You don’t have to sit in front of a screen for hours dissecting every player’s performance on every play the way the people at Pro Football Focus do to figure out why the New York Giants lost on Sunday.
Furthermore, PFF only grades players, not coaches and general managers. Still, let’s see how many pleasant surprises (if any) there were yesterday in the Giants’ unfathomable 34-27 overtime loss to the Detroit Lions.
Offense
PFF grades
First, the offense as a whole, which is playing admirably without its top skill players:
Now let’s look at the details. First, the passing:
Patrick Mahomes? Josh Allen? Lamar Jackson? Matthew Stafford? I don’t know that you could ask any of those players to give you more than Jameis Winston gave the Giants Sunday. He was the No. 1 pick in the 2015 draft, and if it weren’t for his interceptions, he’d be considered one of the NFL’s great quarterbacks today. As usual, he had an interception, but it mattered little in the larger scheme of things. Winston played his you-know-what off, willing his team to what should have been a victory against a superior team on the road.
The amazing thing about Winston’s performance is that he was in some sense better under pressure than when kept clean, even though his interception and another turnover-worthy play came when pressured. Five big-time throws in a single game, and don’t forget his TD reception. Winston was pressured on 44.7% of his dropbacks, but that doesn’t mean that the offensive line pass-blocked all that poorly, as we’ll see. It’s because Winston was big-game hunting all afternoon: Only four throws behind the line of scrimmage, eight from 0-10 yards, 13 from 10-20 yards, and six of 20+ yards. That’s winning football in the modern NFL. By comparison, Jared Goff, the 2016 No. 1 pick, had only seven throws beyond 10 yards.
The Giants should extend Winston and keep him as their QB2 for years. With a good defense he’d be 2-0 this season. He and Jaxson Dart are a pair no defensive coordinator would relish game planning against.
Speaking of the offensive line, here are the pass blocking grades:
Detroit has PFF’s fourth-ranked pass rush, so yesterday was a tall order. Greg Van Roten and Andrew Thomas played very well, each with only one hurry yielded. Jon Runyan was just about average with two hurries. Jermaine Eleumunor didn’t play as well as he apparently thinks he did, given his comments about Aidan Hutchinson: a sack, a hit and two hurries, plus a penalty. Likewise, John Michael Schmitz yielded three hurries. Still, we’re being picky: 13 total pressures and one sack against the Lions is not a bad day’s work.
Now the run blocking for those players who did a decent amount of it:
As usual, the Giants had a lot of players in the nearly average range. Schmitz was the best of them, along with Eleumunor and Thomas. Runyan and Van Roten had a tougher go of it. My impression is that the Giants’ offensive line as a whole has a tough time run blocking in the first halves of games, and then for whatever reason they hit their stride in the second half. However, not having a dominant run blocking team hurts them at key junctures in games. Late in that fateful fourth quarter, the Giants had first and goal at the Detroit 4-yard line. On first down, Tyrone Tracy got 2 yards. Then after an incomplete pass, Devin Singletary lost 4 yards, necessitating the big decision to go for it on fourth down rather than kick a field goal. You know if it were the Eagles with first and goal on the 4-yard line, a couple of tush pushes later they would have been in the end zone. This is why in my opinion the Giants need to prioritize finding a strong run-blocking guard (or two) next offseason.
Now let’s look at the receivers:
Of course the star of the game was Jameis Winston, who got an almost perfect receiving score from PFF (I’m not sure what he could have done to get the other 0.7, maybe they didn’t like his Heisman pose). As for the full-time receivers, Theo Johnson had his third consecutive strong game. Isaiah Hodgins had another solid game including a TD. The real story, though, was “only a slot receiver” Wan’Dale Robinson, with nine catches for 157 yards and a TD. Robinson will always be tainted in Giants’ fans eyes for not being George Pickens (who is playing great for Dallas, by the way, as we’ll see in the next chart). Look at the NFL leaders in receiving yards, though:
There’s Robinson at No. 7, tied with Justin Jefferson, and with 12.0 yards per reception for the season. GM Joe Schoen may have bypassed Pickens for non-football reasons, but the guy he did pick is sure looking like a problem for opposing defenses now that he’s had the chance to run deeper routes with quarterbacks who’ll throw to him at the intermediate and deep levels.
