AFC East Over/Unders 2026: Two-Horse Race
by from on (#77Y2Y)
It's been a while since we saw a division that was as much of a two-horse race as the AFC East. The Buffalo Bills and New England Patriots are both +125 or better to win the division, depending on exactly where you get their lines. The Bills are slight favorites, as the oddsmakers are slightly skeptical of the defending AFC champions because of their soft schedule last season and their lack of track record, but they're both right up there near the top, more or less co-favorites. No other division in the league has two teams at +125 or better to win. Heck, the AFC West, NFC North and NFC South don't have any team with odds that high. Which means, of course that no one, and I mean no one, believes in the New York Jets or Miami Dolphins. And it's hard to blame them! The Jets have been terrible for a decade, have a head coach that few seem to believe in, and are running out a retread quarterback from a decade ago while they apparently kill time until next year's quarterback-rich draft. And their odds of winning the division are twice as high as the Dolphins, who are spending the year dead for cap reasons. There are only five teams in the league with worse than +1500 odds to win their division, and you're looking at two of them. Crazy things do happen, of course. Last year, we were calling this a one-horse race, with the Bills obviously going to walk all over the three doormats in the division. So there's always a chance that the Jets or Dolphins could be this year's Patriots, coming out of relative nowhere to make noise. I mean, on paper, at least. Some of that see-through tracing paper that rips if you look at it the wrong way. That you've left in a rainstorm for three hours before trying to use. That you're trying to write on from across the room with 20 markers taped to one another. A chance! Remember, you can search for the best odds on these, or any other props with ourProp Shop.Buffalo Bills (10.5) Some disclaimers before angry Buffalo fans put me through a table: I do think the Bills will end up winning the division. The Almanac has them as the fourth-best team in football, and while I might slide them down a spot or two, I think they are a very good team and will be a contender in January. I also think Duff's wings are broadly fine, though I encourage people to actually try seasoning your wings and not relying solely on the sauce to make them palatable. And that's kind of how I feel about the Bills this season - kind of a bland team that would mostly be considered fine, at best, but becomes a contender because you dunk them in a thick layer of Josh Allen sauce. It's a good sauce! Any team with one of the best quarterbacks in the league (and one of the" may not be necessary in that sentence) is going to be at least in the mix. But I don't really get the Bills' offseason, and it has me squinting and frowning in the general vicinity of the franchise as a whole. Firing Sean McDermott and replacing him with Joe Brady feels like making a change for the sake of making a change, rather than actually an honest attempt to improve the team. You could justify making sweeping changes, throwing out the entire coaching staff and front office and seeing if a new philosophy could help Buffalo get over the hump. But that's not what they did - they just promoted Brady internally and bumped Brandon Beane up from mere general manager to president of football operations. That seems to be at least implicitly putting all the blame for Buffalo's postseason failures on McDermott, which seems very harsh and certainly buck-passing of the highest order. It wasn't McDermott ranting on the radio about people who dared criticize the receiver room, after all. 
