Potential Lost Snaps Through Free Agency

Unfortunately the Jets season has ended a little sooner than we’d all have hoped for. However despite of this, I’m feeling pretty optimistic about the future of this franchise. I completely agreed with the Jets keeping hold of Bowles and Maccagnan and I’ve stated on Twitter that the potential for improvement this off-season is vast. With an estimated $100 million in cap space and 3 draft selections inside the top 50, this off-season could make or break the Jets for years to come.

However before focusing on the new players who will undoubtedly be wearing Jets green next year, you need to look at the free agents who may be leaving for pastures new. Now we’ve already focused in on the free agents on GGN, but here I’m going to take a slightly different angle which was an idea by David Fucillo over at Niners Nation. If all our free agents were to leave, how many snaps would we need to replace in 2018?

Below you can see just how much each player contributed to the 2017 team in terms of service time. I’ve only included the percentage of snaps on offence or defence, any difference between actual snaps and the percentage of snaps will be made up of special team snaps.

Josh McCown - 819 snaps (78.8% of all offensive snaps)

Morris Claiborne - 931 snaps (82.2% of all defensive snaps)

Wesley Johnson - 940 snaps (90.5% of all offensive snaps)

Jonotthan Harrison - 146 snaps (9.9% of all offensive snaps)

Dakota Dozier - 310 snaps (24.0% of all offensive snaps)

Demario Davis - 1227 snaps (99.8% of all defensive snaps)

Bruce Carter - 265 snaps (1.0% of all defensive snaps)

David Bass - 475 snaps (29.1% of all defensive snaps)

Austin Seferian-Jenkins - 667 snaps (63.0% of all offensive snaps)

Mike Pennel - 431 snaps (27.2% of all defensive snaps)

Kony Ealy - 491 snaps (40.4% of all defensive snaps)

Terrence Brooks - 385 snaps (8.4% of all defensive snaps)

Julian Stanford - 480 snaps (8.2% of all defensive snaps)

Chandler Catanzaro - 132 snaps (28.0% of all special team snaps)

So if all of these players leave via free agency (which probably won’t happen) we’ll need to find 7,699 snaps from somewhere. Obviously we have money to spend and draft picks to make, but I liked looking at free agency from a slightly different perspective. Now of course this doesn’t mean that all those snaps were positive ones, for many of these guys, they simply didn’t do enough in their time to warrant receiving a new contract from the Jets.