Finally, the running backs:
There’s not much to talk about in the running game. Note, though, that Devin Singletary had a good game and has stepped up now that he has been given the chance with Cam Skattebo injured.
Snap counts
- Winston and the starting offensive line played every snap.
- The three tight ends together played 143 snaps, i.e., the Giants once again used very little of the 11 personnel grouping, which is a league-wide trend.
- Robinson is now effectively WR1, with Isaiah Hodgins and Darius Slayton sharing most of the rest of the snaps. Gunner Olszewski and Dalen Cambre saw a few snaps, one of them being the NFL play of the year.
- Tracy and Devin Singletary split the running back snaps.
Defense
OK, the fun part of this article is now over. Now we’re forced to look at the other side of the ball. First, the overall defensive grades:
You may be surprised to see so many very good and average grades, but this was yet another game in which the Giants’ defense was OK until late in the fourth quarter.
Let’s start with the pass rush:
PFF grades
The highest grade of the game went to elite Giants pass-rusher … Rakeem Nunez-Roches? Nacho had a sack and a hurry yesterday to earn that grade. Dexter Lawrence, who we now know was injured again in some way and was held out of first and second down plays, still managed a hit and a hurry. Darius Alexander is starting to come on, with two sacks plus a hurry. Abdul Carter still didn’t get a sack, but he did get three hits on Jared Goff. Brian Burns had a quiet game, not adding to his sack total but getting two hurries.
Next, the pass coverage:
The grades may not look as bad as you might have imagined overall. Remember, though, that PFF grades every play. This was a game the Giants led 27-17 with 11 minutes left against one of the NFL’s best offenses (e.g., PFF ranks them fourth overall and third in receiving). Look closer and you can see some of the accumulated small failures of the pass defense: Dru Phillips giving up seven catches in seven targets for 54 yards, all (+1) of it YAC. Bobby Okereke giving up six catches in eight targets for 50 yards. Zaire Barnes giving up five catches in seven targets for 31 yards, 30 of them YAC. The Detroit passing game under Goff is death by 1,000 cuts (28 cuts yesterday, to be specific) rather than the big bombs that some pass offenses like.
Now, unfortunately, we have to look at the run defense (ordered by number of run snaps):
Among the players who played a lot of run defense, the grades were poor, some of them abominable. Mostly it was because of the big plays they gave up to Jahmyr Gibbs. Dane Belton, Cor’Dale Flott, and Jevon Holland all missed tackles on the same Gibbs TD run, I believe. The Giants only had five missed tackles on the day, which is not many, but they allowed three big rushing plays by Gibbs, which is the story of the loss.
Snap counts
- The deep secondary players (Dane Belton, Jevon Holland, Cor’Dale Flott, and Korie Black) were on the field for just about every snap. Dru Phillips played almost two-thirds of the snaps, while Nic Jones saw a little action and even Jarrick Bernard-Converse got a couple of snaps.
- Bobby Okereke played every off-ball linebacker snap as usual, while the other linebacker snaps were shared among Zaire Barnes, Swayze Bozeman, and Demetrius Flannigan-Fowles. That’s a problem.
- With Kayvon Thibodeaux out, Abdul Carter played almost every defensive snap. Brian Burns played almost as many, and Chauncey Golston played the rest.
- The rotation of interior defensive linemen, with Lawrence being held out of first and second downs, is obvious in the snap counts, with Lawrence and Darius Alexander playing almost the same amount, and Roy-Robertson Harris, Rakeem Nunez-Roches, and Chauncey Golston splitting the rest.