Said receiver room should be better with DJ Moore brought in, but they're paying him like a Top Guy when he's more of a miscast second option on a team without a first option. And anything he adds to the overall offensive efficiency seems like it will be offset by the loss of David Edwards. The offense may look different, but I'm not sure it'll be improved. And the defensive side of the ball, with Jim Leonhard coming in, is undergoing a massive schematic shift. It's going to take several seasons for Leonhard to get the pieces he really wants to run his defense, and the Bills shouldn't be in a we'll be ready in a few years" mode. I don't know. The Bills are a good team, but it feels like they started the offseason with such urgency and didn't really do anything with it. 10.5 wins is a fairly large line for a team that doesn't quite seem to know where it's going. Plus, their new grey uniforms are terrible, and that docks them half a win. Hey, I don't make the rules. Strongest Position: I've heard this Josh Allen" fella is pretty good, but I've been flipping through some old Almanacs, and they seem very low on him as a prospect. Probably just a flash in a pan of some description, then. Weakest Position: Dorian Williams and Terrel Bernard are penciled in as the starters at off-ball linebacker, and no, I don't think that's going to work very well. Williams is a situational guy who now has to become an every-down guy out of the blue, while Bernard has been hurt, ineffective, or both hurt and ineffective the last two years. How many safeties can Leonhard get on the field to reduce the impact of his sub-par backers? Biggest Question: It's Leonhard in general. This is his first time calling plays in the NFL, so he's very much a mystery box at this point in time. Buffalo hopes they have a Mike Macdonald-type creator, and maybe they do! But we're basing that a lot on Leonhard's time at Wisconsin, and it's not always as easy in the pros. How quickly he's able to get his defense up and running may define Buffalo's season. Verdict: I'll go under 10.5, though, coward that I am, I'd probably pay the -190 odds to go up to under 11.5 and buy myself a little more breathing room. That opening slate - at Texans, then the Lions, Chargers and Patriots at home, then on the road to the Rams - is very, very rough for a team that may still be figuring out it's new defense to start the year. They'll figure it out, I'm sure, but they may well start 2-3 (or 1-4?) and come on strong later. Miami Dolphins (3.5) I respect and appreciate what the Dolphins are doing, and I endorse their team-building philosophy. In exchange, can I be excused from having to watch any Dolphins football this year? The Dolphins know they are picking through the ruins of a collapsed regime. They signed some ill-fated contracts and made some poor decisions in the wake of back-to-back playoff appearance to start the Mike McDaniel era, and (correctly) decided that that version of the team was not going anywhere. They were 7-10 last season, so they weren't among the very dregs of the league. A lot of teams would make a cut here or there, change the coach, and try to build something on top of what was already there - constructing a new team on top of a rotten foundation. Not the Dolphins, though. They decided things weren't working and blew everything up. They have decided to take all their bad contract medicine in one year, throwing out every veteran who could reasonably be moved. As such, they've accumulated $180 million in dead money this season, taking nearly all their bad decision" medicine in one go. They couldn't quite afford to get rid of everything in one season - the Tua Tagovailoa and Bradley Chubb contracts will still cost them $57 million in dead money in 2027 - but they didn't try to do Saints-esque kicking the can down the road or anything. As a result, they have a record 59.6% of the salary cap devoted to players who are not on the team anymore. No one else has hit 50% in the modern era, and even the ones who were a more quasi-reasonable 35-40% tend to be double-digit loss teams with poor DVOAs. Miami is selling 2026 to attempt to have a future in 2027, and I applaud them for the degree to which they're willing to do that. They have a clear plan and are executing it. The roster, as one might expect, is pretty damn barren because they can't afford to pay anyone. On paper, at least, it's the worst roster in football. The wide receiver room is one of the worst I've ever seen, the edge rushers are the worst in football, and the secondary may be even worse. There are some position groups where Miami simply does not have NFL-caliber players. That said, 3.5 is still a very low line. I'm not willing to trash it quite as much I did for the Cardinals last week, because the Dolphins roster is demonstrably worse. But bad teams win football games all the time, even ones deep in a rebuilding process. I don't buy Malik Willis as a long-term option at quarterback, but I have seen worse players starting. I'm intrigued by a number of their draft picks; we might see as many as five rookies starting by the time the season ends. They still have De'Von Achane and Aaron Brewer and Zach Sieler and Jordyn Brooks. This may be an expansion-level roster, but the 2002 Texans went 4-12. And they didn't get to play the 2026 Jets twice... 
