A Linebacker Led This Defense in Sacks. Let That Land.
The angle I wrote last week framed Quincy Williams's 3.5 sacks as an indictment of the edge group around him — a linebacker doing the dirty work that dedicated pass rushers were supposed to handle. Now Williams is gone to Minnesota, and the indictment has become a verdict. The Jets didn't lose a linebacker. They lost their best pass rusher. The position on his jersey was almost beside the point.
Pull up the 2025 sack ledger and the picture is genuinely damning. Williams, a linebacker, led the entire team with 3.5 sacks across 13 games. Jamien Sherwood, who played every game and led the team in tackles, added 2 sacks. Tony Adams, another safety-linebacker hybrid, chipped in 1. The defensive ends — Will McDonald, Jowon Briggs, Tyler Baron — do not appear anywhere in the top-12 production list. A defense that finished 3–14 while being outscored by nearly 12 points a game was generating its most consistent quarterback pressure from its second level. That is not a scheme quirk. That is structural failure at the line of scrimmage.
What makes the Williams departure particularly corrosive is the context it lands in. The beat narrative coming into this offseason was about wholesale reconstruction — Sauce Gardner traded, Jamal Adams shipped to Minnesota, the secondary gutted and rebuilt. Those moves were painful but defensible as part of a coherent reset. Losing Williams reads differently, because he wasn't a piece of the old regime being cleared out. He was the one defensive player who could actually get to the quarterback. His 83 tackles and 3.5 sacks over 13 games represented the closest thing this defense had to a reliable disruptor. The reset just handed that away to the same division rival that already took Adams.
The depth chart now lists Trevin Wallace, Kiko Mauigoa, and David Bailey at linebacker — Bailey himself returning from an ankle injury that cost him the early part of the preseason. On the edge, McDonald leads a rotation that includes Briggs and Baron. Kingsley Enagbare anchors the interior. My read is that this group, collectively, will need to manufacture pass rush from coordination and scheme rather than individual dominance, because there is no individual on this roster with a demonstrated track record of getting home. That is a significant ask of a defense still integrating new personnel across the secondary.
Aaron Glenn is coaching for his job in a very real sense — the "first coach fired" conversation was already circulating before Week 1, and a defense that cannot generate pressure makes every other problem worse. Geno Smith and the offense will face shorter fields, more third-and-longs in their own end, and fewer possessions to work with when opposing quarterbacks are operating clean. The 2025 Jets went 3–5 in one-score games, which at the time looked like an execution problem. A defense without a credible pass rusher doesn't lose close games on execution. It loses them in the third quarter, when the other team's quarterback has all afternoon and the scoreboard starts running away. Williams leaving doesn't just remove 3.5 sacks from the ledger. It removes the last illusion that this defense had a real edge.