The summer is the season for optimism around the NFL, the time when fans of every team allow themselves to indulge in hope for the coming season.
The New York Giants have had a bit more than a week of training camp and are about a week away from their first preseason game on August 15th. Rather than asking about anything specific before seeing the team on the field in a live situation, we wanted to take the temperature of the fanbase as things start to ramp up.
It isn’t much of a surprise that the
overwhelming majority of Giants fans are either optimistic, or outright excited, about their team. That flies in the face of the national perspective, where the Giants are an afterthought and even outright derided. Even Las Vegas views the Giants as extreme long-shots to make the playoffs this year, with the second-longest odds in the NFC, per FanDuel.
We’ll see if the fans or the national perspective is right, but so far the news out of camp has been almost universally positive.
Camp under John Harbaugh has been faster and tougher than what we’ve seen in recent years from the Giants, with a much higher level of accountability.
The defense under Dennard Wilson has been consistently disruptive and at times dominant. The pass rush has been making the quarterbacks’ lives difficult while the secondary hasn’t been giving up much separation at all. And while they aren’t hauling in all their interception opportunities, the defensive backs seem to be playing faster and more confidently than we saw the last two years.
The defense hasn’t been allowing the offense to establish much rhythm or consistency, but we’re still getting positive reports out of that side of the ball as well.
Both WR Malik Nabers and RB Cam Skattebo are healthier than many of us on the outside anticipated, and Odell Beckham Jr. has been rounding into form with increased reps. Rookie WR Malachi Fields has produced highlight reel catches with regularity, and the offensive line has looked good as well — despite the pass rush consistently getting into the backfield. It seems that’s just a function of the Giants’ hyper-athletic front seven, not poor play on the part of the blockers.
There are, of course, fans who aren’t drinking the Big Blue kool-aid just yet — And that’s fair. After all, the Giants looked amazing in camp and preseason last year, but still managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on five separate occasions during the season.
We’ll see how the good reports translate into the preseason, as well as how the Giants progress over their three preseason games. Last year there were consistent lapses in execution and assignment discipline that were never resolved and became the team’s Achilles heel in the season. Even if the Giants don’t win their preseason games, we’ll see a solid baseline of execution and what issues that crop up be corrected.
