Free Agent Reset: Who is left for the Jets?

Now that the second wave of free agency has well and truly slowed to a crawl, let's review where the Jets are having signed eight external free agents and, by our count, re-signed 16 of their own free agents (including exclusive rights and restricted free agents).

There are currently just three Jets unrestricted free agents who have yet to be signed: Keelan Cole, Laurent Duvernay-Tardif and Tyler Kroft.

It's unlikely, but not impossible, that the Jets could re-sign any of these but it's perhaps more interesting to consider whether any of them could benefit the Jets' potential compensatory pick calculation if they were to be signed between now and the cut-off date just after the draft.

The answer is that it's highly unlikely. The Jets currently have four projected qualifying free agent losses and six gains. In order to have any realistic chance of a compensatory pick next year, the qualifying losses need to outnumber the gains.

So, if all three were signed and the Jets didn't add any other qualifying free agents, then they could theoretically get a compensatory pick. However, they'd all need to be qualifying which would mean being signed before the cut-off date and with a salary of around $3 million at least.

While it is theoretically possible to get one seventh round compensatory pick in cases where gains and losses are the same (which would be the case if two of the above three unsigned free agents were qualifying signings), this is rare. The other possibility could be that the Jets could have qualifying gains that end up not qualifying, perhaps because they ended up getting cut in camp or something. Again, this is rare and unlikely.

For the record, Ryan Griffin, who is apparently going to the Bears, won't count towards the formula because the Jets cut him rather than him being a free agent loss.

That cut-off date is also relevant because the market often picks up due to teams holding off on making offers that would potentially cause them to lose a potential compensatory pick if the deal was made before the cut-off. So, in the week after the draft, we might see some movement from the top unsigned free agents on the market - players like Tyrann Mathieu, Jadeveon Clowney, Stephon Gilmore and Julio Jones.

The Jets might not have interest in any of these guys, but perhaps a team that signs one of them will get rid of a younger player the Jets could have interest in, so it's worth watching. There are still a ton of veteran players who made major contributions in 2021 that are still unsigned.

In addition to the unsigned free agents mentioned earlier, Kyle Phillips (a non-tendered restricted free agent) remains unsigned as do any players who were on the practice squad at the end of the year but did not sign a futures deal (this includes Dan Brown and Ronnie Blair).