The silver lining beneath Jets’ Bailey-over-Reese shocker

Jets fans, you have a right to be frustrated.

Nonetheless, Bailey is on his way to Florham Park, which means it’s time to embrace the selection and envision the best-case scenario.

After all, it’s not as if the Jets passed on Reese for some slouch. This is no Travon Walker-over-Aidan Hutchinson scenario. Bailey’s blend of elite athleticism (4.50 forty, 9.66 Relative Athletic Score) and elite production (NCAA-high 14.5 sacks in 2025) makes him every bit of a prospect with a superstar ceiling at the next level.

There is one particular silver lining that should infuse Jets fans with confidence that New York has landed a potentially franchise-altering player.

Bailey’s profile screams NFL success

Back in January, I conducted a study that aimed to identify the collegiate metrics that tended to correlate the most with future NFL success for first-round EDGE prospects.

The goal was to figure out which college stats are worth paying attention to as we attempt to project NFL success, and which ones could be tossed to the wayside because they carry no predictive value.

I compiled each prospect’s production in their final college season across 15 different metrics, as well as their career NFL regular-season performance, quantified by their overall Pro Football Focus grade (a good tool for capturing both pass-rush and run-defense impact). I then calculated the correlation between each college metric and NFL PFF grade.

Of the 15 metrics analyzed, many carried minimal predictive value. But four college metrics stood out for having a noticeably strong correlation with NFL success. Those metrics were:

• Pass-rush win rate
• Pressure rate
• Sack rate
• Overall PFF grade

The next step was to combine these four metrics.

I rated each prospect on a 0-100 scale for their performance in each of those four metrics, averaging the four numbers into a single “Big 4 Score”. This metric correlated relatively closely with future NFL success; the correlation coefficient between Big 4 Score and NFL PFF grade was 0.624.

Here is a visualization of how Big 4 Score compared with future NFL PFF grade for first-round EDGE prospects from 2015 to 2024.

It’s not a perfect one-to-one predictor, but it’s a pretty reliable guideline to follow.

If you randomly choose any two players, there is an approximately 76% chance that the player with a higher Big 4 Score has the higher NFL PFF grade. Those are some nice odds when it comes to an event as unpredictable as the NFL draft.

The exciting news for Jets fans is that David Bailey fared extremely well in this formula.

Not only did Bailey top the potential first-rounders of the 2026 draft class, but it wasn’t close, even compared to Arvell Reese. In fact, since 2015, Bailey’s Big 4 Score is bested by only five first-round EDGE prospects: Josh Hines-Allen, Micah Parsons, Laiatu Latu, Chase Young, and Nick Bosa.

With a 93.3 overall PFF grade, 21.3% pressure rate, 4.0% sack rate, and 21.6% pass-rush win rate, Bailey checked all four of the boxes that tend to be meaningful for predicting the NFL success of first-round EDGE prospects.

From a production standpoint, Bailey did it all. Not only did he rack up sacks at a high rate, but he consistently made his presence felt via pressures and pass-rush wins, and he did it all in a fashion that impressed via the eye test (PFF grade).

Reese’s profile isn’t quite as proven, even if he still posted a high rating that puts him in the neighborhood of players like Myles Garrett and T.J. Watt.

While Reese racked up pressures and sacks at an extremely high per-snap rate across the limited opportunities he received, he wasn’t actually winning his pass-rush reps at nearly as high a rate as Bailey. His PFF grade was also noticeably lower than most other first-round EDGE prospects, which could be because he got a lot of his pressures and sacks on schemed pressures, which won’t earn as high a PFF grade as one-on-one pass-rush wins.

None of this is to say that Bailey is definitively a better prospect than Reese or has a better chance of becoming an NFL star. This chart shows Clelin Ferrell above Will Anderson. It is not a cut-and-dry formula that tells a prospect’s fortune. Still, it reveals trends worth placing stock in as we attempt to predict a prospect’s chances of panning out at the NFL level.

Bailey checks a plethora of boxes that have tended to be extremely valuable for first-round EDGE prospects. Meanwhile, Reese’s profile is not quite as solid across the board, supporting the narrative that he might be less of a sure thing than Bailey.

While this analysis doesn’t guarantee anything, it should help Jets fans rest a little easier at night if they were losing sleep over missing out on Reese.