For a few months last season, Jowon Briggs looked like one of the best finds of the Jets’ year. Now, seven games into 2026, the picture has changed fast.
Briggs’ rise in 2025 was real enough. The Cincinnati product, a seventh-round pick by the Browns in the 2024 NFL draft, came to New York in a Day 3 pick swap just before the season began.
He was supposed to be a depth piece. Injuries and the Quinnen Williams trade pushed him into a much bigger role, and he took it.
From Weeks 10-18, Briggs ranked seventh among defensive tackles with 29 total pressures and third in pass-rush win rate at 19.4%.
That kind of finish made it easy to imagine him as a long-term piece for the Jets, especially with the 2026 opener still ahead and his age not yet a concern at 25. But the way the summer unfolded told a different story. In camp and preseason, Briggs was usually working with the second and third-string defensive lines while T’Vondre Sweat, David Onyemata and Harrison Phillips sat ahead of him on the depth chart.
The regular season has backed that up.
Briggs opened the year buried, playing only 20% of the defensive snaps in Week 1 and ranking fourth among Jets defensive tackles. Then Onyemata went down in Week 2, and Briggs was shoved back into a featured role. He played 59% of the snaps and answered with one of his better games as a Jet: three run stops, one strip-sack and a QB hurry that forced an incompletion.
At that point, it looked like he might be ready to carry over the momentum from the end of 2025. Instead, the last five games have shown the Jets’ concerns were not misplaced.
With Onyemata on injured reserve because of a groin injury, Briggs has logged a 57% snap share over the last five games. That extended run has exposed the limits in his game.
Against the run, he has been pushed around too often, frequently giving up multiple yards at the line of scrimmage and getting too aggressive when he should be holding his spot and staying disciplined in his gap. Jets X-Factor’s Robby Sabo has repeatedly pointed out his movability in the run game.
That weakness has shown up on the scoreboard too. After holding opponents under 70 rushing yards in each of the first two games, the Jets’ run defense has sagged badly over the last five weeks, allowing 152.6 rushing yards per game.
Even more troubling, those yards are coming in steady chunks rather than a handful of explosive runs. Since Week 3, the Jets are surrendering a league-worst 9.2 rushing first downs per game.
The timing lines up directly with Briggs’ expanded role.
The bigger issue is that he has not offset the run defense problems with the kind of pass-rush production he had a year ago. Last season’s late surge now looks like a distant memory.
After posting a 19.4% pass-rush win rate from Weeks 10-18 of 2025, Briggs has seen that number fall to 6.3% this year, according to Pro Football Focus. That ranks 58th out of 80 qualified defensive tackles with at least 100 pass-rush snaps.
The production dip shows up in the weekly numbers too. In 2025, Briggs reached at least three total pressures in six of his final nine games.
This season, he has not had a single three-pressure game. He has finished with just one pressure in five of his seven games.
For a defensive tackle playing more than half the snaps, that is a bad combination. And the Jets’ defense feels it.
The unit has been better when Briggs is on the sideline. According to RayCarp, New York allows +0.05 EPA per play with Briggs on the field and -0.09 when he is off, a gap that lines up with the difference between the league’s 25th-ranked defense and its fourth-ranked one.
That -0.14 swing in defensive EPA per play with Briggs off the field versus on ranks 204th out of 251 defensive linemen leaguewide.
There is still time for Briggs to flip the script and reclaim some of the upside he showed at different points of his Jets run. But so far in 2026, he has looked more like the player the Jets believed they were getting on a Day 3 swap than the one who flashed a breakout stretch late last season.
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