The Jets Are 25th in Triple-Bust Rate. They Are Also 10th in Clean-Hit Rate.
Issue No. 41 of this newsletter established that the Jets, drafting in the first round between 1976 and 2025, hit a triple-bust on roughly 27.8% of their picks. The triple-bust criterion required a player to fail all three of: never made a Pro Bowl, posted a career Approximate Value below half the slot expectation, and lasted fewer than four seasons as a starter. Twenty-eight percent felt high. The implication, again, was franchise-level incompetence.
Part 1 of this series tested the implication on Hall of Fame counts and found the Jets are the modal outcome, not the floor. Part 2 tests it on busts. The result is more nuanced than Part 1: the Jets are below the league median on triple-bust rate, sitting at 25.0% versus a median of 21.7%. They are not, however, anywhere near the worst. The worst is Cincinnati at 37.0%. The gap between best and worst — 8.0% to 37.0% — is a 4.6× spread, the kind of variance that makes any single team’s ranking less interesting than the shape of the league.
The Variance Is the Story
The Three Bust Definitions, Briefly
Definition A: The pick never made a Pro Bowl. The least demanding bar; about 60% of all first-round picks meet it.
Definition B: The pick’s career Approximate Value was below half of what the slot — the pick number itself — predicts. This adjusts for the fact that pick #1 is held to a higher standard than pick #28.
Definition C: The pick spent fewer than four seasons as a starter. A proxy for “they couldn’t crack the lineup.”
Triple bust: all three. Clean hit: none.
Triple-Bust Leaderboard (32 Teams, 1976-2025)
| # | Team | Triple-Bust % | Clean-Hit % | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Baltimore Ravens | 8.0% | 60.0% | Best in modern NFL. Founded 1996, 25 picks. |
| 2 | Tampa Bay | 10.8% | 37.8% | Tied with Tennessee. |
| 3 | Tennessee | 10.8% | 48.6% | Old Houston Oilers franchise. |
| 4 | Houston | 11.1% | 50.0% | Expansion 2002, only 18 judged. |
| 5 | Indianapolis | 15.0% | 42.5% | Manning era + Polian. |
| ··· | ||||
| 17-18 | NY Giants · Pittsburgh | 21.9% | 31.7% / 34.2% | Tied at the league median. |
| ··· | ||||
| 25 | NY Jets | 25.0% | 45.5% | 3.3 points worse than median. |
| 26 | Arizona | 27.3% | 42.4% | |
| 27 | Kansas City | 27.8% | 50.0% | Pre-Mahomes era weight. |
| 28 | Cleveland | 28.2% | 33.3% | Reputation says worst. Not. |
| 29 | San Francisco | 28.9% | 37.8% | Surprising: 4 HoFers AND poor bust rate. |
| 30 | Philadelphia | 30.6% | 38.9% | Zero HoFers AND high bust rate. |
| 31 | Miami | 32.4% | 35.1% | |
| 32 | Cincinnati Bengals | 37.0% | 26.1% | Worst in the NFL by a clear margin. |
The Jets are 25th. The five teams below them are Arizona, Kansas City, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. The team below those is Miami. The team below Miami is the actual winner of the worst-drafting-franchise sweepstakes since 1976: the Cincinnati Bengals, at 37.0% triple-bust rate — nearly double the league median, and 12 percentage points worse than the Jets.
The Cincinnati Discovery
The Bengals are the genuinely surprising finding of this series. Cleveland gets the reputation, and the Browns are bad — 28th overall — but they are not the floor. The Bengals are. Their first-round triple-bust roster across fifty years includes David Verser (1981), Pete Koch (1984), Rickey Dixon (1988), David Klingler (1992), Ki-Jana Carter (1995, first overall), Reinard Wilson (1997), and many others. Seventeen of forty-six judged first-round picks since 1976 have been triple busts. That is not a draft history. It is a wreck.
And it is, even more surprisingly, paired with a clean-hit rate of 26.1%, the second-lowest in the league. Most teams that are bad on busts are at least adequate on hits, because the same picks just turn out one way or the other. The Bengals manage to be bad on both ends. They miss often and they hit rarely. Of the four teams ranked 29th through 32nd, only Cincinnati combines a high bust rate with a low clean-hit rate. Philadelphia drafts plenty of clean hits; they just never hit Hall of Famers. Miami is mediocre on both. Cincinnati is bad on both.
The Jets’ Paradox
| Definition | Jets Rate | League Median | Jets Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| A: Never made a Pro Bowl | 54.5% | ~57% | 13 of 32 (better than half) |
| B: Career AV below half slot | 27.3% | ~21% | 25 of 32 |
| C: Fewer than 4 starting seasons | 34.1% | ~31% | 20 of 32 |
| Triple bust (A + B + C) | 25.0% | 21.7% | 25 of 32 |
| Clean hit (none of A, B, C) | 45.5% | 39.9% | 10 of 32 (top third) |
Look at the last row carefully. The Jets are in the league’s bottom-third on triple-bust rate. They are also in the league’s top-third on clean-hit rate. They are simultaneously worse than median at producing busts and better than median at producing hits. That sounds contradictory, and it is, in the sense that most teams cluster on one end or the other.
What it means, mechanically, is that the Jets have less of the middle ground than most teams. They draft players who are either solid contributors (Freeman McNeil, Ken O’Brien, Hugh Douglas, James Farrior, John Abraham, Santana Moss — all clean hits, none Hall of Famers) or complete washouts (Lam Jones, Blair Thomas, Vernon Gholston, Dee Milliner). They struggle to produce the in-between — the player who fails Definition A or B but not all three. That barbell is unusual at the league level. It also explains why their HoF count looks so flat (Part 1): they have plenty of clean hits, but very few of those hits ascend to Canton.
“The Jets’ problem is not that they cannot tell good players from bad ones. Their problem is that they cannot tell good players from great ones.”
— The Columnist, on the precise indictmentWhat the Variance Means
The 8% to 37% spread is, per usual, a story about era and front office. Baltimore’s 8% comes mostly from the Ozzie Newsome era, which started in 1996 and produced first-round Hall of Famers (Ogden, R. Lewis, Reed) at a clip the rest of the league has never matched. Cincinnati’s 37% covers fifty years of relative organizational chaos, the most stable period of which produced one Hall of Famer (Anthony Muñoz, 1980) and an awful lot of Ki-Jana Carters.
The cleaner reading of the variance is that draft “competence” is roughly twice as variable as the within-season spread of any team-level performance metric. NFL teams differ by a couple percentage points on most things; on this one, they differ by twenty-nine points. That is not noise. That is sustained difference in process — what scouting departments do, what owners interfere with, what front offices weigh.
The Jets are not, by this evidence, organizationally broken. They are organizationally bottom-third. Whether that bottom-third is a function of bad scouting or something else — ownership interference, roster fit, late-round whiffs — is what Parts 3 and 4 of this series will sort out.
Coming Next
Part 3 (Worst Evaluators in American Sports) leaves the NFL and asks the cross-sport question: across MLB, NBA, NHL, and NFL, which franchise has the worst draft-evaluation record, and how do we separate teams that pick poorly from teams that pick fine but won’t pay to keep their picks? That separation matters: the Athletics, Pirates, and Rays draft well by some measures and badly by others, and the difference is payroll, not scouting. Part 4 (Where Scouting Earns Its Money) returns to the NFL to test whether the Jets’ problem is in rounds 1-3, where the talent is obvious, or rounds 4-7, where scouting departments differentiate themselves.
