NFL Draft: Tom Rock details why the Jets (and their next QB) are among the winners
Jets fans cheer during the second round of the NFL Draft on Friday in Pittsburgh. Credit: AP/Sue Ogrocki
A few weeks ago, Aaron Glenn was laughed at when he said Geno Smith would deliver the Jets to the “promised land.”
That’s still an absurd thought, although bravo to Glenn for having that kind of confidence in his quarterback no matter how misguided it probably will turn out to be.
Instead of just relying on Smith to bring them to that lofty height, though, the Jets actually did something in this draft that will probably benefit their quarterback of the future, a player who is likely to be selected in the 2027 draft when the Jets will have three first-round picks at their disposal and, unlike this year, plenty of enticing options at the position.
By selecting tight end Kenyon Sadiq at 16th overall and then trading up to take wide receiver Omar Cooper Jr. at 30th on Thursday, the Jets have compiled a sweet little assemblage of talent. Pair those players with the ones already in the fold — Garrett Wilson, two strong young offensive tackles, Mason Taylor, and perhaps even Breece Hall if a long-term deal can be worked out with him in the coming weeks — and wouldn’t you know it the Jets have become a bit of a “promised land” destination for a quarterback themselves.
Like an expectant mother bird, general manager Darren Mougey has gone into nesting mode to prepare for the blessed future arrival.
In the meantime, Smith gets to take the new toys for a test run in 2026. He’ll almost certainly give the Jets better production from the most important position in the sport than they suffered through last season. He'll probably even win more games than the team that hasn’t had an over-.500 record since 2015 has seen in quite a while. He may even — gasp! — get them into the playoffs for the first time since the 2010 season.
But make no mistake:
This draft hasn’t been about helping Smith fulfill his potential. It’s about setting his eventual replacement up for immediate success.
We don’t know who that player will be, and neither do the Jets. It’s probably some guy who is just wrapping up his spring practices on campus and dreaming about winning a national championship or Heisman more than he is focused on becoming the next Jets quarterback of the future. It might even be Sadiq’s former quarterback at Oregon, Dante Moore, who returned to school for one more year even though he probably would have been on the Jets’ radar had he come out in this draft.
When we look back on this 2026 NFL Draft, that currently-untapped player will likely be regarded as one of the biggest winners to come out of the weekend.
Here are a few other winners — and losers — from the just-completed NFL Draft:
LOSER: The Steelers
Pittsburgh showed up strong in hosting the draft, including a record crowd of 320,000 for the first round. The Steelers? Not so much.
They were embarrassed when they were on the phone with USC wide receiver Makai Lemon, the player they were expecting to select 21st overall, only to have the Eagles trade up and grab him at No. 20 in the most cringy call-waiting changeover in NFL history.
These things happen a lot toward the end of the draft as teams try to work potential free agents or get a jump on picks only to have them evaporate off the board, but for it to occur in the first round — and in the televised green room at the draft taking place outside their own stadium — was a real kick to the gut of one of the NFL’s model organizations.
It’s not bad enough that the Steelers are being held hostage waiting to see if Aaron Rodgers wants to come back and play for them next year, now they don’t have one of the receivers they hoped they’d have for whomever their quarterback winds up being. The Steelers tried to play it as if everything went according to plan and they wound up selecting offensive lineman Max Iheanachor at No. 21, but he (and they and the rest of us) will spend the rest of his career knowing he was their second choice.
WINNERS . . . BUT ALSO LOSERS: The NFC East
Was there a division that had a better first round than the one the Giants play in? Of course that only makes the competition more fierce. For instance: The Giants wound up with two of the highest-ranked players in their draft board in Arvell Reese and Francis Mauigoa at picks 5 and 10, but the two players many felt they could have selected — and perhaps should have taken in Sonny Styles and Caleb Downs — landed with the Commanders and Cowboys.
That kind of proximity to passed-over talent made even Giants receiver Malik Nabers fret. “I would rather get him then play against him,” Nabers lamented of Downs, the safety from Ohio State, on a Bleacher Report live stream of the first round hosted by Micah Parsons. “Downs was there twice . . . We just traded [Dexter Lawerence], you need you need interior D-line [help]. When you eliminate something from there you have to put something in the back end to be secure.”
Throw in the two receivers the Eagles added and their addition of edge rusher Jonathan Greenard in a trade from the Vikings and all four teams in the division got demonstrably better. The NFC East selected four of the top 11 players taken and six of the 32 first-rounders overall. It’ll make the division better, more competitive, and more entertaining.
