Much of the New York Jets’ 2026 season has been defined by a prevailing narrative: “This team has talent; it’s being held back by coaching.”
When you’re 2-7 despite being ranked as the league’s 13th-best roster, per Pro Football Focus’ cumulative individual grades, that narrative makes sense.
Plenty of promising young players have emerged for the Jets this season. Their touted draft class has shown plenty of promise, racking up four Rookie of the Week awards (potentially five after David Bailey’s dominant game in Kansas City). On top of that, young players in their second and third seasons have shown excellent progress, such as running back Braelon Allen, wide receiver Adonai Mitchell, and right tackle Armand Membou.
When listing the standout building blocks who have emerged for the Jets this year, many of them hail from the offensive side of the ball. In fact, it can be argued that the Jets have the majority of their 2027 offensive starting lineup on the roster already. The obvious holes have been at center and franchise quarterback (although Geno Smith has made a strong case to return as a bridge starter), but other than that, the Jets’ offensive pieces largely range from solid to great.
However, a new hole may have opened up that Jets fans did not anticipate before the year: left tackle.
Do the Jets need to address the blind side?
Third-year left tackle Olu Fashanu has not had the season that the Jets or their fans were hoping for.
Through nine games, Fashanu has coughed up eight sacks, per Pro Football Focus, the most in the NFL among offensive linemen. That’s three more than every player besides the Colts’ Jalen Travis (7), who was a fourth-round pick last year.
In addition, Fashanu has committed six penalties, tied for the eighth-most among left tackles. He is on pace to finish with 15 sacks allowed and 11 penalties over 17 starts. Should he reach those numbers, he would become the first player with 15+ sacks allowed and 10+ penalties in a season since PFF began tracking stats in 2006; nobody else came particularly close. A handful of players hit 15 sacks, and plenty reached 10 penalties, but nobody has come close to hitting both benchmarks.
As a former first-round pick, this is not what the Jets are looking for out of Fashanu. While he was not drafted by current general manager Darren Mougey, it was fair to expect that the 11th overall pick of the 2024 draft could establish himself as a long-term solution by the end of 2026, his third NFL campaign. But after 33 NFL starts, Fashanu seems to be trending down.
Fashanu is still only 23 years old (he will turn 24 in December), so there could be growth ahead. But after a sophomore campaign in which he only looked around league-average for a starting left tackle, the hope was that he would take a big step forward in 2026, not a big step backward.
Even if you evaluate Fashanu in metrics besides sacks, he does not fare well. He has yielded 25 total pressures, the 10th-most among tackles, and his allowed pressure rate of 7.5% ranks 49th out of 60 qualified tackles. So, it’s not just the sacks; he is consistently allowing defenders into the backfield, regardless of whether it results in a sack.
Fashanu’s run-blocking is also problematic. PFF is oddly forgiving of him in this area, giving him a 67.4 grade that ranks 23rd out of 60 qualifiers, but that does not quite line up with the film, which has shown Fashanu giving up quite a few run stops this season.
If you don’t have time to grind the tape, you can just look at the Jets’ rushing tendencies to get a feel for their confidence in Fashanu’s run-blocking.
Of the six gaps from the left C-gap to the right C-gap, the Jets’ two least frequently targeted gaps on designed rush attempts are the left B-gap (12 attempts) and the left C-gap (13 attempts)—the two gaps on either side of Fashanu. It’s easy to see why; on those 25 carries, the Jets were abysmal, gaining 88 yards (3.5 per attempt) and no touchdowns, with just 15 of those yards coming before contact (0.6 per attempt/17% of the yards).
Fashanu is under contract for 2027, the final year of his four-year rookie deal. This coming offseason, the Jets will have to decide on Fashanu’s fifth-year option for the 2028 season. Over The Cap projects that option to be worth $22.2 million, equivalent to the average of the third to 20th-highest salaries at the player’s position over the last five seasons.
Coming into 2026, accepting Fashanu’s 2028 option may have felt like a no-brainer. That’s a reasonable price for a player who projected to be a 25-year-old, above-average starting left tackle by the 2028 opener. There would be no reason for the Jets not to pick it up if Fashanu kept playing at the middle-of-the-pack level he maintained in 2025.
But nine weeks into his third season, Fashanu is on pace for an unprecedented combination of sacks and penalties, and the Jets are avoiding running behind him.
Is this position more of a need than the Jets hoped it would be?
Eight games remain for Fashanu to flip the script, or New York may have another premium offensive need to address.
With a franchise quarterback likely entering the building in 2027, the Jets can’t mess around with the protection in front of him. If Fashanu doesn’t undergo a drastic turnaround by the end of 2026, proving himself as a player who can be trusted with protecting the blind side of New York’s face of the franchise, the Jets should not hesitate to invest premium resources in a new left tackle.
Armed with three first-round picks and some of the most cap flexibility in the league, the Jets will have resources to spare. It would be far more ideal if Fashanu could provide an in-house solution at this premium position, allowing Mougey to disperse more resources across the rest of New York’s roster holes, but if Fashanu fails to do that, the Jets cannot afford to put the safety of their future franchise quarterback in the hands of a left tackle who continues to bleed sacks and pressures.