Strongest Position: De'Von Achane is their biggest offensive threat by far, and Miami went out of their way to keep him around as a building block for the future. He was one of the best runners between the tackles last year and is a weapon out of the slot or catching swing passes. The Dolphins are going to run him into the ground, so hopefully Jaylen Wright or Ollie Gordon II can give him a breather or two now and again. Weakest Position: Here are the starters in the Miami secondary: Dante Trader Jr., Chris Johnson, Ryan Gabriel, Zayne Anderson, JuJu Brents, Sam McManus and Jason Marshall Jr. I made two of those names up, and if you can tell which two, you're probably watching too much Miami Dolphins football. Biggest Question: Is it 2027 yet? Verdict: I can't in good conscience pick an NFL team to go under a 3.5-win line. This is a much less confident over than it was for Arizona, but it remains an over, even if it's just a philosophical standpoint rather than an actual endorsement of this roster. New England Patriots (10.5) The New England Patriots, in 2025, were a good football team who rode a little bit of luck and the fourth-easiest schedule in DVOA history to go to the Super Bowl. In 2026, I expect the New England Patriots to continue to be a good football team; it's the other stuff that will send them back a little bit. I do need to reiterate that the Patriots were, and remain, good. Theare some people who see the soft schedule they had, the fact that their AFC Championship opponent didn't have a quarterback, and their resulting shellacking in the Super Bowl and come to the conclusion that the Patriots were frauds with a side of flim-flam. That's really not the case. Were they won of the bottom quartile teams to ever make the Super Bowl? Yeah, probably; DVOA has them 16th-worst of the 98 teams to make it in our dataset. I think they got a little bit better than that as the season went along, though, and were playing better than their 10.6% DVOA would indicate by the postseason. Were they the worst 14-win team ever? DVOA thinks so and it's got a good case, though I'd eye up those 2024 Vikings suspiciously. But someone has to be the worst of the best, and we're talking about an extremely small fraternity of clubs who were able to be this successful, regardless of how fortunate they were or how easy their path was. But they were just good, and not something particularly special, and that makes it really hard to go over a 10.5-point line. Adding A.J. Brown should be a significant boost to Drake Maye's weapons, but that's offset in part by the departure of Stefon Diggs. The offensive line remains a worry, and rookie Caleb Lomu and the oft-injured Alijah Vera-Tucker doesn't feel like enough to fully consider it patched. On defense, too, it was a one-guy in, one-guy out sort of offseason. Are Dre'Mont Jones and Kevin Byard III enough to set off the losses of K'Lavon Chaisson, Khyiris Tonga and Jaylinn Hawkins? Maybe, but it doesn't feel like there's a good reason to think they'll be substantially better than last season. Don't get me wrong - we should still see New England playing in January, and I would not be shocked at all if they win the division again. I just am not ready to put them up at the tippy-top level of contenders; they feel more comfortable for me in the also receiving votes" category for the time being. Strongest Position: Drake Drake Maye" Maye would prefer not to get sacked 47 times again this season, but it's hard to look at the MVP runner up, third in passing DYAR and fourth in passing DVOA, and go anywhere else. Great! It's been too long since the Patriots fans had a solid quarterback; they've been getting antsy. Weakest Position: New England figured out by the end of the year that they had to blitz repeatedly to generate any pressure, and that worked! It would be nice if they didn't have to, though, and to that end, I look at the revamped edge rusher group and frown. Harold Landry III still isn't cleared for action, leaving them with Dre'Mont Jones, Elijah Ponder and rookie Gabe Jacas as their top pass-rushing options. The Patriots overcame their week edge rushing group by blitzing 43% of the time in the playoffs, and it worked, but I don't know how sustainable that is. Biggest Question: Is the revamped offensive line enough? Vera-Tucker is in at left guard and Jared Wilson moves to his more natural position of center to replace Garrett Bradbury, but that's it. Will Campbell, in particular, remains a major question mark who needs to show improvement, else he be kicked inside for Lomu. Verdict: Under 10.5. A 