Building A Jets Core: Chris Herndon

We have the 14th core member of the New York Jets, as voted by all of you. And the winner is: Chris Herndon, Tight End! Chris Herndon was the Jets’ 4th round draft pick in the 2018 NFL draft. Herndon got off to an excellent start to his career, playing like a top 10 tight end in the league in the last half of his rookie season and enjoying one of the best performances for a rookie tight end in recent memory. Since then Herndon’s career has taken a turn for the worse. He missed nearly the entire 2019 season due to injuries. When Herndon was finally healthy in 2020, he played extremely poorly early in the season, dropping passes at an alarming rate. Herndon slowly pulled out of his funk as the season wore on, and he enjoyed some modest success in the last few games of the 2020 season. At this point it is difficult to project what the Jets might expect to get out of Herndon going forward. Can he still be the dynamic threat he looked like in his rookie year, or is he the backup-at-best player we saw in 2020? Assuming he is not cut in training camp, Herndon will have the 2021 campaign to prove he is worth signing to a new deal with the new Jets regime.

With Chris Herndon taking the 14th spot, our crowd sourced Jets Core 2022 looks like this:

1. Mekhi Becton
2. Quinnen Williams
3. Denzel Mims
4. Marcus Maye
5. Bryce Hall
6. Ashtyn Davis
7. Folorunso Fatukasi
8. John Franklin-Myers
9. C.J. Mosley
10. Braden Mann
11. Jamison Crowder
12. Sam Darnold
13. Brian Poole
14. Chris Herndon
15. ?

By 2022 most of the new regime’s reworking of the current roster will have taken place and a core group of Jets who will form the backbone of the new Jets regime will emerge. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to think alongside the Jets’ new staff and vote for who you think are the most likely players to form that core and still be here on opening day of the 2022 season. Nobody knows for sure how things will play out, and evaluating the chances of some of the younger players who have barely scratched the surface yet is tricky, but we know who the coaching staff is and what type of payers might fit their system, so let’s give this a shot. Let’s crowd source a Jets Core 2022.

Through mid-February I’ll be putting up a daily poll asking GGN to vote on the most likely current Jets players to still be with the team in 2022. I’ll include some current Jets that are not under contract for the 2021 season and may leave in free agency this year, but I will not include any player in college, in the 2021 NFL draft, currently under contract with another team, or any free agent who wasn’t with the Jets at the end of 2020. The idea here is to build a list of the current Jets players you think will most likely make up a core group the team will build around to begin to construct a playoff contender.

In the event I have made an egregious omission and a name you think should be on the poll is not there you can write in candidates in the comments section. If a player gets support in the comments section I’ll add him to the next day’s poll.

We all have different views on various Jets players. What we’re looking for here is the community’s collective view of the players who might help lead the Jets out of the wilderness in the coming years. Your views may or may not coincide with the community’s, and either way that’s OK.

So let’s get to it. Today we vote for the number 15 Jets core player. Who will the next spot go to? Vote early, vote often, and let’s hear who you think are the players that will be the Jets leaders of the future.