EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — A 41-year-old kicker wearing a hoodie, dad jeans and a plain black cap leaned against a wall in the New York Jets’ locker room, waiting for a 36-year-old quarterback in a jean jacket to finish talking. The Jets don’t win Sunday without these two old men, outliers in a very young locker room.
Nick Folk has been kicking in the NFL for so long that he actually crossed paths with his head coach one summer with the Dallas Cowboys.
“I played with Nick,” Aaron Glenn said. “That’s crazy.”
On Saturday at walkthrough, Adonai Mitchell called out to quarterback Tyrod Taylor in between plays and asked him when he graduated high school. Taylor told him, 2007.
“I was 5 years old!” Mitchell said.
The Jets have one of the youngest rosters in the NFL — no team has given more snaps to first- and second-year players — and in the midst of a lost season, the performance of veterans like Taylor and Folk won’t matter much in the long run. Whether they’re here next year or not, odds are they won’t be part of the team when the Jets finally fulfill Glenn’s vision and turn things around. But they have wisdom to impart. Things they’ve seen. Wars won, battles lost. Sunday was a battle won — the kind of win the now-3-9 Jets haven’t had much success finding in the last year or two. The 27-24 victory over the Atlanta Falcons featured clutch late-game performances; a quarterback finding ways to make plays even as he had trouble picking himself off the ground; and a kicker, practically perfect all season, nailing a 56-yarder to clinch a victory over a team that needed it much more than them.
There were other moments, other players who provided something worth building on. When Folk’s field goal found its way through the uprights, the Jets celebrated as if they’d won something meaningful. The meaning came more in how they won it.
“It’s more than just the win that I’m looking at,” Glenn said. “I look at: These guys never quit. They get bashed. Everybody on this team gets bashed for everything. And it’s OK, because we know exactly what we’re trying to do. And we’re going to continue to just block out all the noise and keep our focus straight ahead on that vision that we got on what we’re trying to be as a team.”
Taylor might not be part of that vision, but a young receiver he connected with Sunday will be. These are some of the building blocks, however small, that Glenn will need.
Mitchell was watching film with Daniel Jones at the Colts’ facility Nov. 4 when he was told he’d been traded to the Jets. Coincidentally, he was watching Falcons film — the team the Colts were playing that week. Mitchell was stunned, but once the shock wore off, he saw the opportunity. It was a chance to put the past in the past, move on from his up-and-down time in Indianapolis, where his signature moment came when he nearly scored a touchdown earlier this year against the Rams, but instead let go of the ball too soon and fumbled it through the end zone for a touchback and a turnover.
He thought about that as he crossed the plane of the end zone Sunday — the ball, importantly, still in his hand — for his first touchdown in the NFL.
“I’d say the ups and downs play with your confidence a little bit,” Mitchell said. “I always knew who I can be, but it always came down to me. Whether it was finishing or being locked in on the details, my time in Indy taught me how much the little things matter.”
He’s still learning. There are times where Mitchell and John Metchie — the two receivers the Jets acquired at the trade deadline — still find themselves figuring out where they’re supposed to be. There were moments Sunday, running back Breece Hall said, when a play would be called that Mitchell and Metchie hadn’t repped in practice yet; they’d have to ask Taylor where to be. And yet, Mitchell found himself in the right place, at the right time, all afternoon.
In the third quarter, Taylor was hit after completing a 13-yard pass to Hall and was slow to get up. The next play offensive coordinator Tanner Engstrand called involved a couple of players motioning. It took Taylor a few extra seconds to gather himself; Hall was worried they wouldn’t get the play off in time, so he told everybody to “just get lined up.”
“Then (Taylor) says: set hut, set hut. I see the ball go up in the air and I’m like: All right, we scored.”
Mitchell had gotten behind Falcons cornerback Mike Hughes, so Taylor launched a pass (59 yards in the air, per NextGen). As Mitchell adjusted, Hughes fell, Mitchell caught it and then coasted past the goal line for a touchdown. Taylor said it was a play he and Mitchell had been discussing all week in practice.
“I gave AD a chance down the field and he made a great play,” Taylor said. “If you put the ball around him, he’s going to catch it.”
Mitchell also made two crucial catches in the fourth quarter to help set up Folk’s game-winning field goal and finished the afternoon with a career-best eight catches on 12 targets for 102 yards and that touchdown — no small feat against one of the NFL’s best pass defenses, which had allowed only two other 100-yard receiving performances all season. Mitchell dominated his matchup against Hughes. Seven of his receptions came against the veteran corner; according to NextGen, that is the most catches a receiver has had against one defender in the NFL this season.