10-7 season feels just about right for the Patriots, and I'd stay away from this number if it was even one win lower. But there are enough worlds out there where New England isn't as healthy as last year, or the tougher schedule takes a win or two, that I feel more comfortable selling than buying. New York Jets (5.5) See, this is a better line for a team expected to be terrible. By at least some metrics, the Jets have the least optimistic fan base in the league for 2026, and it's not hard to see why. While the Dolphins' expansion-quality roster was an intentional move, spurred by a massive contract purge that left them with 40 cents on the dollar to pay players, the Jets' decade-long misfortune has been caused by a series of own goalsand poor decisions that has left the team utterly noncompetitive. It's a better roster than the Dolphins nearly everywhere. Miami has the better running back depth overall, and Geno Smith versus Malik Willis is a toss-up in which there really are no winners, but everywhere else, it's advantage Jets. They especially went out of their way to try to provide Aaron Glenn something to work with on defense, adding multiple competent veterans to bolster a unit that somehow went the entire year without intercepting a single pass. The floor should be raised. And on offense, Smith is a more accurate passer than the Justin Fieldses, Tyrod Taylors or Brady Cooks of the world, and so the baseline should be a little better. Question. Why do the Jets care about their baseline in 2026? I get why Aaron Glenn would care, because he would like to get a third season in charge, and 3-14 is not the way to start that. But what does bringing back Smith, at age 35, do for the long term of this franchise? Do they expect Demario Davis or David Onyemata to be on the next good Jets team? It's an attempt not to be entirely embarrassing out there, but it also kind of conflicts with their strategy from last season, trading away Sauce Gardner and Quinnen Williams for more first-round draft picks in the 2027 class. The future of the Jets is next year's draft, and the Jets run the risk of getting to 7-10 or something and killing their own draft pick. I don't see the line you walk where you both feel good about the Jets' performance in 2026 and are in position to select the quarterback of the future you want. Say what you want about the Dolphins' strategy and whether or not they'll be watchable - at least their plan is coherent. Glenn's already fired his coordinators as ablative armor, so he knows the expectations are to win now, and this is not a roster designed to win now. And when your teardown is trading away the young players who were part of your last rebuild, you might as well lean into it. It doesn't feel like the Jets know who they are. And step one of getting out of the hole you've dug yourself is understanding what went wrong in the past. I do not trust the current Jets management to do that. But maybe we'll try again next year with the third-highest touted defensive mind available and QB5 in the draft class. Strongest Position: If you're going to bring in an aging linebacker to a rebuilding team, you could do a hell of a lot worse than Demario Davis. Between him and Jamien Sherwood, is that... the best linebacking corps in the league? ESPN's rankings certainly have them up there, at any rate. I think I'd still take Detroit's Jack Campbell- and Derrick Barnes-led group over New York's, but the fact that they're in the conversation is worth celebrating. 
Weakest Position: I'll admit where I was wrong - trading Sam Darnold for Geno Smith was, in fact, an upgrade in Seattle last season. Smith ranked 34th last season with a -22.5% passing DVOA. He's still OK when he gets time to work in the pocket, but the Jets were 25th in pass-block win rate a year ago and arguably got worse on the offensive line this offseason. The only quarterback with a higher adjusted sack-rate than Smith? Justin Fields. So, uh, that's not going to work. Biggest Question: No, seriously, is it 2027 yet? The Jets do have a few players who look to be pieces of whatever next year's rebuild looks like - David Bailey, Kenyon Sadiq and D'Angelo Ponds will be fun to track this year - but it's hard to imagine the team you care about next year bearing too much of a resemblance to this one. Verdict: The Jets, spiritually, are a five-win franchise, finishing within two wins of that mark in nine of the last 10 seasons. I'm staying away from the 5.5-win line and would advise anyone else to do the same. But, for the sake of making a prediction, I slightly prefer the under.
