You know two of the most common adages in today’s NFL:
You can’t win without a quarterback.
Purgatory is the worst place to be in the NFL.
The second one is a byproduct of the first.
Thus, there is a contingent of fans and analysts who believe the New York Jets’ best-case scenario in the 2026 season is to have another pitiful season that puts them at the top of the draft board, just like their 3-14 campaign a year ago.
This time, though, the prevailing belief is that a strong quarterback class will enter the 2027 draft, which means that landing a high draft pick would yield a franchise-altering quarterback, rather than the defensive player (David Bailey) New York had to settle for with the No. 2 pick in a quarterback-deprived 2026 draft class.
Is this really the best path forward for the Jets, though?
Here are the reasons why tanking isn’t as appealing a plan for the Jets as many fans and analysts think.
1. QB class uncertainty
As of today, the 2027 quarterback class is expected to be fantastic.
But that can change over the course of an entire college football season.
One year ago, prospects like Oregon’s Dante Moore, South Carolina’s LaNorris Sellers, LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier, and Clemson’s Cade Klubnik were expected to be high first-round picks. Where are those guys today?
Moore and Sellers returned to school. Nussmeier and Klubnik had disappointing seasons and were drafted on Day 3.
Nobody can say for sure what the upcoming quarterback class will look like. It is entirely possible that by the time the 2027 draft rolls around, we will see the same scenario as this year, in which there are few or no quarterbacks worthy of being taken in the first round.
You don’t sacrifice a full year of NFL football in hopes of drafting a kid who has yet to play his final season of college football. You might end up throwing your season away for nothing (well, not nothing… but probably not Andrew Luck or Peyton Manning).
2. The Jets can trade up, anyway
When the Jets shipped off Sauce Gardner and Quinnen Williams at the 2025 trade deadline, it wasn’t just about stockpiling assets to build out the roster.
It was also about maximizing their trade ammunition.
The Jets know they need a franchise quarterback. They also know it is not a reliable plan to sit around and wait until they land the first overall pick in a draft that features a quarterback worthy of that pick. After all, they just had an extremely terrible season, and it still wasn’t enough to land a quarterback in the draft.
That’s why it’s critical for quarterback-needy teams to keep themselves armed to strike on the trade market. The Jets have done just that.
Yes, it would have been nice if the Jets simply landed the first overall pick in the 2026 draft and selected Fernando Mendoza. Well, it’s debatable whether Mendoza himself warranted that selection and will ultimately justify it, but logistically, it’s valuable to get your quarterback without giving up assets.
It didn’t happen.
But the Jets cannot afford to keep throwing seasons away until they are lucky enough to both a) lose enough games for a high draft pick and b) have the draft class shake out in a way that affords them an opportunity to draft an elite quarterback prospect.
It might take years of tanking for that to pan out. One special teams touchdown there, one fumble bounce there, and you win two more games than you’re supposed to, ruining your draft position. Or, you can land the first overall pick in a draft like 2022, where the best quarterback is the likes of Kenny Pickett.
That’s why the Jets might just have to go ahead and make an aggressive move to land their man. They have equipped themselves to do so, allowing them to potentially avoid years of waiting for the draft to fall their way.
New York has three first-round picks in the upcoming draft: their own, the Colts’, and the best of the Cowboys’ and Packers’. They also have their own picks in rounds two through five and an extra sixth-round pick.
Even if the Jets win enough games to drop outside the top 10, they have more than enough assets to construct a trade package that will allow them to land their hopeful franchise quarterback, especially if this quarterback class is as deep with first-round talent as many expect.
The thing is, despite so many fans clamoring for their team to tank for the first overall pick and draft a quarterback without having to trade up, two of the league’s best quarterbacks were acquired through aggressive trade-ups.
The Chiefs traded up to draft Patrick Mahomes at No. 10. The Bills traded up to draft Josh Allen at No. 7. So, you don’t even need to trade to the top of the draft to land a star. There is evidence that you can find them in the back half of the top 10.
Yes, it would hurt for the Jets to part with so many assets to get their quarterback instead of using those assets to draft more players around the quarterback. But if you nail the quarterback, nothing else really matters. Ask the Bills and the Chiefs how much they miss the picks they gave up.
