Landing top-tier players in free agency is always a difficult task, even for teams like the New York Jets who have a significant amount of cap space. The task becomes even more difficult when you’re targeting high-impact positions such as edge rusher.
Teams don’t typically tend to allow their top players to just walk and become free agents for nothing. Essentially, if a player hits the open market, it’s because something happened where they weren’t a good fit with their old team.
While that isn’t always the fault of the player, more often than not you aren’t going to find great players in free agency simply because they’re all already under contract with NFL teams.