Said receiver room should be better with DJ Moore brought in, but they're paying him like a Top Guy when he's more of a miscast second option on a team without a first option. And anything he adds to the overall offensive efficiency seems like it will be offset by the loss of David Edwards. The offense may look different, but I'm not sure it'll be improved. And the defensive side of the ball, with Jim Leonhard coming in, is undergoing a massive schematic shift. It's going to take several seasons for Leonhard to get the pieces he really wants to run his defense, and the Bills shouldn't be in a we'll be ready in a few years" mode. I don't know. The Bills are a good team, but it feels like they started the offseason with such urgency and didn't really do anything with it. 10.5 wins is a fairly large line for a team that doesn't quite seem to know where it's going. Plus, their new grey uniforms are terrible, and that docks them half a win. Hey, I don't make the rules. Strongest Position: I've heard this Josh Allen" fella is pretty good, but I've been flipping through some old Almanacs, and they seem very low on him as a prospect. Probably just a flash in a pan of some description, then. Weakest Position: Dorian Williams and Terrel Bernard are penciled in as the starters at off-ball linebacker, and no, I don't think that's going to work very well. Williams is a situational guy who now has to become an every-down guy out of the blue, while Bernard has been hurt, ineffective, or both hurt and ineffective the last two years. How many safeties can Leonhard get on the field to reduce the impact of his sub-par backers? Biggest Question: It's Leonhard in general. This is his first time calling plays in the NFL, so he's very much a mystery box at this point in time. Buffalo hopes they have a Mike Macdonald-type creator, and maybe they do! But we're basing that a lot on Leonhard's time at Wisconsin, and it's not always as easy in the pros. How quickly he's able to get his defense up and running may define Buffalo's season. Verdict: I'll go under 10.5, though, coward that I am, I'd probably pay the -190 odds to go up to under 11.5 and buy myself a little more breathing room. That opening slate - at Texans, then the Lions, Chargers and Patriots at home, then on the road to the Rams - is very, very rough for a team that may still be figuring out it's new defense to start the year. They'll figure it out, I'm sure, but they may well start 2-3 (or 1-4?) and come on strong later. Miami Dolphins (3.5) I respect and appreciate what the Dolphins are doing, and I endorse their team-building philosophy. In exchange, can I be excused from having to watch any Dolphins football this year? The Dolphins know they are picking through the ruins of a collapsed regime. They signed some ill-fated contracts and made some poor decisions in the wake of back-to-back playoff appearance to start the Mike McDaniel era, and (correctly) decided that that version of the team was not going anywhere. They were 7-10 last season, so they weren't among the very dregs of the league. A lot of teams would make a cut here or there, change the coach, and try to build something on top of what was already there - constructing a new team on top of a rotten foundation. Not the Dolphins, though. They decided things weren't working and blew everything up. They have decided to take all their bad contract medicine in one year, throwing out every veteran who could reasonably be moved. As such, they've accumulated $180 million in dead money this season, taking nearly all their bad decision" medicine in one go. They couldn't quite afford to get rid of everything in one season - the Tua Tagovailoa and Bradley Chubb contracts will still cost them $57 million in dead money in 2027 - but they didn't try to do Saints-esque kicking the can down the road or anything. As a result, they have a record 59.6% of the salary cap devoted to players who are not on the team anymore. No one else has hit 50% in the modern era, and even the ones who were a more quasi-reasonable 35-40% tend to be double-digit loss teams with poor DVOAs. Miami is selling 2026 to attempt to have a future in 2027, and I applaud them for the degree to which they're willing to do that. They have a clear plan and are executing it. The roster, as one might expect, is pretty damn barren because they can't afford to pay anyone. On paper, at least, it's the worst roster in football. The wide receiver room is one of the worst I've ever seen, the edge rushers are the worst in football, and the secondary may be even worse. There are some position groups where Miami simply does not have NFL-caliber players. That said, 3.5 is still a very low line. I'm not willing to trash it quite as much I did for the Cardinals last week, because the Dolphins roster is demonstrably worse. But bad teams win