As I noted in this week’s Studs and Duds report reviewing the loss to the Eagles on Thursday night, this was the first loss of the year that really didn’t make it into the ‘moral victory’ column despite the fact that it was the fourth time so far this fall that a Giants loss wasn’t decided until the game’s final minute. In fact, we were still tossing and turning past 4 AM still replaying over and over and over again all the close plays that could have changed the result at the end.
The sun did still come up the next morning and we came to accept the realization that whether the Giants were 1-6 or 2-5, the fact they weren’t going anywhere this year and that the only reason two wins might have mattered was because the NFC East is so woefully woeful. Fact is the Giants are in the midst of a long, slow, painful rebuild the goal of which is not to win the division with 5-6 wins. The goal ultimately, of course, is to build a team capable of posting double-digit win seasons on a regular basis and going deep into the playoffs year-after-year.
Which obviously ain’t happening this year. Indeed, with the team at 1-6 with only a faint hope of contending this year even in the sad-sack division, it may not be the worst idea to start looking to the future in general, and the 2021 draft in particular. Needless to say, at this point in time, we don’t have any idea which player the Giants are actually going to take with their first pick this year; heck, we don’t have a clue even what position or positions they’ll be focussed in on this coming April. At the same time, though, it’s not a bad idea to at least start looking at what options they might ultimately be looking at this spring. And the one thing we can be pretty certain of is that the Giants are going to have some interesting options.
Of course, what options are actually available when the Giants get on the clock this coming April will be largely dictated by where they ultimately pick. Here are some random thoughts on what those options might be depending on what range the Giants select in.
Picks 1-3: If the Giants do end up with one of the first 2-3 picks – and they’d have the 2nd overall if the draft were this week – its likely going to be all about the QBs in a QB-rich draft. In fact, there is more than one Giant fan secretly dreaming about ending up with the #1 pick overall where they’d have a chance to take Clemson QB Trevor Lawrence, the consensus top prospect this year. Indeed, it would be pretty much a no-brainer for the Giants to select Lawrence if they did end up with the top pick, even after taking Daniel Jones with the 6th pick just two years ago as the Clemson star is generally considered to be the best candidate at the position since at least Andrew Luck in 2012. However, we doubt the Giants ultimately end up with the top pick. Fact is the Giants are playing close games just about every week and the odds are that if that trend continues, they’ll eventually win a couple or three of those types of games and play themselves out of the top pick.
The more realistic scenario might be that the Giants end up with the 2nd or 3rd pick Justin Fields of Ohio State was still on the board. Fields is a really good prospect, but not in the same class as Lawrence and as such we don’t see the Giants giving up on Daniel Jones after just two seasons for a guy who still has some ‘project’ in him. At the same time, there may be as many as ten teams out there that do have greater needs at QB and may offer the Giants yet an avenue to stockpile extra draft picks.
Picks 3-7: While this is clearly a QB-heavy draft with the likes of Lawrence and Fields at the top of the board, there is also a very talented top tier of non-QB prospects including Oregon LT Penei Sewell, Penn State LB Micah Parsons, LSU WR Ja’Marr Chase and Miami DE Greg Rousseau. And while the term ‘generational’ is way overused these days, all four of these guys are considered to be as good as any prospect to come along at their respective position in the last little while.
Sewell, for example, is a 6-6, 330-pound dancing bear who won the Outland Trophy as the nation’s top offensive lineman as a true sophomore last fall. And while Sewell will certainly have his supporters among the Giant faithful (some of whom I swear think the OL is THE only position that actually matters) it’s just hard to see the Giants going back there after devoting the better part of their 2020 draft resources to the position. Of course, the Giants will have to consider that Andrew Thomas has struggled this year, but they are also likely to be willing to give Thomas and Matt Peart a little more time to prove themselves. Plus at some point, you just have to invest in the impact positions that actually impact games.