LOSERS: Players taking pay cuts
Because of the arrival of big NIL packages in college, particularly at quarterback where schools often pay millions for a star at the position, there were certainly players who will be slated to earn less in the NFL than they did in the NCAA. Those college “salaries” aren’t made public and are rarely disclosed, but there were reports that Carson Beck made over $4 million playing for the University of Miami last season. He was drafted Friday by the Cardinals at the top of the third round, 65th overall, a spot that projects for a $7.4 million four-year contract with a $1.35 base salary in 2026 per Spotrac.com. Later picks such as Drew Allar (76th overall to Pittsburgh) and others will make even less.
There is still life-changing money to be had, especially in the first round. First overall pick Fernando Mendoza’a rookie deal is slotted to top $57 million, including nearly $10.5 million in 2026. And 13th pick Ty Simpson’s contract with the Rams figures to come in at about $25.4 million total, including $4.6 million in the first year. But the minimum salary for a draft pick in 2026 is $915,120. In college that’s backup-level cash. NFL executives certainly don’t mind. They no longer need worry how their new players will react to the big money the league provides along with the temptations and responsibilities that accompany it because in most cases the rookies have already dealt with those challenges. Still, it’s a strange relatively new dynamic that will take some getting used to by players and observers alike.
WINNER: Jaxson Dart
Usually when teams try to build around a young quarterback they draft offensive players, and the Giants certainly gave Dart a few of those by taking Mauigoa with the 10th overall pick and trading up into the third round for big-bodied wide receiver Malachi Fields from Notre Dame. But anyone who saw the Giants play even a little bit last year knows the best way the Giants could “help Dart” is to improve the defense. They did that this weekend.
Reese, taken fifth overall, will be a versatile linebacker for the team and Colton Hood, the cornerback from Tennessee taken in the second round, was projected as a first-round player and should be a physical starter who could develop into a No. 1 at the position. Dart did just fine last season as a rookie with what he had on offense, even when that was without Nabers and Cam Skattebo most of the year. This year he’ll get them back (in some capacity) and he’ll also have the services of free agency additions Isaiah Likely at tight end and Patrick Ricard at fullback. But the Giants didn’t necessarily need to figure out how to take leads this offseason, they needed to figure out how to keep them. This draft should help them do just that.
LOSER: Matthew Stafford
It doesn’t matter how many verbal guarantees he received and what kind of extension he gets, the Rams made it clear when they picked Simpson out of Alabama as the eventual replacement for the reigning NFL MVP: The clock on your retirement starts now. Just ask Eli Manning what happened when the Giants picked Daniel Jones in 2019. His tenure as the team’s starter lasted just two more games. Now, Simpson isn’t quite as NFL ready as Jones was (or seemed to be) and it’s unlikely that the Rams will move on from Stafford as quickly as the Giants did with Manning. But it’s coming. And what’s worse for Stafford is that the pick provides him and the Rams with no first-round addition that can help them win — or even stave off the encroaching ticks and tocks that are growing louder — in 2026.
WINNER: Draft viewers
Thanks to the reduction of time between first-round picks from 10 minutes to eight, the entire opening night of the draft was wrapped up in a brisk 2 hours and 53 minutes . . . roughly the time it takes to play an NFL game. By comparison, last year’s first round lasted 3 hours and 29 minutes. As recently as 2007, when there was 15 minutes between picks, the first round lasted an unending 6 and 8minutes.
The broadcasts on both Thursday and Friday nights ended only minutes after 11 p.m. on the East coast, a perfect touchdown in television terms. There were some concerns that the condensed time limits would limit the number of trades and create rushed picks, but that was not the case (see: the Eagles-Steelers situation above). It may take a year or two for the TV crews to get used to the new pace; they were at times two entire picks behind the live action on the broadcasts while they yapped about it over each selection and each prediction. But for those watching it the normally interminable process felt more like an action movie than a period drama, and that’s good for football.
LOSER: Giants’ image
As great as it was to see always respected president and CEO John Mara, who is fighting cancer, publicly involved in the draft process, whether it was in the team’s war room or posing for photos with the first-round picks, it was overshadowed by the cringiness from seeing his partner Steve Tisch in the same environment.
The league and team have tried to distance themselves from him in the fallout from the disclosure of his tawdry emails included documents released among the Jeffrey Epstein files; NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell went so far as to say bluntly that Tisch and his two siblings are “no longer owners” of the their half of the franchise at last month’s league meetings after transferring the stake they inherited from their father Bob Tisch to their children.
But Tisch was practically front and center nearly every time the broadcast cameras cut to the Giants’ headquarters throughout the first three rounds. "He's the chairman of the team, and he's in the draft room like he is every year,” Giants general manager Joe Schoen said when asked about his boss.
The Giants seemed careful to crop Tisch out of any of their in-house publicity shots, even in the background of the many photos and videos they published on their website and social media, but it’s clear from his literally prominent seat at the table that Tisch is still very much a major voice in team business. His overt presence shows a deafness to his public status and perception.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
