The Jets may have found another useful piece on the margins in Nate Lynn, and the early signs are coming in a way few would have expected.
Lynn’s calling card has always been his pass rush. That was obvious in the preseason, first with Detroit and then again after New York scooped him up on August 18. But once the regular season arrived, the edge rusher has made his first impression with his work against the run.
That’s a pretty good development for a Jets defense that can use help in that area. Through his first three games, Lynn has logged 39 defensive snaps, including a season-high 28 against the Raiders last week when David Bailey and Joseph Ossai were out. In that stretch, he has earned a 73.2 run-defense grade from Pro Football Focus, second among Jets edge rushers behind Kingsley Enagbare’s 74.1.
The production has been small in volume but sharp in detail. On 21 run-defense snaps, Lynn has made four tackles and hasn’t missed one.
Two of those stops were charted as defensive stops, and his average depth of tackle sits at -2.0 yards. That kind of work matters on a Jets edge group that has too often been caught too far downfield before making contact.
The contrast with the rest of the unit is pretty clear. Enagbare’s average depth of tackle is 1.6 yards, which ranks 14th among 57 qualified edge rushers with at least 100 run-defense snaps.
Will McDonald is at 2.7 yards, good for 33rd, while Bailey sits at 3.8 yards, 50th. Ossai has not played enough to qualify, but his mark is 6.8.
For Lynn, the interesting part is that this early run-defense value has come before he’s really been able to show the pass-rush juice that made him such an appealing pickup in the first place.
His path to this point has been a winding one. A 2024 undrafted free agent out of William & Mary, Lynn signed with the Lions and flashed immediately in his rookie preseason, posting a sack, two quarterback hits and two hurries on just 13 pass-rush snaps.
A torn ligament in his shoulder wiped out his season. He came back strong in 2025, piling up 10 pressures on 70 pass-rush snaps across four preseason appearances and earning a 90.6 pass-rush grade from Pro Football Focus.
Detroit still waived him during final cuts. Lynn later landed on the Titans’ practice squad in November, didn’t appear in a game, signed a reserve/future deal in January and was waived in April.
When the Jets brought him in, the preseason résumé was hard to ignore. Across five preseason games before arriving in New York, Lynn had 15 pressures on 83 pass-rush snaps.
Then he got to the Jets and kept rolling, adding six more pressures and three sacks on 31 pass-rush snaps in two preseason games. Through three NFL preseasons, that put him at 21 pressures on 114 pass-rush snaps, with five sacks.
That wasn’t enough to win a roster spot, as New York kept Braiden McGregor as its EDGE5 and stashed Lynn on the practice squad. But now he’s getting his shot, and the first few outings suggest there’s something real here.
He has only one pressure so far in the regular season, and just 14 pass-rush snaps, so that side of his game remains mostly unopened. The Jets have used him on passing downs on only 36% of his defensive snaps, with 54% coming against the run and 10% in coverage.
That leaves the larger question still unanswered: how much more can Lynn give once the Jets let him loose as a pass rusher? If his run defense keeps holding up and his preseason burst starts showing up in games that count, New York may have uncovered a valuable two-way edge rusher.
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