Stats are lying to you: Meet the ‘Garbage Time Jets’

Based on wins and losses, the 0-5 New York Jets are unequivocally the worst team in football.

But according to some stats, the Jets seem like a better team than their league-worst record suggests:

• Three of their five losses were by one score.
• They rank 20th in total offense and 22nd in total defense.
• Quarterback Justin Fields is off to a roaring start, throwing four touchdowns to no interceptions while posting a career-high 100.1 passer rating.

With numbers like these, it might appear that the Jets have sneakily performed better than their record, and as a result, are due for wins to start falling their way.

Unfortunately, that is not the case.

This is an 0-5 team that has played like an 0-5 team. To start racking up victories, they must play much better. Their apparently respectable stats are misleading.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the “Garbage Time Jets.”

Jets’ garbage time dominance masks their true misery

Aaron Glenn’s team has mastered the art of stat padding.

In four of their five games, the Jets trailed by multiple scores for the majority of the second half. As a result, most of their second-half plays this season were hardly “real football” and therefore should not be included in statistical evaluations. New York has amassed a ton of snaps against opponents who knew the game was over and called plays accordingly to milk the clock.

The Jets excel at maximizing these opportunities to pad their numbers. Once games are out of reach, the Jets’ offense frequently records touchdown drives against conservative defensive schemes. Defensively, they chain together stops against offenses that are just trying to run the ball and go home.

This has caused the Jets’ overall team stats to paint them as a more respectable team than they really are. When you adjust the Jets’ team stats to remove garbage time, they look every bit as bad as their 0-5 record.

From quarters 1-3, the Jets’ offense ranks 30th in Expected Points Added per play (-0.157), while the defense ranks 32nd in EPA allowed per play (0.235). Only the Bengals have a worse EPA/play margin before the fourth quarter.

These adjusted metrics provide a far more accurate description of who the Jets are as a football team than surface-level stats like “three one-score losses” or “20th in total offense and 22nd in total defense.”

Justin Fields’ stat-padding

When it comes to individual players, no Jet has benefited from garbage time more than Justin Fields. His box-score stats paint the picture of a breakout year, but if you take out garbage time, he looks like a liability.

Take a look at this comparison of Fields’ stats this year:

• Trailing by multiple scores in the 4th quarter: 24 for 36, 225 passing yards, 3 total touchdowns, 0 turnovers, 1 sack for 9 yards
• Any other situation: 47 for 70, 529 passing yards, 4 total touchdowns, 2 turnovers, 9 sacks for 84 yards

Fields has accumulated 33% of his net passing yards, 34% of his completions, and 43% of his total touchdowns with New York already down multiple scores in the final frame.

From quarters 1-3, Fields has produced just 94.5 net passing yards per game across his four starts. Yes, you read that correctly. With Fields as the starter, the Jets are averaging under 100 passing yards as a team before entering the fourth quarter.

Even if you throw in Fields’ 42.3 rushing yards per game from quarters 1-3, he is still averaging a grand total of just 136.8 yards per game before the fourth quarter. Suffice to say, it isn’t surprising that Fields has yet to win a start with that type of production.

Yet, Fields’ overall stats look pretty solid despite his minimal production through three quarters. That’s because he excels in the art of exploiting prevent defenses when the game is out of reach.

According to the analytics website RBSDM, Fields is averaging 0.316 adjusted EPA per play when the Jets’ win probability is under 2%. For perspective on how good that is, it would have been the second-best full-season mark among quarterbacks in 2024 (without applying the win probability filter), slotted directly between league MVP Josh Allen (0.332) and MVP runner-up Lamar Jackson (0.310).

A whopping one-quarter of Fields’ plays this season (39 of 156) came with the Jets having a win probability under 2%. It shows just how significant an effect his garbage-time production is having on his overall numbers.

If we exclude plays in which the Jets’ win probability was under 2%, Fields’ adjusted EPA per play drops all the way to 0.008. That ranks 27th out of 32 qualified quarterbacks in 2025 after adjusting for garbage time (min. 100 plays with a win probability of 2-98%).