football games all the time, even ones deep in a rebuilding process. I don't buy Malik Willis as a long-term option at quarterback, but I have seen worse players starting. I'm intrigued by a number of their draft picks; we might see as many as five rookies starting by the time the season ends. They still have De'Von Achane and Aaron Brewer and Zach Sieler and Jordyn Brooks. This may be an expansion-level roster, but the 2002 Texans went 4-12. And they didn't get to play the 2026 Jets twice... Strongest Position: De'Von Achane is their biggest offensive threat by far, and Miami went out of their way to keep him around as a building block for the future. He was one of the best runners between the tackles last year and is a weapon out of the slot or catching swing passes. The Dolphins are going to run him into the ground, so hopefully Jaylen Wright or Ollie Gordon II can give him a breather or two now and again. Weakest Position: Here are the starters in the Miami secondary: Dante Trader Jr., Chris Johnson, Ryan Gabriel, Zayne Anderson, JuJu Brents, Sam McManus and Jason Marshall Jr. I made two of those names up, and if you can tell which two, you're probably watching too much Miami Dolphins football. Biggest Question: Is it 2027 yet? Verdict: I can't in good conscience pick an NFL team to go under a 3.5-win line. This is a much less confident over than it was for Arizona, but it remains an over, even if it's just a philosophical standpoint rather than an actual endorsement of this roster. New England Patriots (10.5) The New England Patriots, in 2025, were a good football team who rode a little bit of luck and the fourth-easiest schedule in DVOA history to go to the Super Bowl. In 2026, I expect the New England Patriots to continue to be a good football team; it's the other stuff that will send them back a little bit. I do need to reiterate that the Patriots were, and remain, good. Theare some people who see the soft schedule they had, the fact that their AFC Championship opponent didn't have a quarterback, and their resulting shellacking in the Super Bowl and come to the conclusion that the Patriots were frauds with a side of flim-flam. That's really not the case. Were they won of the bottom quartile teams to ever make the Super Bowl? Yeah, probably; DVOA has them 16th-worst of the 98 teams to make it in our dataset. I think they got a little bit better than that as the season went along, though, and were playing better than their 10.6% DVOA would indicate by the postseason. Were they the worst 14-win team ever? DVOA thinks so and it's got a good case, though I'd eye up those 2024 Vikings suspiciously. But someone has to be the worst of the best, and we're talking about an extremely small fraternity of clubs who were able to be this successful, regardless of how fortunate they were or how easy their path was. But they were just good, and not something particularly special, and that makes it really hard to go over a 10.5-point line. Adding A.J. Brown should be a significant boost to Drake Maye's weapons, but that's offset in part by the departure of Stefon Diggs. The offensive line remains a worry, and rookie Caleb Lomu and the oft-injured Alijah Vera-Tucker doesn't feel like enough to fully consider it patched. On defense, too, it was a one-guy in, one-guy out sort of offseason. Are Dre'Mont Jones and Kevin Byard III enough to set off the losses of K'Lavon Chaisson, Khyiris Tonga and Jaylinn Hawkins? Maybe, but it doesn't feel like there's a good reason to think they'll be substantially better than last season. Don't get me wrong - we should still see New England playing in January, and I would not be shocked at all if they win the division again. I just am not ready to put them up at the tippy-top level of contenders; they feel more comfortable for me in the also receiving votes" category for the time being. Strongest Position: Drake Drake Maye" Maye would prefer not to get sacked 47 times again this season, but it's hard to look at the MVP runner up, third in passing DYAR and fourth in passing DVOA, and go anywhere else. Great! It's been too long since the Patriots fans had a solid quarterback; they've been getting antsy. Weakest Position: New England figured out by the end of the year that they had to blitz repeatedly to generate any pressure, and that worked! It would be nice if they didn't have to, though, and to that end, I look at the revamped edge rusher group and frown. Harold Landry III still isn't cleared for action, leaving them with Dre'Mont Jones, Elijah Ponder and rookie Gabe Jacas as their top pass-rushing options. The Patriots overcame their week edge rushing group by blitzing 43% of the time in the playoffs, and it worked, but I don't know how sustainable that is. Biggest Question: Is the revamped offensive line enough? Vera-Tucker is in at left guard and