On first blush, Penn State’s Parsons, a fast, explosive OLB, looks like he’d be a perfect fit for the Giants’ 3-4 defense. However, that assumes the Giants actually play a lot of 3-4. They actually don’t. Indeed, because so many teams run 3-WR sets these days, the Giants are actually in what amounts to a 4-2-5 far more than they ever play a traditional 3-4. One of the problems the Giants’ defense currently has is that when they go to the 4-2 look, they have to push their undersized OLBs up into the line of scrimmage where they become undersized DEs. And while he’s many things, at a somewhat bulked up 6-3, 245, Parsons isn’t all that big for that kind of role. As such, in a 4-2 with the Giants he’d almost have to line up as one of the inside LBs where he’d no doubt be very good as he can make plays in both directions, but that may not be the best positional value for a close to top 5 pick.
Again, we don’t have a clue who the Giants would actually take, but when we did our latest mock last week, our choice for the Giants with their first round pick came down to Chase versus Rousseau. In the end, we pencilled in the LSU receiver who led the country with almost 1,800 receiving yards and 20 TDs in 2019 as he averaged a remarkable 21 yards per on 84 catches playing in the tough SEC West.
In ticketing a receiver like Chase we think the Giants really need to figure out which unit they want to try and win football games with, either their passing attack, pass rush or coverage units. And right now, the easiest to build on will be the offensive skill set. It would also be the most logical fit with what they have done in the past few years in adding Daniel Jones, Saquon and the young OTs. As well, we really think that 2021 will be the make-or-break year for Jones, and it would be nice if the Giants could get a look at him working with a legit NFL offense around him before they had to make a decision like that. In that vein, if the Giants were to draft a speedy, big-play wideout like Chase, we’d love to see them add a quality two-way TE like Penn State’s Pat Freiermuth in the second round and follow that up with yet another receiver with either speed or size with their 3rd or 5th round picks.
Since we made that mock, though, we have started to look more and more at The U’s Rousseau, who reminds of a young Jason Pierre-Paul. Rousseau is a 6-7, 260-pound athletic freak with an explosive first step, long arms and 4.65-closing speed. Like JPP, though, he’s very raw as he only played one full year with the Hurricanes. What a year, though, as he posted 15.5 sacks last season, second only to Ohio State’s Chase Young, the 2nd pick overall at this past April’s draft.
And in taking a second and third look at Rousseau, it’s not so much that he’s that much better a prospect than the others, it’s just that elite edge rushers are just so darn hard to find. If the Giants were in fact to select Rousseau with their first round pick this April, they’d still have a chance to upgrade their receiver corps and/or coverage unit, at least to some extent, from a combination of later draft picks and/or free agents. Take a WR or DB in the opening round, and the pass-rush next year is likely to be pretty much what you see now.
Picks 7-12: We hear some snickering out there, but right now the top of the 2021 selection order is really jammed up. Indeed, had the Giants held on and won in Philly last week, they would have dropped all the way down to the 10th pick. And while there is something of a drop-off to the next level, there still some really good prospects out there in this range, which could be an important consideration if the Giants were to think of trading down. For the record, that second-tier would include players like CBs Patrick Surtain of Alabama and Ohio State’s Shaun Wade, WRs Rashon Bateman of Minnesota and Alabama’s Jaylen Waddle (although his status is up in the air a bit after he suffered a season-ending foot injury this week), Florida TE Kyle Pitts, OTs Sam Cosmi of Texas, North Dakota State’s Dillon Radunz, Alex Leatherwood of Alabama, and Walker Little of Stanford.
Second round: This year’s draft looks to be reasonably deep with a number of interesting potential prospects that should be there early in the second round including DEs Joe Tyron of Washington, Pitt’s Patrick Jones and Jayson Qweh of Penn State, CB s Paulson Adebo of Stanford and Florida State’s Asante Samuel, WRs Terrace Marshall of LSU and 6-4 Nico Collins of Michigan, and Michigan OT Jalen Mayfield among others.
Decisions, decisions! Fortunately, we still have 185 days to try and figure it out.
