Revolving Doors

Edition #1109

Good Morning ☕

If you’re a kicker trying to make a roster, your leash is extremely short. Younghoe Koo was signed last week and around 7 days later he’s looking for new employment once again.

On Tuesday the media witnessed the South Korean struggle through his set of kicks. Just over 24 hours later news spread that he was being cut.

Koo was a very good kicker, consistent and reliable. But since that hip injury he’s struggled to maintain any kind of consistency, and the #1 trait of a good kicker is consistency.

In a corresponding move the Jets signed kicker Jason Sanders who spent the first 7 years of his career in Miami. Unfortunately Sanders sustained a hip injury in pre-season and missed the entire 2025 season.

There is an irony to this whole situation.

Koo - Reliable kicker, gets placed on IR with a hip injury, struggles for form, is released by his team, signs with the Giants, is released by them and signs here.

Sanders - Reliable kicker, gets placed on IR with a hip injury, is released by this team, signs with the Giants, is released by them and signs here.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.

Harbaugh actually cut Sanders because he felt his kicking style was not suited to the winds that we get at MetLife.

So I went back and had a look at every game he’s played at MetLife (8) and he’s gone 17-21 on FGs which is good for 81% and 18-19 on extra points (95%).

That 81% is worse than his career average of 84.6% but not by a long shot.

Sanders when healthy has been an extremely reliable leg. He carries an 84.6% success rate on field goals including three years where he hit 90% or higher. He’s hit nearly 70% of his kicks from 50+ over his career and he’s 98-102 (96%) on kick of 40 yards or less. Basically over his career he’s made the kicks he should make and made a high clip at 50+ too.

My concern is that a kicker who’s that reliable got waived from his long-term team, got picked up by the Giants and handed $300k in guarantees, only to be waived pretty quickly. We’ll see how he does with the Jets, but right now the advantage in the kicking competition goes to Cade York, because he’s the only guy not to be cut this off-season.

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NEWS & NOTES 🗞️

• Da’Quan Felton barely had time for a cup of tea with the Jets, 48 hours after signing him they waived him. Frank Reich obviously saw enough over the first two practices to know that he was never making this roster. I’ll hand it to the Jets, they don’t stall when they know the fit isn’t right.

• Remember Ashtyn Davis, he was often not a popular name around these parts. But he’s signed on with the San Francisco 49ers on a one year deal.

• David Onyemata gave a good interview with the Jets official site around what he takes pride in and the keys to playing the run in the NFL as a DL:

  • “It’s about taking pride in the little details. Over the years I was fortunate to have someone like [Saints DL coach] Ryan Nielsen early in my career, and he helped me with those details. Everybody bought into it, and once you start seeing the results, it’s like why go back to anything else?”

• Harrison Phillips reached out to every defensive rookie after the draft and he said the responses really surprised him.

  • “I text them and welcome them to the organization so they have a contact from someone here that can kind of welcome them,” Phillips said. “The responses that I got back were different than almost any other year [and] I’ve done this for nine years now. Like it was not just a like of a message or a ‘Nice to meet you bro,’ like really nice written messages and I was like, ‘Hey this is a little different. This hasn’t happened every place I’ve been.’ “

• He also went out of his way yesterday to highlight David Bailey:

  • “I’ve really liked what [Bailey] can do as an athlete on the field, not just with his hand down in the dirt, but the different varieties you can do with somebody who can also run and change direction at an elite level,” Phillips said. “Obviously, he can chase down quarterbacks, but there might be some other players he can chase down in space which really helps you.”

• Rich Cimini had a really interesting note on Brendan Sorsby on the Jets Collective podcast:

  • “I talked to a scout about him just based on pure football ability, forgetting about the off-the-field stuff. The scout I talked to, who studied him very closely during last season, thought he was a third-day draft pick. Somewhere between the fourth and sixth round. He wasn’t overly impressed with him. He’s listed at 6-3, [but] the scout told me he’s probably closer to 6 foot or 6-1. Good athlete, but kind of reckless when he runs with the ball a little bit. He put up some good passing numbers, but this scout said they have that guy on the roster – Cade Klubnik. That’s who he compared him to. Now this scout is not affiliated with the Jets, I just want to make that perfectly clear, this was a guy who was independently scouting and saw this guy,”

• Cimini also spoke about the ripple effect on the Jets due to the Garrett trade:

  • “Today’s two blockbuster trades will send ripples through the NFL, and the Jets will be one of the teams affected. No. 1, Myles Garrett to the Rams, in return, the Browns get a package that includes a 2027 first-round pick. That means they join the Jets as the only two teams with multiple first-round picks in the talent-rich 2027 draft. The Jets have three first-rounders, the Browns have two. Now the Browns are potential competition for a coveted quarterback,”