State of the Giants at The Home Stretch

Some thoughts about what has thus far been a rather surprising and interesting season for the New York Giants.

Let’s be realistic about the state of the New York Giants. Few people expected this team to be playing meaningful games at this point in the season. (If you did, then good on you.)

Yet here we are, the Giants holding a 7-4-1 record with five games to go. They currently hold the sixth seed in the NFL playoff race despite posting a 1-2-1 record since coming out of the bye. 

They have the second hardest remaining schedule (.710 win percentage), according to Tankathon, with two games to go against the Eagles (one coming up this weekend), a big re-match against Washington in two weeks, and games against Minnesota and the Colts to round out the slate.

That the Giants are still playing meaningful football this late in the year should be chalked up as a win, even if they don’t make the playoffs. General manager Joe Schoen, head coach Brian Daboll and the rest of the front office have a large sample size at this point regarding how far this team has come and how far it still has to go.

The playoffs? That will be the cherry on the cake if the Giants get in. It would certainly be a boost for a team that, in the off-season, has a lot of work to do on the roster between convincing some of their pending free agents to stay and coaxing some select outside free agents to come on board. Most players want to be part of a winning and competent organization, and the Giants, thus far, have proven to be just that.

Let’s take a step back to look at the big picture of how far this organization has come and how far it still needs to go.

It’s Always Been About the Evaluation

Schoen was hired on January 22, 2022. Daboll was hired a week later. Daboll didn’t have his coaching staff fully assembled until almost three weeks later, a staff which, by the way, had several members working with Daboll for the first time, such as defensive coordinator Wink Martindale.

Thus by the time the general manager and coaching staff were fully in place, the off-season evaluation process, which technically should have started as soon as the season was over, was delayed. 

The remaining staff members did some of that, but the process wasn’t going to begin in earnest until the new general manager, head coach, and coaching staff were established. It also didn’t help that the Giants were implementing new systems on offense and defense and that there were questions about how certain players might fit into those systems.

There are other factors to consider. Any major changes in how Schoen wants the scouting process to run versus what the Giants had been doing couldn't be implemented immediately, given the timing of his hiring commensurate with where the scouting process was.

It helped that Schoen took an active role in scouting, a process he had begun in Buffalo. But the bottom line with this team was that there were far too many unknowns that only several months of firsthand evaluation of the current team and its systems wouldn’t eventually answer.

The Roster Had Its Issues Even Before the Injuries

Schoen inherited a disastrous salary cap situation from his predecessor Dave Gettleman, who went for broke by loading up on veteran free agents to help get the team back to the playoffs.

Unfortunately for Gettleman, the plan backfired (as it did in previous attempts made by this team during the Jerry Reese era). The result, of course, was the horrific cap situation left for Schoen, who had no choice but to cut defensive back James Bradberry just to be able to sign the rookie draft class.

It also forced Schoen to retain receiver Kenny Golladay, who had just come off an injury-filled, disappointing yet, as altering Golladay’s contract would have only worsened the situation.

And speaking of making the situation worse, Schoen, who spoke of his preference of not restructuring contracts, had no choice but to do so just to get the Giants under the salary cap at the start of the 2022 league year.

Among those he had to touch included receiver Sterling Shepard, defensive lineman Leonard Williams, and linebacker Blake Martinez, just to name a few. Such moves have resulted in the Giants already having $3,821,736 in dead money set to hit next year’s cap—not a huge amount, but again, not ideal for a rebuilding team whose general manager is interested in extending some of the core players.

The lack of money meant the Giants had to be prudent with veteran player acquisitions. They shopped the bargain bins during free agency and were never going to be in a position to compete for top talent to help bolster their cornerback depth, which again took a hit with the Bradberry transaction, or the linebacker depth where Martinez ended up being a “surprise” cut at the start of the season and where Tae Crowder, a former starter, ended up losing his job due to poor play.

The good news is that this coaching staff has gotten the most out of many of the players they picked up from waivers. Cornerback Nick McCloud, who last year was with the Bills twice and the Bengals, has not only been solid as a backup cornerback but he’s also been one of the better special teams players for the Giants. So too, has cornerback Fabian Moreau, who had stints with Washington, Atlanta, and Houston. On defense, Jihad Ward and Jaylon Smith have been unsung contributors.

Overall, the Giants' roster isn’t as bad as it’s been in previous seasons. But there are glaring holes, to begin with, some of which were made worse by the injuries that the depth just can’t overcome.

The Injuries Haven’t Helped

If someone can come up with a reason why the Giants are among the most injured teams seemingly every year, co-owner John Mara would probably pay handsomely for that information. Alas, there isn’t one specific contributing factor from a group that includes the turf, the constant change in the strength and conditioning program, and bad luck.

But here’s what we do know. Every team has to deal with injuries. The teams that overcome them have depth. The Giants, as noted above, do not have depth. One can easily argue that many of the Giants' receivers on the field playing a prominent role in the passing game might be a lot lower on another team’s depth chart (if present).

The Numbers

While the Giants have been a wonderful storyline all season long, given how they’ve overachieved and surpassed expectations, some things still don’t exactly scream “playoff juggernaut.”

The biggest ones come on the offensive side of the ball. The Giants, quite frankly, are not built to survive a scoring shootout. The Giants are averaging 20.4 points per game—a far cry from some of the top teams that have a much higher placement in the playoff seeding, such as Philadelphia (28.2 points per game), Dallas (27.8 points per game), and even Seattle (26.5 points per game), a team that has been gathering steam in the playoff race.

They have yet to top 30 points in a given game this season, coming close in their Week 5 game against the Packers when they scored 27. And their wins have all been close, as all but two have been decided by six points or less (the other two by eight points).

Playoff games are generally high-scoring affairs. The Giants, as currently constructed, have shown that they aren’t equipped to survive those. And while they might still slide into the postseason –the website fivethirtyeight.com has the Giants’ chances of making the postseason at 50 percent—unless the Giants start scoring more points, their odds of coming out on top of higher-seeded teams don’t appear very promising.

The Future

One of the dangers of having a first-time head coach and a first-time general manager is that the team can overachieve and take a few opponents by surprise. Sure enough, critics of the Giants will say that’s precisely what happened when they rolled to a 6-1 start but that once teams acquired enough film on the team, the scale started to even out.

Therein lies the challenge for the future: Can the Giants sustain the positive momentum they built in this first year of the Schoen-Daboll era? We’ve sort of been down this road before. At the end of Pat Shurmur’s first season as head coach, the Giants finished 4-4 in the second half of the season after a 1-7 start, that second half sparking some hope that the team was finally on the right track.

Before him, Ben McAdoo, in 2016, famously took the Giants to their first postseason berth since 2011, only to have the wagon wheels completely fall off. And Joe Judge, who had his 2020 Giants team on the brink of a postseason berth that was destroyed once the Eagles decided to play games with their quarterback situation in the regular season finale, saw the wheels come off his wagon in Year 2 of his regime.

What will Year 2 hold for Daboll? We won’t know until we get there, but there is a different sense of optimism that things will be different this time, given how Daboll and Schoen have navigated through the adversity that’s hit this team in Year 1.

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