Jared Wilson moves to his more natural position of center to replace Garrett Bradbury, but that's it. Will Campbell, in particular, remains a major question mark who needs to show improvement, else he be kicked inside for Lomu. Verdict: Under 10.5. A 10-7 season feels just about right for the Patriots, and I'd stay away from this number if it was even one win lower. But there are enough worlds out there where New England isn't as healthy as last year, or the tougher schedule takes a win or two, that I feel more comfortable selling than buying. New York Jets (5.5) See, this is a better line for a team expected to be terrible. By at least some metrics, the Jets have the least optimistic fan base in the league for 2026, and it's not hard to see why. While the Dolphins' expansion-quality roster was an intentional move, spurred by a massive contract purge that left them with 40 cents on the dollar to pay players, the Jets' decade-long misfortune has been caused by a series of own goalsand poor decisions that has left the team utterly noncompetitive. It's a better roster than the Dolphins nearly everywhere. Miami has the better running back depth overall, and Geno Smith versus Malik Willis is a toss-up in which there really are no winners, but everywhere else, it's advantage Jets. They especially went out of their way to try to provide Aaron Glenn something to work with on defense, adding multiple competent veterans to bolster a unit that somehow went the entire year without intercepting a single pass. The floor should be raised. And on offense, Smith is a more accurate passer than the Justin Fieldses, Tyrod Taylors or Brady Cooks of the world, and so the baseline should be a little better. Question. Why do the Jets care about their baseline in 2026? I get why Aaron Glenn would care, because he would like to get a third season in charge, and 3-14 is not the way to start that. But what does bringing back Smith, at age 35, do for the long term of this franchise? Do they expect Demario Davis or David Onyemata to be on the next good Jets team? It's an attempt not to be entirely embarrassing out there, but it also kind of conflicts with their strategy from last season, trading away Sauce Gardner and Quinnen Williams for more first-round draft picks in the 2027 class. The future of the Jets is next year's draft, and the Jets run the risk of getting to 7-10 or something and killing their own draft pick. I don't see the line you walk where you both feel good about the Jets' performance in 2026 and are in position to select the quarterback of the future you want. Say what you want about the Dolphins' strategy and whether or not they'll be watchable - at least their plan is coherent. Glenn's already fired his coordinators as ablative armor, so he knows the expectations are to win now, and this is not a roster designed to win now. And when your teardown is trading away the young players who were part of your last rebuild, you might as well lean into it. It doesn't feel like the Jets know who they are. And step one of getting out of the hole you've dug yourself is understanding what went wrong in the past. I do not trust the current Jets management to do that. But maybe we'll try again next year with the third-highest touted defensive mind available and QB5 in the draft class. Strongest Position: If you're going to bring in an aging linebacker to a rebuilding team, you could do a hell of a lot worse than Demario Davis. Between him and Jamien Sherwood, is that... the best linebacking corps in the league? ESPN's rankings certainly have them up there, at any rate. I think I'd still take Detroit's Jack Campbell- and Derrick Barnes-led group over New York's, but the fact that they're in the conversation is worth celebrating. Weakest Position: I'll admit where I was wrong - trading Sam Darnold for Geno Smith was, in fact, an upgrade in Seattle last season. Smith ranked 34th last season with a -22.5% passing DVOA. He's still OK when he gets time to work in the pocket, but the Jets were 25th in pass-block win rate a year ago and arguably got worse on the offensive line this offseason. The only quarterback with a higher adjusted sack-rate than Smith? Justin Fields. So, uh, that's not going to work. Biggest Question: No, seriously, is it 2027 yet? The Jets do have a few players who look to be pieces of whatever next year's rebuild looks like - David Bailey, Kenyon Sadiq and D'Angelo Ponds will be fun to track this year - but it's hard to imagine the team you care about next year bearing too much of a resemblance to this one. Verdict: The Jets, spiritually, are a five-win franchise, finishing within two wins of that mark in nine of the last 10 seasons. I'm staying away from the 5.5-win line and would advise anyone else to do the same. But, for the sake of making a prediction, I slightly prefer the under.