Jets Draft Order Scenarios

Once again we find the Jets outside the playoff picture and the focus turns to next season.  Today we will look at the Jets draft position. This year, as of week 16, the Jets have a chance to go as high as the 3^rd pick of the draft and as low as the 18^th pick of the draft even after going over the schedule as none of the 4-10 teams play each other in the last two weeks. Strength of schedule or SOS is the first tiebreaker in determining the draft order as the worse schedule you played the better your draft pick is.

Here is the current list of the NFL draft order showing only the pick the Jets can get:

Note – SOS is 16 teams playing 16 games so after week 17 the SOS should add up to 256 but for now it’s at 224 with 32 games left to figure out.

There is way way too much math involved to attempt how we can take the top spot which would be pick #3 but I explain it as simply this: Jets lose both games and have all 4-win teams win both games, have the 5 win teams & Pittsburgh win at least once and if SOS stays roughly the same then the Jets would get the 3^rd pick. Obviously that isn’t going to happen but there’s still a chance anyway since our SOS is the worst aside from Pittsburgh in the 6 wins or less club. The Jets would lose at least 7 games in differential to Jacksonville and Oakland and 6 to Cleveland, Atlanta and Tampa Bay so they would need a lot of help in the other games to win the SOS battle.

Now you maybe thinking what about the Dolphins(8 – 6, 113 – 111) couldn’t we pass them? The answer is no we can’t because by beating them we would lose SOS by 1 game in the best case scenario since 14 out of 16 games are against the same team thus the best that could happen is a +2 difference (+4 for our other 2 winning out and theirs losing out and -2 for our win against them) which would leave us 1 short of passing them.

Moving on to getting pick #18, the Jets would have to win out plus having Green Bay lose out and having Detroit, San Diego, and Dallas lose at least once with some SOS help as the Jets lose at least 3 games in SOS due to their wins and they gain at least 1 win with a loss basically a 4-5 game swing pending who their one win is against.

Next week once some of this dust settles and we have a much clearer picture of where the Jets are going I’ll have a full chart on what needs to happen to get each pick that they can get.

Chris Menn

I'm a 27 year old Jets fan from Massachusetts who has been following the Jets since 1990. I used to run my own Jets blog called Chris' Jets fan blog and worked on JetsCentral.com before I joined JetNation.com. Still waiting for that Super Bowl...

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