Mason Taylor gave the Jets a training camp clip worth replaying Tuesday, and it came with one of the team’s biggest veteran additions on the wrong end of it.
In a video posted by the Jets, the second-year tight end rose over three-time first-team All-Pro safety Minkah Fitzpatrick and reached above his head to snag a deep throw from Geno Smith. It was the kind of grab that turns a routine camp rep into the day’s highlight.
That matchup has become a familiar one this summer. Fitzpatrick, brought in from the Miami Dolphins in a March trade, has spent plenty of camp working against Taylor, the son of Jason Taylor. The two arrived in New York from very different points in their careers, but they’ve ended up in the same kind of daily battle the Jets wanted when they built out the roster with veterans around a young core.
Taylor has already shown he can win in tight windows. As a rookie, he caught 11 of 14 contested targets, a 78.6% rate that ranked second among qualified tight ends behind only George Kittle, according to Pro Football Focus.
Beating Fitzpatrick on a jump ball only raised the difficulty level. PFF credited Fitzpatrick with five forced incompletions on 13 man-coverage targets in 2025, a 38.5% forced incompletion rate that ranked second among safeties with at least 10 man-coverage targets.
“Iron sharpens iron” hardly gets more accurate than this specific scenario. You have one of the league’s top two contested-catch tight ends of 2025 going up for a jump ball against one of the league’s top two on-ball-playmaking safeties in man coverage.
This time, Taylor won the rep. For the Jets, that’s exactly the sort of payoff they were hoping for when they surrounded their younger players with established veterans who can push them in camp.
The real test comes later. If Taylor is making catches like that against Fitzpatrick now, the Jets have every reason to believe those same plays can show up once the games count.
In Other News...
Jets Secondary Buzz Could Force A Real Defensive Change
A few weeks into camp and the preseason, the Jets have started to show where some of their defensive experimentation could lead. Andre Cisco and Dane Belton have both flashed enough to put themselves in line for bigger roles, and Cisco helped his case further with an interception in a recent win. For a secondary built around versatility, that kind of depth can give Aaron Glenn more ways to mix and match personnel without losing speed on the field.
The next question is how far Glenn wants to push it once the games count. The Jets are expected to feature Cisco and Belton more prominently, potentially in three-safety looks alongside Minkah Fitzpatrick, which would be a notable tweak to the defensive packages. If those camp and preseason impressions carry over, the scheme could shift in a way that makes this secondary even harder to read, and thats the sort of adjustment opponents will have to account for quickly. [Read more 🡒]
Jets Still Have Two Roster Holes Cutdown Day Could Finally Fix
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The other possibility is Aidan OConnell, the Raiders quarterback who could become available and might fit as a veteran backup for the Jets. For a team trying to tighten up its depth before opening week, those are the kinds of pragmatic additions that can quietly matter, even if they do not change the headlines - at least not right away. [Read more 🡒]
Jets Enter Cutdown Week With One Big Question About This Defense
Training camp is done and cutdown week is here, which means the Jets are moving from evaluation mode to the business of sorting out the final roster and practice squad. One of the first notable decisions came at kicker, where Cade York was waived after losing the competition to Jason Sanders, another sign that the last few days before roster finalization can reshape more than just the depth chart.
On the defensive side, the bigger conversation is about whether the blueprint will translate once the games count. The Jets have been clear about the style they want to play: disrupt quarterbacks and receivers, attack the ball and keep explosive plays off the board. That approach is supposed to lift a unit that struggled badly in the rankings a season ago, and the real question now is whether the pieces they keep through cutdowns can make that vision look a lot more like reality. [Read more 🡒]