New York Jets: Five best value draft picks since 1977
2.Kyle Clifton
No not David Harris. We said at the top that the criteria was third round or lower and Harris was selected in the second. Our number two selection comes from way back in 1984. Kyle Clifton was selected in the third round that year and rapidly became one of the top Jets in team history. He never was selected to a Pro Bowl but one could argue that he should have been. He should have been more than once.
Clifton didn’t start from day one but he did mid-year and that started a run of 100+ tackle seasons every season he was in New York and healthy. From 1984-1993 he was only below 100 tackles once and that was because he missed games. He posted 113 tackles as a rookie, and his top ceiling was a whopping 199 tackles in 1990. Clifton was a tackling machine through a lot of lean years for the Jets.
Clifton was essentially the Jets answer to Harry Carson. Clifton didn’t make the flashy plays like Mark Gastineau and the guys up front. Same goes for Carson who didn’t garner the splash plays the way Lawrence Taylor did. What Cifton did was all the dirty work. If the Jets needed a tackle to be made you could find #59 somewhere near the football. He just got overshadowed because the team, for the most part in that era, was very bad.
But Kyle Clifton was a great pick. We go way back for the number one choice.