Gang Green Nation
The Jets have question marks at plenty of positions heading into the 2025 season. Linebacker is not one of them. On paper the team has a top notch duo leading the way.
Quincy Williams
The timing of a career year can mean everything. If a player has his best season in a year where his contract is expiring, it can mean tens of millions of dollars. For Quincy Williams it went the other day.
The Jets signed him to a three year, $18 million contract in 2023. At the time he signed it, the deal was a reasonable value for the Jets. It wasn’t an exorbitant price for a player who had developed into a functional linebacker. Williams proceeded to improve by leaps and bounds. He earned a First Team All Pro nod in the first year of the deal. Suddenly a decent contract turned into one of the best contracts in football.
Quincy is now entering the final year of that three year deal. We can presume it is likely that he will command far more than $18 million on his next contract.
Will the Jets be the team to give the soon to be 29 year old that contract? It depends in no small measure on the quality of his play in a new defensive system. Quincy covers a lot of ground from the linebacker spot with his blazing speed. Aaron Glenn likes to blitz his linebackers a lot. It isn’t hard to envision Williams firing off the edge with a speed rush on passing downs and compiling 4-6 sacks along with his solid play elsewhere.
If Williams plays to his potential, the Jets will have a problem on their hands this offseason, but it will be a good problem to have. They will need to pay a top notch player.
Jamien Sherwood
The Jets got mocked plenty on the final day of the 2021 NFL Draft. The team selected not one but two college safeties with the intent to convert them to linebacker. One was Hamsah Nasirildeen. Say what you will about him, but at least Nasirildeen was on track to potentially becoming a first round pick before suffering a serious injury at the end of his college career. The other was Sherwood, which was a pick many people found tough to defend.
A funny thing happened along the way. Sherwood started showing steady improvement. By the end of his third year, he was a quality part-time player. Then came year four. The venerable CJ Mosley had a difficult time staying on the field at his advanced age. Sherwood stepped into the starting lineup and suddenly looked like a legitimate starter. He led the league with 98 solo tackles from the linebacker position and was voted as the Jets’ most valuable player by his teammates.
Unlike Williams, Sherwood had a breakout year at the right time. 2024 was the final year of his rookie contract. Hours before he was...
