Since the Giants finally got off the schneid with Sunday’s dramatic overtime win over the Saints in New Orleans we’ve been asked by more than one correspondent what it all means. The simple answer is that Sunday’s win proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the weeks following wins are far better than those after losses. You sleep better, your food tastes better, life is just better.
At the same time we continue to preach ‘don’t analyze to the score’ after a win just as much as we do after a loss. Indeed, we had more than one correspondent writing in saying essentially ‘finally a convincing win!’ Really! What game were they watching? The Giants won in overtime. They had to score 11 points in the final 5-6 minutes of regulation just to get to overtime; they had to kick a 47-yard FG as time expired just to get to overtime; they had to recover wildly bouncing fumbles on two of their three scoring drives including the one in OT. Heck, just winning the coin flip to start OT was huge!
Which isn’t to downplay in any way the Giants win. They made the plays; they got the breaks; they got the win whereas they just came up short the two previous weeks. In fact, one could probably make the case that the Giants were far more ‘convincing’ in the Washington game than they were in New Orleans. But welcome to the wild, wacky world of the NFL where so many games get decided in those final couple of minutes.
The reality is the Giants ‘could’ be 3-1; they ‘could’ just as easily be 0-4. If there was any justice in the world, they ‘should’ be 2-2. They are 1-3! Indeed, somebody asked after the WTF loss how long it would grate. My simple answer was ‘all season long’ because every time one looked at the record one would be saying ‘jeez, we should have one more ‘W’. And what makes it kind of critical is that the Giants are now into the hardest part of the season. Indeed, their next 6 opponents, starting with Dallas on Sunday, are a combined 17-7; indeed, the only one NOT at 3-1 is 2-2 Kansas City. Ouch!
So the goal becomes to somehow find a way to maybe hang in there and go 3-3 in the next month and a half because the schedule does get somewhat easier over the final 7 weeks when opponents have a combined 13-15 record. And the fact is that there isn’t one of the coming six opponents that the Giants can’t beat, although the odds are going to be pretty long in several of those games. Still maybe catch somebody looking ahead or taking them for granted; win a game on turnovers. It’s why we play the games.
And while it still hasn’t really shown up on the scoreboard to date, one gets the sense the Giants’ offense has the potential to evolve into a very productive group. QB Daniel Jones, for example, appears to be on the verge of emerging as one of the best young QBs in the game. And if he isn’t, he’s damn close. He just looks like a different guy in the pocket this year. The ball is coming out with authority as he just looks confident, aware and instinctive back there. In particular, where he would just sit in the pocket in his first two years and go through his progressions with everything collapsing around him, this year if his first read isn’t there, he’s sliding out and resetting in a secondary pocket.
Meanwhile, the receiver corps appears to be slowly coming together. Indeed, don’t tell anyone, but if everybody is healthy, the Giants could have one of the scariest skill position groupings in the league outside Kansas City. WR Kenny Golladay, the Giants’ prize off-season free agent acquisition, for example, looks to be getting comfortable with Jones and the Giants. He isn’t going to make many plays in the vertical game, but he’s almost impossible to cover on mid-level crossing routes because of his size. At the same time, both Darius Slayton and John Ross do have world-class sprinter speed and provide the vertical threat, while Sterling Shepard runs those exquisite underneath routes and Kadarius Toney looks like he will indeed be electric with the ball in his hands. Oh, and did we mention that Saquon looks like he still has it in space.
Put Golladay and Slayton on the outside, Shep and Toney in the slot and Saquon swinging out of the backfield and how the heck are they going to cover them all. In fact, one of the popular media questions heading into the Dallas game is how the Giants will handle Cowboy WRs Lamb and Cooper, but maybe the better question would be how the Dallas D will match up against Golladay/Toney/Barkley and Ross and company. Indeed, maybe the only remaining question is whether Joe Judge and OC Jason Garrett get the message and open up the playbook.
Of course, the other side of the ball is the other side of the equation. As we’ve noted, the Giants simply are not getting any pass rush at all from their 4-man front and in particular the ERs who are all 3-4 OLBs forced to play as undersized DEs. And when that happens you have two choices: 1) you can either bring more people into pass rush and tighten up your coverage; or 2) you can live with whatever you get from the rush and play looser coverage to take away the big play and force other teams to drive the full length of the field to score.
