Keep or Dump: Which Jets free agents are still unsigned?

With activity on the free agency market having slowed down to a crawl it's worth checking in on where the Jets' remaining unsigned free agents stand.

There are currently still 12 free agents unsigned, all of whom are unrestricted free agents apart from Harvey Langi. JetsFix readers had voted to give Langi a low-level deal during our Keep or Dump series before free agency.

These other 11 include four of the six players JetsFix readers voted as wanting the Jets to re-sign. Those four: Brian Poole, Patrick Onwuasor, Arthur Maulet and Neville Hewitt.

There have been some reports that the team might bring back these players but those would be the sorts of reports you'd hear every year as smaller agents report to local media that their player was told they might be brought back during their exit interview. Poole's status may be being held up by medicals, since he had a shoulder surgery at the end of 2021.

JetsFix readers also voted to dump Frank Gore, Daniel Brown and Bradley McDougald, and were undecided on Bryce Hager, Bennett Jackson, Trevon Coley and Ross Travis all of whom also remain unsigned.

As anticipated, the Jets don't currently stand to be in a position to receive any 2022 compensatory picks for their free agents lost, even though a few of them do qualify. That's because they are offset by the qualifying free agents signed by the Jets, which was always expected to be the case.

It's not impossible some of the 12 that are unsigned could yet sign a qualifying contract and there's also the possibility that some of the qualifying additions could end up not qualifying - perhaps because the Jets release a player or two who otherwise would have qualified before the cut-off date at the trade deadline, as teams will often do to manipulate the formula. However, this seems unlikely.

One other issue worth drawing a line under is that none of these 12 players will qualifying for the NFL's Qualifying Player Benefit.

That rule, which came in via the new CBA, allows teams to claim a cap reduction of up to $1.5 million on a veteran player contract (or by combining two contracts), providing certain conditions are met. However, one of the conditions is that the player(s) has to have been with the team for the four previous seasons, which doesn't apply to any of the unsigned free agents.

It's possible the rarely-used UFA tender could be an option for a few of these guys, but we'll revisit that if any of them are still signed prior to the UFA tender deadline in the first of May.

It's interesting to note that the Jets had dealt with re-signing any free agents before we got to April last year, so perhaps that means we can conclude the Jets have opted to move on from them - or at least left a standing offer on the table that they have no intention of increasing.