This is the sort of performance the Colts envisioned when they drafted Mitchell in the second round out of Texas in 2024 — and the reason the Jets insisted Mitchell be included in the trade that sent Sauce Gardner to Indianapolis at the deadline.
“He’s here for a reason,” Glenn said. “Sometimes when these things happen, these trades happen, people (thought) that he’s a throw-in. But he was never a throw-in. He was a guy that we wanted. … I just look forward to seeing him progress as the season goes and for him coming back next year and being a huge part of what we’re doing.”
The Jets needed an infusion of talent at wide receiver in the worst way to support Garrett Wilson, who is out with a knee injury. Maybe they found it in Mitchell.
At every special teams meeting, coordinator Chris Banjo includes a slide in his presentations about belief. It’s a simple concept, sure, but it’s resonating.
“Banjo preaches buy-in, but with buy-in you gotta also stay in,” said cornerback Qwan’tez Stiggers, one of the Jets’ gunners on special teams, too. “If you believe, you’ll go out and make every play.”
It really does feel as if the Jets’ special teams unit is going out and making every play lately. Against the Browns they scored back-to-back return touchdowns, and it has long felt as if those two returners — Kene Nwangwu and Isaiah Williams — are a threat to score every time they touch the ball. Williams nearly brought another one back Sunday in the fourth quarter. He was tripped up after 83 yards on a kick return. It set up a 32-yard Folk field goal at a crucial point in the game.
Folk’s run of perfection ended Sunday — his first miss of the season came on a 55-yarder in the third quarter — but he nailed that game-winning 56-yarder, in the rainy and cold conditions at MetLife Stadium.
Austin McNamara pinned three punts inside the 10-yard line, including one inside the 5 — something he’s done on a remarkably consistent basis all season, his first in the NFL. “We call him our sniper,” Glenn said, “because he has the ability to flip the field for us at any given time.”
And then there was Stiggers. All week, Banjo preached to his coverage unit about the Falcons’ punt returner, Jamal Agnew, who had a propensity for fielding punts no matter how perilous his surroundings. Stiggers found himself in a one-on-one situation with a Falcons blocker running down the field, beat him and got to Agnew just as he fielded McNamara’s punt at the 7-yard line. Agnew dropped it, and Stiggers jumped on it.
“That returner is real ambitious inside the 10-yard line,” Stiggers said. “He fields everything inside the 10.” Stiggers forced his first turnover — only the second of the season for the Jets — against the team he watched growing up in Atlanta.
Jets players and coaches know they don’t win this game without the special teams unit, just like they wouldn’t have beaten the Browns three weeks ago, just like they wouldn’t have been in so many tightly contested losses if Banjo — who retired from playing in the NFL only in February 2023 — hadn’t built up his unit into one of the best of its kind. By most metrics, in every area, the Jets rank at or near the top of the NFL: punting, kicking, field goals, punt coverage and kick coverage. That’s nothing to sniff at — especially with how inconsistent the other units have been. Including Sunday.
“They keep us in the game,” Hall said. “They deserve the most grace.”
“I’m one of the coaches that truly believes special teams can change the momentum of a game,” Glenn said. “That’s the reason we spend so much time with it. … I believe that you need all three phases to be able to win the game, and those guys have been coming through for us damn near every game.”
On Sunday, the Jets needed Folk and McNamara, and Williams and Stiggers, to beat a 4-8 Falcons team headed toward a rebuild of its own. The Jets stuck with them Sunday even as the Falcons doubled the Jets’ yardage total in the first half (172-71) and ran all over the Jets’ defense — Bijan Robinson had 142 yards and a touchdown. Tight end Kyle Pitts (seven catches for 82 yards) was often roaming wide open. The tackling was poor, and the Jets, even against a turnover-prone Kirk Cousins, failed to record an interception — continuing their run as the only team in NFL history to get this deep into a season without a pick.
On offense, Taylor battled but was far from perfect. He completed 19 of 33 passes for 172 yards and a touchdown, and scrambled for a 10-yard score in the fourth quarter, but the running game was inconsistent and the offensive line had a few ill-timed penalties. Metchie dropped three passes, and Hall, again, was largely ignored as a receiver (two catches, 8 yards). Hall said he was frustrated with the offensive operation, especially at the end of the game, when the defense forced back-to-back three-and-outs and the offense didn’t do much with either of them.
“Guys gotta know where they’re at, what the objective is and what they’re doing,” Hall said. “I feel like we could’ve been better for Tyrod.”
This is not quite a Jets team that’s ready to be a winner. Not yet. But Sunday brought a win, and it appears that in some areas, at least, they are on the right track.