While the more standard choice in the NFL is the former these days, Judge and DC Patrick Graham have opted for the latter approach over the past two seasons with mixed results. This year, for example, the Giants rank 15th in points allowed per game, which isn’t bad at all considering they are 26th in opponents’ QB rating, and 31st (ahead of only lowly Jacksonville) in opponents’ completion percentage.
And the Giants actually took the old ‘bend but don’t break’ philosophy to some new places in New Orleans on Sunday. It appeared that they just weren’t going to allow Alvin Kamara to break anything big so that even when the Saints had third and short, and they had a bunch including several third and ones, and lined up in a jumbo formation with three TEs, the Giants pretty much stayed in their prevent with only 6 in the box (with the LBs lined up 4-5 yards off the LOS) and everybody else in way off.
Overall, the Giants have allowed all four QBs they have faced so far this year – including the Saints Jameis Winston – to complete around 75% of their pass attempts. And that’s been against some guys like Winston who have never been thought of as necessarily elite passers. Indeed, the theory could be really tested over the next few weeks as the Giants go up against a murderer’s row of established NFL passers including Mahomes, Brady, Stafford, Prescott and Carr. Time will tell.
The problem with the system is that while the Giants’ have been able to minimize to a degree the number of points they have been allowing, the conservative approach has meant they have been for the most part losing the battles of field position and time of possession. Plus they aren’t getting any turnovers meaning that on most days the offense is being forced to drive 80-yards or more to score just about every time they do get the ball back.
And that sets up an interesting question going forward. Playing that very conservative D actually does make some sense when your offense is struggling. You want to keep the clock moving and the score low. It isn’t as clear cut though when and if your offense can actually put points on the board. In that case, you want to maximize the time they have with the ball. In that scenario, allowing the other team to put together 7-8 minute, 15-play drives is probably rather counterproductive.
Fun with mocks: As we noted last week, because the Giants’ opponents’ strength of schedule is relatively strong (currently around .550), they are going to be pretty close to the bottom of whatever win group they are in once the season ends. This week, for example, there are ten one-win teams across the league among whom the Giants have the third highest SOS. As a result, if the draft were held today, the Giants would be picking 10th overall with their own pick and 16th with the Bears selection.
Just for fun, we ran several mock scenarios earlier today and in each one we had the Giants selecting Michigan DE Aidan Hutchinson who looks like he’d be a perfect hybrid DE/OLB in their base 4-2 defense. At 6-6, 270, he actually looks more like a TE or power-forward, and while he may lack the quick twitch sprinter speed to just run around people, Hutchinson is still an excellent athlete with a long, quick first step, the agility to plant and change direction, good hand technique and impressive strength. He’s also scheme versatile with a Bosa/Watt like motor.
(As an aside, one of the things I really noticed when watching Hutchinson on tape is that his first step is always away from the defender, either upfield or inside on a loop. In contrast, when you watch the Giants ERs like Carter, Ojulari and Ximenes, on literally every snap, their first step takes them directly into the chest of the OT. Don’t know if that’s by design or not, but it certainly appears to put them at a distinct disadvantage as that usually plays into the strength of the tackle.)
While, for us at least anyway, the Giants first pick in our sequence of mocks was pretty much a no-brainer, there were all kinds of possibilities with that second pick at #16. We really think the Giants 2022 draft will be all about the defense and there could be some really interesting players at that spot including DE/ERs like George Karlaftis of Purdue, USC’s Drake Jackson, Adam Anderson of Georgia and rising Jermaine Johnson of Florida State; 340-pound Georgia OT Jordan Davis; LBs Devin Lloyd of Utah and Christian Harris of Alabama; and CBs Kaair Elam of Florida, Andrew Booth of Clemson, Ahmad Gardner of Cincinnati and Roger McCreary of Auburn.
Of course, there is always still that pesky problem on the offensive line that never seems to get fully resolved, although the unit has certainly played well enough to date despite all the roster changes. And while I’m not sure the Giants would necessarily want to use one of their first round picks on a guy who wasn’t a LT, if they did, they’d have some options not the least of whom might be Iowa C Tyler Lindenbaum, who isn’t all that big at just 6-3, 290, but he’s an outstanding athlete and technician. Plus the position is very much in flux with the gruesome injury that Nick Gates suffered. Meanwhile, other OL who could be in the mix at #16 likely include Texas A&M OG Kenyon Green, Mississippi State OT Charles Cross and rising FCS star OT Trevor Penning of Northern Iowa.
