The Biggest Surprise of New York Giants Training Camp Is…

As the Giants wrap up their 2024 training camp, we look back at how things unfolded, starting with the biggest surprise.

Offensive Line Coach Carmen Bricillo, of the NY Giants NFL team at an organized team activity at their training facility in East Rutherford, NJ on Thursday May 30, 2024. / Tariq Zehawi/NorthJersey.com / USA TODAY NETWORK

Better or different? That has been the lead-off question in just about every New York Giants training camp preview and with good reason.

The question applies to perhaps one of the most important units on the team, the offensive line. And the answer, at least over much of the last decade, hasn’t been the one that Giants fans everywhere have hoped for.

However, This summer, Giants fans finally seem to have gotten the answer they longed for. The Giants' offensive line has looked far better this summer than in summers past when a combination of injuries and coaching have piled up to the point of this unit ranking at or near the bottom of Pro Football Focus’s pass-blocking efficiency rating.

The Giants' approach in finally fixing this offense line was two-fold. The first step was to bring in Carmen Bricillo, a man with a solid track record of getting every last ounce of juice from his offensive lines, most recently the Raiders units of the last two years. 

Bricillo’s teaching style is more of the nurturing tye than the yeller and screamer school of thought. He’s has been described by his linemen as being thorough and patient, to where he not only goes over the assignments for his linemen, he also gets into the little details on how to ensure success rather than leaving anything open to interpretation, and he encourages open communication. 

His linemen also praise him for the atmosphere created in their room and off the field, one in which Bricillo treats them like extended members of his family and goes out of his way to look after every one of them. He’s not afraid to dish out tough love when necessary, but he’s equally not afraid to give a guy a big bear hug and tell them he loves them.

The second part of the Giants’ offensive line resurgence was bringing in veterans so the unit could hit the ground running. This approach allows Bricillo to develop the youth so that the Giants can be assured of having a pipeline of homegrown offensive linemen in reserve for the foreseeable future. 

The result–and keep in mind that the Giants’ projected starting offensive line of Andrew Thomas, Jon Runyan, Jr., John Michael Schmitz, Greg Van Roten, and Jermaine Eluemunor has yet to play a snap together because of injuries–has been encouraging.

Through two preseason games, the Giants are ranked 17th (87.1) in PBE–a far cry from where they were ranked toward the end of last preseason (31st) with a 77.5 PBE.

The offensive line–and we’re talking all three units of the group (starters, backups and third string)--has also seen a vast reduction in pressures from the 45 allowed in the preseason a year ago to just 17 so far, the biggest drop being the unit having gone from allowing seven sacks last preseason to just one so far this preseason.

While the preseason game results don’t mean anything in the long run, the fact that the Giants' offensive line has been able to hold its own, regardless of the level of competition on the other side, is a major win for the Giants this preseason and one that they obviously hope carries over to the regular season. 

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