Decoding What’s Behind the Giants Offensive Line’s Woes

Veteran offensive line coach Dave DeGuglielmo knows that his unit hasn’t been good enough lately. The question is why.

There aren’t very many statistical categories where the Giants offense ranks at or near the top league-wide this year.

One category at which they do happen to be near the top of the league—sacks allowed—is a ranking you won't hear them boasting about.

Yet with one week left in the season, that’s where the Giants are, tied with the Bengals for the second-most sacks allowed (48). Perhaps even more alarmingly for the Giants is that they’ve allowed 15 of those 48 sacks over the last three weeks with seemingly no end in sight.

“It wasn’t good enough,” Giants offensive line coach Dave DeGuglielmo said of his unit’s performance last week against the Ravens, where they allowed six sacks out of 11 quarterback hits.

“You know, there are always bright spots in a ballgame, and there, there are some individual plays where you just say, ‘Wow, what a great job a guy did!’' or you see advancement in fundamental techniques.

“But when you take the totality, the play just not good enough as a group. It's not good enough individually. And clearly, you know, uh, it's not good enough in terms of how I got them ready to go. And, and I have no problem saying that because that's my job.”

DeGuglielmo, who points to players losing sight of their fundamentals and technique when things break down in games, has a laundry list of things he’d like to see improved, among them the execution of double-team blocks, sustaining run blocks longer, and forming an impenetrable pocket.

These are all things that the players show themselves capable of doing all that during practice, but who, for whatever the reason, don’t always carry everything they’re taught into every play of a game.

A bigger question is why, given how late it’s been in the season, has the unit, which earlier looked like it was finally over the hump, appears to be regressing.

One reason could be the lack of continuity on the offensive line, a unit on which head coach Joe Judge hasn’t been afraid to rotate personnel as part of his quest to evaluate what he has and get them experience. Between the on-going rotation, having a new teacher with a very different style, and the group's youthfulness as a whole, the Giants’ offensive line performance seems to be the result of the perfect storm.

“It just takes time to get that, especially when you're instituting a new system,” DeGuglielmo said. “And this is a new system to them, even though we're late in the season, this was a brand new system for this group beginning of the year. And like every year, new players came in the building and that's something you got to work through.”

If all that’s not enough, there is also the fact that DeGuglielmo took over the unit midway through the season for Marc Colombo and has his own way of teaching that might vary from how Colombo approached it. DeGuglielmo has been careful not to use the timing of his hire as an excuse, but at the same time, he admits that it's been a challenge.

“I said this at the outset when I got here is you cannot completely reconstruct anything with the time period or the time when I came in—that’s virtually impossible,” he said. “I’m doing the best I can to help these guys progress and get better day to day. Sometimes it shows, sometimes it doesn’t show, so we just got to keep plowing forward and hope that everything we do now is essential to our success.”