jalen Travis, and three more than anyone besides Travis.
To boot, Fashanu had a false start penalty that ultimately contributed to the Jets turning the ball over on downs.
Sunday marked Fashanu’s 30th career NFL start. That’s plenty of time for a young player to develop.
Now that Fashanu has hit the 30-start mark and is still allowing sacks at an exorbitant rate, it’s time for the Jets to start having some uncomfortable long-term thoughts about Fashanu and the future of their left tackle position.
To be clear, Fashanu is not a “bad” player just because of the sack number. That metric itself can be misleading, because sacks are a stat that quarterbacks can partially own, and Geno Smith has been extremely susceptible to both holding the ball too long and failing to escape sacks when pressure gets home.
Those issues inflate the sack numbers for individual offensive linemen. Seven of the 17 total pressures allowed by Fashanu have been sacks, which is an absurd pressure-to-sack conversion rate of 41.2%. For perspective, the league average for tackles this season is 14.2%. So, Fashanu has been a little unlucky to have his low moments spotlighted more frequently than most tackles.
However, many of the sacks tagged to Fashanu were legitimate one-on-one losses in quick, clean fashion. He’s yielded far too many of those, especially for a player who continues to be average at best as a run blocker and is supposed to be making his money in pass protection.
Not to mention, even if you evaluate Fashanu based on pressures rather than sacks, he still doesn’t fare well. With 17 total pressures allowed on 217 pass-blocking snaps, Fashanu has allowed a pressure rate of 7.8%, which ranks 57th among 66 qualified tackles.
Last year, Fashanu’s allowed pressure rate was 6.2%, ranking a more respectable 41st out of 71 qualifiers, although it was still a bottom-half mark. Granted, having Justin Fields at quarterback was even more detrimental to the Jets’ linemen than Smith in those same areas of concern (time to throw, avoiding sacks), so it was hard to use individual metrics to get an accurate read on New York’s blockers last year.
Numbers aside, Fashanu’s performance early in the 2026 season continues the worrying trends that emerged in 2025, his first full season as a starter after receiving some late-season starts in his rookie year.
Jets X-Factor film analyst Joe Blewett revealed in his review of Fashanu’s 2025 season that Fashanu’s tape was far closer in quality to that of a league-average starter than his draft pedigree and certain metrics might have led fans to believe.
Despite Fashanu gaining a widespread reputation for having solidified himself as the team’s long-term answer at left tackle because of his performance in 2025, the film suggested otherwise. Many technical issues from his Penn State tape continued to show up repeatedly, namely his wide punch.
Six games into 2026, we’re still seeing those issues.
The takeaway here does not need to be extreme. It’s not as if Fashanu is a colossal liability or that he needs to be benched. The Jets do not have an alternative who is nearly as effective; he is certainly one of the league’s 20-or-so best left tackles.
But when that’s all you can say with confidence about a first-round pick six weeks into his third season, it’s clear that he is not on track to have his fifth-year option accepted, and that the Jets are on track to enter the offseason with left tackle as a legitimate need.
If Fashanu wants to change that, he needs to improve his production over the next 11 games. Whether Smith is holding the ball too long or not, seven sacks in six games is hard to work around from a starting left tackle in today’s NFL.
