The 2025 New York Jets finished with a pass EPA/play allowed of +0.253 — the worst mark of any defense in the NFL this season, and worse by roughly three hundredths of a point than the next-worst defense, Dallas (+0.221). That number alone is a story. But the reason it got that bad is the story people are missing: the Jets became the first defense in the 20-year pass_defense_depth era (2006–2025) to finish a season with zero interceptions on any level of the field.

Not one. Not deep, not intermediate, not short, not behind the line of scrimmage. Across 514 pass attempts logged by target depth in 2025, the Jets did not pick off a single throw.

Table of Contents

1. The historical company they don't have
2. Every depth of the field is bleeding
3. Raw sacks vs. sack rate — why this isn't a pass-rush story
4. A season with no takeaways
5. Why "bad secondary" isn't the right frame

1. The historical company they don't have

Since 2006, only two other defenses have finished a season with three or fewer interceptions across all pass-depth tiers combined — and neither one hit zero:

That's it. Twenty seasons of defensive data, and the 2025 Jets stand alone at the bottom. San Francisco in 2018 and Houston in 2020 were bad pass defenses too, but they still generated some takeaways off the arm. The Jets generated none.

2. Every depth of the field is bleeding

Here's the depth breakdown for the Jets defense in 2025, and — for context — the same team's 2023 numbers, when this defense posted one of the stingier pass-defense marks in recent franchise memory (-0.156 EPA/play):

Two years ago this defense picked off 17 passes across the four tiers. In 2025 it picked off zero, while the short-throw EPA number swung by roughly 0.45 EPA/play in the wrong direction and the deep number moved from a positive-but-manageable +0.028 to a brutal +0.502. In 2023, opposing quarterbacks who tested the Jets deep got picked five times in 52 attempts; in 2025, 51 deep balls produced zero picks and cost the defense half a point of expected value on average every time a ball left the quarterback's hand.

The behind-LOS tier (-0.001 EPA/play in 2025) is the only level where the Jets weren't actively getting torched. Everywhere else, they were.

3. Raw sacks vs. sack rate — why this isn't a pass-rush story

The lazy read on a historically bad pass defense is "no pass rush." That's only half true, and it's worth separating the two things that are true at once.

By raw count, the Jets were genuinely rare: their 26 sacks were the second-fewest in the league in 2025, ahead of only San Francisco's 20. That's a real, uniquely bad number.

But sack rate tells a different story. The Jets faced 579 opponent dropbacks and posted a 4.5% sack rate (26/579) — which sits in the middle of a pack that includes Baltimore (30 sacks on 696 dropbacks, 4.3%), Arizona (30 on 621, 4.8%) and Carolina (30 on 563, 5.3%). The low raw sack total is mostly a function of the Jets facing fewer total dropbacks than some of those teams, not evidence the pass rush was uniquely inept relative to its opportunities.

So: uniquely bad by count, unremarkable by rate. Combine an average pass rush with zero interceptions and three total fumble recoveries, and you get a defense that produced almost no takeaway pressure to bail out its coverage. When you can't take the ball away, every "good enough" pressure just turns into a completion for a first down instead of a sack or a punt.

4. A season with no takeaways

Across the full 2025 season, the Jets' defense allowed a league-worst +0.253 pass EPA/play on 579 dropbacks, and forced zero interceptions on any of them. Combined with only three defensive fumble recoveries, the picture is stark: across an entire 17-game season and every depth tier of the field, this defense essentially never manufactured a takeaway through the air. Whatever quality wins this defense had, they were held-serve, non-takeaway wins — not games where the Jets took the ball away and changed a game's outcome.

5. Why "bad secondary" isn't the right frame

The Jets did not have a bad secondary in the traditional sense of "giving up completions and yards" alone. They had that too, but the deeper problem is that the defense was structurally incapable of manufacturing a negative outcome for the passer. Every play was a coin the offense got to keep flipping — because even when the coverage was right, or the throw was contested, or the pass hung up in the air a beat too long, nobody on this Jets defense came down with it.

That's why the historical peers matter. The 2018 49ers and 2020 Texans were bad defenses too, but they at least occasionally interrupted a drive through the air. The 2025 Jets, across every depth tier of the field and all 579 dropbacks they faced, did not.

Getting the pass EPA/play number back to respectable is not primarily a corner-play problem or a pass-rusher problem — the sack rate says the rush was closer to average than the raw total suggests.

Zero interceptions in a modern NFL season is not a slump. It's a signature.