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It was bad, but sometimes when you are too close to something, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees.
So let’s go to an NFL film analyst in Los Angeles for a 30,000-foot view.
“That might be the worst Jets defense I’ve ever seen, and I don’t say that lightly,” said Brett Kollmann of Bootleg Football and NFL.com.
He added: “There was nothing this defense was good at -literally nothing.”
As we mentioned yesterday, Kollmann is a rising star on the NFL media scene, and recently he did an extended film breakdown of the Jets defense from last year and provided some great insight on some of the schematic issues.
First of all, while Steve Wilks was the defensive coordinator most of the season before being fired in the middle of December, he feels the system did have the earmarks of an Aaron Glenn scheme.
“Even when Steve Wilks was calling it, it was very Aaron Glenn-ish in the sense that it was man covergae all the time, even when they have the guys to do it,” Kollmann said.
Kollmann feels they really only had one good man-to-man coverage guy in the secondary, Sauce Gardner, before he was traded in October, but even before the trade, the lack of enough good man-to-man guys was apparent.
“So you have Sauce who is great in man coverage, but no other corners who are really good in man, including the guy they paid in Brandon Stephens – he had his moments, but overall not great,” Kollmann said,
As for safety and linebacker:
“Andre Cisco got detonated in man over and over again,” Kollmann said. “The linebackers couldn’t cover anybody.”
Using man-to-man coverage as much as they did made little sense to Kollmann.
“Ideally, if you’re blitz-heavy, as they were, the whole goal is to pressure the quarterback, play tight coverage and deny the easy throws,” Kollmann said. “Well, if you can’t cover enough to deny the easy throws, you are not to get the benefit of a man-heavy team because you’re just bad at it.”
So as far as Kollmann was concerned, trading Gardner was the way to go.
“So the Sauce trade made sense,” Kollmann said. “If you are going to be a man-heavy team, but we only have one guy who can do it, why bother?”
Kollmann was baffled by their red zone defensive approach.
“I watched a cut-up of every TD they gave up on play-action,” Kollmann said. “A lot of them were in man coverage, and for whatever reason, when a team got in the red zone and things got tight and formations condensed, they responded to it still in man coverage.
‘In the red zone, you just can’t let them get four yards a try until they punch it in. So these linebackers were taking little steps (after play-action fakes), and running backs were wide ass open in the flat, because they would use the play-action fakes to get leverage to the flat where you can catch and run. When you play man coverage, you still need to play the run, and they were just ruthlessly exploited in condensed formations, especially in the red zone.”
And according to Kollmann, they stubbornly stuck to this approach all season.
“The Jets never adjusted,” Kollmann said. “This was a problem from the very first game of the season – they never adjusted the entire way – like ever.
“When they are in the red zone, they know they can’t cover in man, especially against play-action, but they still do it anyway.”
Play-action fakes killed the Jets defense all season.
“They were absolutely horrible against play-action passes pre- and post-Sauce Gardner trade,” Kollmann said.
They gave up 18 passing TDs in the last seven games with opposing QBs having an eye-popping 121.4 QB rating against them from Week 12 on.
What is very interesting about this criticism of them sticking to man coverage even when they were bad at it is that when Glenn was in Detroit, they lost to Washington in the playoffs two years ago. During the broadcast, Fox analyst Tom Brady implored them to get out of man-to-man coverage (due to injuries in the secondary) and go to zone during the game.
So this man-to-man approach, even without the requisite talent, might not be a new thing.
But the bottom line is that the Jets might need to tweak some of their coverage concepts in 2026, whether Steve Wilks is there or not, and make sure they always play to their players’ strengths. No more square pegs in round holes.
July 22, 2026
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