349 Yards and 19 Points: The Jets' Red-Zone Crisis Is Now the Whole Season

The New York Jets left Gillette Stadium with 349 yards of offense, four scoring drives and a 26-19 loss. That sentence is the 2026 season in miniature. Through six games, Aaron Glenn's team is averaging 18.7 points per game while opponents average 20.3 — a minus-1.7 point differential that reads like bad luck but is really a finishing problem.

The number that explains it: the Jets have converted just 25.0 percent of their red-zone trips into touchdowns. That is the lowest mark in the NFL, and not by a rounding error. Cleveland sits next at 35.3 percent, Pittsburgh at 38.1. In Week 6 against New England, the Jets' red-zone touchdown rate was zero. Sanders was perfect — 42, 36 and 40 yards, part of a 12-of-13 season on field goals (92.3 percent) — but three points is not how you beat a division opponent that scored three Drake Maye touchdown passes.

The fourth-down profile compounds it. The Jets ran six non-kicking fourth-down plays in the season's first six weeks and converted three. Sunday's losses were the painful kind: Braelon Allen stuffed for one yard on fourth-and-2, then Geno Smith stopped for no gain on a fourth-and-1 sneak inside New England territory. The process isn't cowardly — this staff goes for it — but the short-yardage execution has been dismal, and the season-long rushing average sits at 94.5 yards per game with 83.0 over the last five.

Smith himself is not the problem, which is the strangest part of this team. He's completing 68.9 percent for 1,336 yards with seven touchdowns and one interception, a 101.8 passer rating. His completion rate over expected sits at plus-4.6 percent, and he's throwing to an average intended air depth of 7.1 yards. The issue is volume of pressure: 19 sacks taken, a 9.7 percent sack rate, four fumbles, and a pressure rate near 24 percent. The offensive line has had moments; Smith's internal clock has not always helped. And the supporting cast has been gutted — Breece Hall and Adonai Mitchell were both ruled out in Week 6, Mitchell needed a procedure on his hand, and rookie Omar Cooper only just returned. The Week 7 injury report is not out yet, so the picture there remains unresolved.

The defense is doing enough to keep this respectable. Seventeen sacks, a plus-4 turnover differential, and a home split allowing 16.0 points per game. But the pass rush vanished against a Patriots line missing three starters — zero sacks, four quarterback hits — which is the kind of detail that turns a winnable game into a 26-19 loss. Glenn is now 0-7 against AFC East opponents.

The context is a 2-4 record that is two plays per game away from 4-2, in a division where Buffalo is 5-1 and New England 4-2. The underlying metrics see it: this team has climbed from 31st to 22nd in the site's power ratings over five weeks, sitting at minus-6.2 with a rating that is nearly three points better than the market's view.

Week 7 brings Miami (0-5, 14.0 points per game) to MetLife. That is the cleanest possible laboratory for the red-zone problem. The Jets don't need a new identity — they need to turn 349 yards into thirty points.