New York Giants head coach John Harbaugh calls the team’s necessary offensive stylistic change, with Jameis Winston replacing Jaxson Dart at quarterback, a “lane change.”
The man primarily responsible for implementing that lane change is offensive coordinator Matt Nagy. He knows what the Giants are getting into with Winston, a 12-year veteran quarterback whose play can swing wildly from positive to negative.
In Big Blue View parlance, Winston might be considered a walking “Kwillie.”
“We know who he
is,” Nagy said. “We talked all training camp about protecting the football. There is a lot of that feast or famine with him. We’ve joked over time about the 30 touchdowns and 30 picks, but now here it is.”
That is a reference to Winston’s confounding 2019 season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. That year, Winston threw for an incredible 5,109 yards with 33 touchdowns. He also threw 30 interceptions. That made Winston the only quarterback in NFL history to go 30-30 in touchdown passes and interceptions.
“Respecting that football and ball security is paramount, this type of team that we have. So, he knows that,” Nagy said of Winston. “And again, he’s as true of a pro as you’ll be around, preparation-wise and how he handles this. So, you just play his game, be who he is, and then we’ve got to help him as a staff, too.”
‘Ultimate trust’ in Winston
The Giants know they can’t survive with the 11 of 27 for 111 yards and an interception performance Winston had Monday in relief of Dart becoming a regular thing. Nagy believes they can help Winston with a game plan tailored to the things that suit his skill set.
“Probably the biggest thing is – one of the things with this offense when we first got started is we wanted to be able to be prepared to have multiple styles of offense,” Nagy said. “And so, if something like this does happen, it doesn’t put you in a hole where you just — it changes everything. Obviously, Jaxson (Dart) is a dual-threat quarterback. That’s one of his strengths. It’s what he does well. And so, when you lose that part of it and what he does well, that’s part of the playbook. That’s stating the obvious.
“But at the same point in time, we look at it with Jameis that here’s a guy that’s played a lot of football games in his career. We have ultimate trust in him. And so, unlike the game when it happens on play seven, where you have most of your game designed around Jaxson, now we get a chance to design around Jameis’ strengths and what he does.”
‘Reps are huge’
Nagy was asked about the difficulty — for both coach and backup quarterback — of navigating a situation where the starter is injured so early in a game.
“The first part is that there’s a part of the playbook that we do lose any way you look at it,” Nagy said. “And I’m sure this is for most teams, when you have the strength of your quarterback, a lot of that is directed towards what they do well. So, if there’s areas of his game that, when you lose him, you lose that part of the playbook. But it’s not a massive number to where you can’t run an offense. I want to be clear with that.
“The other part of this, too, is your reps are so valuable throughout the week, and I think I said it last week to you all, but the walkthrough reps are huge. And we have our volume of plays is – there’s a lot of plays that we run throughout the week, and Jameis has to do it mentally. And so, Jaxson himself is trying to get timing down with some of these skill receivers, running backs, wideouts, tight ends, etc. Now you’re thrown into the mix seven plays in and running these plays that you didn’t run all week. You did mentally, but you didn’t timing-wise. There’s a lot involved there.”
Nagy said the Giants did try to adapt some things on the fly. The issue there, though, becomes not running things the way they were practiced.
“I’ll give you an example. If there’s a motion and a shift in a play, we either eliminated it or we used one motion, not two. That’s just an example,” Nagy said. “If there’s something on the play where we could make it easier for him [Winston] to play faster and have less decisions, we wanted to do that. So, you try to adapt in the game. But now, again, we get to have a full week of prep, and he gets to get out here and get throws on time, which helps.”
As Nagy acknowledged, the quarterback run is not something that can be a regular part of the plan with Winston. There will also be some differences in the types of throws Winston prefers to what Dart is best at.
“There might be a couple concepts where you’re able to do some different things to his strengths,” Nagy said. “For us as coaches, I think it’s very important that you know that Jameis knows what we do offensively. Thank God he’s been here for all the OTAs and training camp. So, calling a play, understanding why a play is in, where to go, his eyes going to where our eyes go, is good.
“But then he also has his strengths on certain routes that he throws, and maybe he does it slightly better than Jaxson, maybe he doesn’t. But we need to make sure that we’re putting that stuff in to where Jameis feels comfortable, and that’s what I think we’re doing.”
Will the Giants’ “lane change” land them in the slow lane or the fast lane? We will see what that looks like on Sunday vs. the Tennessee Titans.
