The New York Jets are getting the solid quarterback play they have long waited for. Geno Smith is on pace to break multiple franchise single-season records.
Yet, it still hasn’t changed the fortunes of the down-on-their-luck Jets, who are sitting at 2-6 through eight weeks.
It’s an astonishing sight, given how many times over their 15-year playoff drought that the Jets seemed a competent quarterback away from either making the playoffs or even being a legitimate Super Bowl contender. It defies football logic to have a 2-6 record with the type of quarterback play they have received.
In fact, this degree of separation between quarterback efficiency and team success has rarely been seen in NFL history.
Led by Smith, who has thrown all of the Jets’ pass attempts this season, New York has a 104.5 passer rating as a team, which ranks fifth in the NFL. As an individual, Smith ranks sixth among qualified quarterbacks in the category, and he is on track to break Chad Pennington’s Jets single-season record of 104.2, which has stood since 2002.
The Jets are the 99th team in the Super Bowl era (1966-present) to post a passer rating of 104.0 or better over their first eight games. Of those 99 teams, they are just the third to start 2-6 or worse, joining the 2020 Houston Texans and the 2000 San Francisco 49ers.
The average team in that bunch had 5.7 wins at this point of this season. The Jets are nearly four full wins behind.
It’s one of many ways to quantify the Jets’ underperformance this season under head coach Aaron Glenn. They also rank last in the NFL with -2.77 wins above expected, when using the cumulative Pro Football Focus grades of teams’ individual players to project how many wins they “should” have based on the approximate talent level of the roster (i.e, “sum of the parts”).
The Jets are enjoying many of the luxuries they have long yearned for. They have an above-average starting quarterback, a thriving running back, a plethora of pass-catching weapons, multiple excellent offensive linemen, and a defense that had plenty of capital invested into it this offseason. Their 2-6 record in spite of those things is one of the franchise’s most disappointing outputs in recent memory.
