After months of waiting for us, the 2026 NFL Draft came and went in three days over the weekend. Now we are left to try and predict the future.

Nobody can say with any degree of certainty how the players the Jets selected will pan out, not you nor I nor the thousands of people who will opine on this topic.

All I can do is offer my thoughts on what took place and where we go from here.

If you are looking for someone who will reinforce all of your preexisting opinions, this probably won’t be what you want. If you want someone to tell you everything the Jets did was either fantastic or horrendous, again you’ll be left disappointed. If you want complete accurate predictions, well I can’t help you there either. I’m sure much of what I prognosticate here ultimately won’t pan out. That’s the nature of writing about the Draft. All you have to do is look back through the archives of this site or any other place where immediate Draft analysis is provided. There’s something humbling about analyzing the NFL Draft. If you do it for any stretch of time, you realize that the unknowns far outweigh the knowns.

Let’s discuss what I liked and disliked about what the Jets did over the three days of the 2026 NFL Draft.

I have no idea what got into the Jets on Friday night, but for a couple of hours they navigated the Draft the way the league’s most successful franchises typically handle themselves.

It was clear early in the night that the board was falling in a favorable way. Quality defensive prospects at positions of need were tumbling down the board. The opportunity cost of trading down seemed small. To be honest, we tend to overrate the cost of trading down anyway. In the early rounds of the Draft, there are going to be quality prospects in front of you no matter where your pick falls. But this was a situation where the Jets could afford to move down a few slots and still have a wide selection of prospects.

What was notable for me was the way the Jets rebounded when the guy they wanted

SOURCES: The #Jets were targeting Jacob Rodriguez at No. 44, but after he went at 43, they adjusted—trading back to select Indiana’s D’Angelo Ponds while adding a fourth-round pick. The move was aimed at stockpiling extra capital to potentially trade back into the late third…

The Jets could have panicked early and traded up to make sure they didn’t lose Rodriguez. Instead they led the board come to them. They executed a trade down and netted an extra fourth round pick.

Then it came time to pick. They selected D’Angelo Ponds, a cornerback out of Indiana.

Really the only negative on Ponds is his size. He’s very small for a cornerback at 5’9” and 182 pounds. That’s right around the minimum threshold for a player to be hold up as an outside corner in the NFL.

The question I have with Ponds isn’t about whether he’s undersized, though. It’s whether he can make up for his shortcomings. Every prospect has weaknesses. Some are pronounced. Others are subtler. The players who succeed in the NFL can compensate for their shortcomings.

Drew Brees was short for a quarterback. He went on to have a Hall of Fame career. Does that mean height is irrelevant for quarterbacks? No, you need to be able to see over the line of scrimmage. Brees worked around his physical limitations by learning how to subtly slide within the pocket so that his line of sight moved to the gap between where two of his offensive linemen were blocking. The Saints for their part also invested heavily in interior offensive linemen during Brees’ career so he would face less instances where the pocket collapsed, and his line of sight was constricted.

If a cornerback is going to hold up at Ponds’ size, he has to make up for it by having explosive athleticism, great instincts, and physicality, Ponds has all three. When it comes to athleticism, I’d particularly note his performance at the NFL Scouting Combine. We all know that Combine results can be overrated and skew evaluations. I think the best way to look at the Combine is to figure out what drills are important for which players. Ponds’ 43.5” vertical jump was one of the best in Combine history. It first of all shows the explosion that is so essential. But it also shows he can get high in the air. It won’t be as easy as you think to beat him all day with jump balls. You might not stick Ponds on Mike Evans, but there’s reason to believe Ponds will play bigger than his frame.

Even if all of this is wrong, and Ponds can’t play outside his instincts, burst, and physicality give him a good chance to succeed in the slot or even possibly safety.

Of course Ponds actually delivering on this potential is more important than any praise I can give immediately after the NFL Draft, but I can’t find anything bad to say with the way the Jets handled the second night.

The only real negative was the lack of a third round pick, which was lost two years ago in the disastrous Haason Reddick trade. The general manager at the helm during that fiasco, Joe Douglas, has long since been fired. I’ll admit it was a tad frustrating to see how many prospects who were on the board and could have helped the Jets at pick 68.

One of the most praised aspects of the 2024 Reddick deal was that the Jets gave up a 2026 pick. The selection was two years after the deal was made. It was so far in the distance as to make the pick seem worthless.

This saga should serve as a lesson that even if you trade a pick in the distant future, the distant future eventually will come. But we won’t let Haason Reddick ruin another night.