Not to mention, it’s not as if the Jets would be left with a bare cupboard of talent. They just selected three players in the first round of this year’s draft. Altogether, they have selected six players in the top 50 of the past two drafts.
There’s already enough young talent in place to where, if the Jets develop it properly and then find their quarterback, they will have the makings of a championship team.
This would have been a different conversation a year or two ago, before the Jets had accumulated these assets and premium young players. Now, though, they have already stocked their roster with building blocks, and they still have surplus assets to make a blockbuster trade-up if needed.
Don’t forget that they also are projected to have the fifth-most cap space in 2027, which can help fill out any remaining roster holes at positions like wide receiver that may have otherwise been filled with those draft picks.
The Jets don’t need to throw a season away just to land a quarterback without trading up, and this next point is the main reason it would be so dangerous.
3. Tanking probably means the team’s core players are not up to snuff
As we said, the Jets have already loaded up their roster with building blocks. Everywhere you look, there are first or second-round picks who are 25 years old or younger.
So, if that talent is as good as advertised, the Jets can afford to lose their surplus of future draft picks to add a franchise quarterback. This core, plus a franchise quarterback, would be enough to compete for championships, even in a scenario where they win enough games to where a trade-up means making no non-QB first-round picks in 2027.
If the talent is as good as advertised.
And if the Jets bottom out in 2026… the talent is probably not as good as advertised.
Pro-tank fans will dream up an idealistic scenario in which the team’s young players perform tremendously, but the Jets stumble to a 3-14 record because of bad quarterbacking by Geno Smith, bad play from veterans, and maybe some bad luck or bad special teams play. If it panned out precisely that way, with David Bailey getting 12 sacks, Kenyon Sadiq catching 10 touchdowns, and D’Angelo Ponds snagging five interceptions… sure, maybe that would be an ideal outcome.
Realistically, though, you don’t get to pick and choose the makeup of the record. If the Jets go 3-14, it probably means their core players struggled, given that most of the key roles on this team, outside of quarterback, are now being held by general manager Darren Mougey’s high draft picks and premium investments.
In all likelihood, a three-win Jets team probably didn’t get after the quarterback, protect the quarterback, move the ball through the air, take the ball away, or cover receivers effectively. And if those areas are weaknesses for the team, it likely means that many of New York’s hopeful cornerstones had poor seasons.
That creates two more problematic branches:
3A: The QB you’re tanking for will be entering a poor situation
If the Jets have another miserable season, the reality is that their roster will still be considered abysmal going into 2027.
Sure, you can say that they’re a young team, and some of these players are bound to improve in their second seasons. Let’s not act like the entire roster is comprised of rookies, though.
What about players like Olu Fashanu, Armand Membou, Joe Tippmann, Mason Taylor, Brandon Stephens, Azareye’h Thomas, Jamien Sherwood, Will McDonald, Arian Smith, Joseph Ossai, T’Vondre Sweat, Jeremy Ruckert, Adonai Mitchell, and Malachi Moore? There are plenty of critical players on this team, most of whom were added or retained by Mougey, who will be expected to improve and help anchor success in 2026. If the Jets struggle this year, it won’t just be because of a few rookies having growing pains.
As a result, the Jets would be throwing this prized rookie quarterback into a brutal situation. It’s the same fiasco that led to Sam Darnold’s demise nearly a decade earlier.
Few highly drafted rookie quarterbacks enter a great situation; their teams wouldn’t be drafting them high if they did. But you have to at least give him a workable situation. If you toss him into a hellish situation, you will put him at great risk of developing scars that cannot be undone.
The Jets will be throwing another young quarterback into another hellish situation if they tank this year. There is no realistic world where the Jets have another season of three wins or fewer and can somehow be viewed as having a viable core to develop a rookie signal-caller. If they are that high in the draft, it means the infrastructure of this roster is not as good as it needs to be to support a franchise quarterback.
3B: Evidence will accumulate that Mougey, the man tasked with picking the right QB and building around him, might not be capable of making the tanking worthwhile
The other inescapable problem with a tanking season is what it would say about Darren Mougey’s managerial skills.
We are still evaluating Mougey to see whether he is cut out to be the GM of a championship team. His process has been sound thus far, but at the end of the day, his record is 3-14. He gets a mulligan for 2025, for obvious reasons, but that’s a very low starting point. So, he has to deliver progress this year.
