Younghoe Koo is signing with the New York Jets for the 2026 campaign, a move reported by Connor Hughes of SNY.tv that adds a veteran leg to New York's offseason competition.
Koo, 31, finished the 2025 season with brief stops in Atlanta and New York and completed six of his nine field-goal attempts and 13 of his 14 extra-point tries across six regular season games. Those six games came in one appearance with the Atlanta Falcons and five games with the New York Giants, and he will now have a chance to compete for the Jets' kicking duties against Cade York and Lenny Krieg.
The raw numbers from 2025 tell the immediate story: one game in Atlanta and five with the Giants, and a split performance that included four of his six field-goal attempts and 11 of his 12 extra-point attempts while in New York. The Giants waived him in December after he missed a pair of field goals against the Washington Commanders; Atlanta had benched and then waived him earlier in the season after a missed, would‑have‑been game‑tying field goal in Week 1 against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Koo's arrival in New Jersey is tied directly to a larger arc in his career. He began his NFL journey with the Los Angeles Chargers, had a stint in the AAF, and then returned to the league in 2019 as a member of the New England Patriots' practice squad before signing with Atlanta. He parlayed that chance into a seven-year run with the Falcons and a career peak in 2020, when he earned a Pro Bowl nod, posted a 94.9 percent field-goal rate and led the NFL in scoring with 144 points.
The context matters: the Jets are adding a kicker who has been one of the league's most reliable scorers in a prior season but whose recent form has been uneven. Koo remained Atlanta's full-time kicker until the 2025 season and then endured a rapid sequence of setbacks that saw him benched the week after the Week 1 miss and waived the following week. Atlanta's move sent him to New York, where five appearances for the Giants ended with those missed kicks in December.
The tension for the Jets is straightforward. Koo arrives with a high-water mark—his 2020 Pro Bowl season and league-leading 144 points—but also a recent string of misses that cost him jobs in Atlanta and New York in 2025. That contradiction is the practical question for the Jets' roster builders: are they betting on a veteran bounce-back based on past peak performance, or are they adding short-term depth while evaluating younger options?
What happens next is the immediate storyline for New York: Koo will enter an open competition with York and Krieg through spring practices and into training camp. The Jets will see whether Koo can translate his overall experience and his 2020 résumé into consistency now that he is 31 and seeking to re-establish himself after a turbulent 2025 that included appearances for two teams and a total of six regular season games.
This signing reads less like a guaranteed solution and more like a low‑risk, potentially high‑reward gamble for the Jets. Koo's record shows he can be an elite scorer; his 2025 arc shows how quickly a kicker's margin for error can evaporate. For Koo personally, the move is straightforward: another roster chance, another competition, and a clear line to a verdict on whether he can return to the form that produced a Pro Bowl nod and a league scoring title.
