4 NY Jets we can safely call busts after the 2023 season

2. Carl Lawson, DE, NY Jets

The Carl Lawson signing made a ton of sense for the Jets at the time. The former Cincinnati Bengals pass rusher was coming off a season in which he finished fourth in the entire NFL with 64 pressures.

Lawson was legitimately one of the best pass rushers in the NFL when the Jets signed him, hence the three-year, $45 million price tag attached to his shiny new contract. The early results were promising.

Lawson was the Jets' best player in his first training camp with the team and looked to be on the verge of stardom. That was until he tragically suffered a torn Achilles in a joint summer practice with the Green Bay Packers.

He would return to appear in all 17 games the following season, but it was clear that Lawson wasn't his same pre-injury self. The Jets had an opportunity to release Lawson in the offseason and save $15 million in the process.

They passed, instead restructuring his contract to push dead money into the future. The Jets believed that a healthy Lawson two years removed from a torn Achilles could still play a significant part in their defensive line rotation in 2023.

They were wrong. Lawson suffered a back injury in the summer and was once again not healthy this past season. He appeared in just six games and was mostly a "healthy" scratch in a loaded defensive line room.

It's a downright shame that we never got to see a fully healthy Carl Lawson with the Jets. The move made sense on paper, but there's no other way to frame this — it was a bust of a signing.