If Mougey comes out of his second season with a 6-28 record… the evidence will be quite strong that he probably isn’t a good GM. Plain and simple.
You can make all the excuses you want about the team’s quarterback situation, its youth, its long-term building approach, or the challenges that Joe Douglas straddled Mougey with. Those excuses only go so far.
They can explain away the Jets failing to make the playoffs in Mougey’s first two seasons, but they cannot explain two straight bottom-feeding seasons. That’s an indicator of someone who doesn’t know how to build a competent team. If Mougey is worth his salt as a talent evaluator and roster builder, the Jets should improve by at least three or four wins this year.
Remember, this is the guy who would be tasked with not only using the high draft pick to select the right quarterback, but also building the right team around that quarterback to maximize his talents.
How could the Jets trust Mougey to do that if he fails to exceed six wins in his first two years?
What pro-tank fans fail to realize is that rooting for the Jets to tank for a quarterback also means rooting for the supporting cast around that quarterback to get worse, and for evidence to stockpile that the man tasked with improving that supporting cast is not up to the job.
4. The Seahawks just proved that non-tanking can work
Many fans are understandably afraid of watching their team spend years hammering away at a ceiling that clearly lies below championship-caliber. They’re afraid of becoming the Pittsburgh Steelers, and would rather watch their team bottom out for a season or two so they can raise the ceiling back up.
Jets fans know that the 2026 squad isn’t winning a Super Bowl. That’s why many fans would rather just endure another tanking season instead of gunning for a firmly capped ceiling. They think it would be worthwhile to raise the Jets’ ceiling in 2027 and beyond.
That is not always the case. In fact, we just saw a team prove that spending a few years in the NFL’s middle tier can actually serve as a doorstep to a championship, despite the widespread belief that the cellar is closer to the roof than the ground floor.
You don’t have to go to the bottom first to reach the top. The Seattle Seahawks proved it.
After years of consistent title contention, the Seahawks dropped to 7-10 in 2021, their first losing season in 10 years. Their core had clearly aged out. At that point, they could have fired Pete Carroll and embraced the tank. They were already dead set on trading Russell Wilson, after all.
Instead, on the strength of a strong rookie class and a surprisingly solid season from Geno Smith, the Seahawks bounced back to the tune of a 9-8 record and a wild card berth.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The Jets are hoping to do the very same thing: compete for a wild card thanks to a talented rookie class and a hopefully solid season from Geno Smith.
It was a promising season for Seattle, but from there, they struggled to raise the ceiling. Seattle went 9-8 once again in 2023, and while they improved slightly to 10-7 in 2024, they missed the playoffs and had a measly +7 point differential.
The team was aggressively mediocre over a three-year span, displaying a firm ceiling. It would have been very easy for the Seahawks to give in to calls to blow it all up and start over, rather than stay the course.
But the Seahawks kept at it. Suddenly, with a new offensive coordinator and a new quarterback… everything clicked in 2025, largely with the same core intact. The Seahawks became a juggernaut behind Klint Kubiak and Sam Darnold, marching to a championship.
The Seahawks’ story proves that the NFL’s middle tier is not always purgatory. Sometimes, the ceiling that separates the middle tier from the top tier can be shattered. It doesn’t always happen, but Seattle proved it is possible.
When you build a core that is strong enough to sustain consistent above-.500 play, you leave yourself just a move or two away from breaking through to the next level. Again, it doesn’t always work. Some teams, like the Steelers of the past few years, have gotten stuck at this stage. But others find a way to rise from wild card contenders to championship contenders with just a few tweaks.
That can be a lot easier than intentionally pushing yourself back to square one, where you then have to spend years building out an entire roster, coaching staff, and culture.
The Jets, along with the rest of the NFL, should look to Seattle’s championship run as evidence that tanking for a superstar quarterback is not necessary to win a title in today’s league.
This has become a league where competing to win games is rewarded.
That sounds simple, but it’s an approach that too many franchises have gone away from in their desperate pursuit of the next megastar quarterback.
Seattle proved that playing to win every season, rather than sacrificing present-day competition for the long run, can eventually take you to the promised land.
That competitive mentality is exactly what Aaron Glenn seems to be pushing in New York. It’s why Jets fans should drop the idea that tanking has any place in this team’s plans… nor should it.
Sometimes you can win by trying to win.
Crazy concept, right?
