I thought the New York Giants’ victory over the Chargers a couple of Sundays ago was pretty uplifting after their dispiriting start to the 2025 season. Nothing beats a victory over a division rival who has dominated the Giants for a decade or more, though. Even more, nothing beats a game when your team is just running out the last five minutes of the game clock on the way to that victory. I think the last time that happened was the final game of 2023, by coincidence the last time the Giants beat the Philadelphia
Eagles before last night. I’d argue that this was the Giants’ best game since the Tommy DeVito last minute win over Green Bay in 2023, which was meaningful only in that it helped ruin the Giants’ chances of getting Jayden Daniels or Drake Maye. We don’t know yet how meaningful last night’s win was. Maybe the Giants will stink the place up next week in Denver, just like they did last week in the Superdome after their uplifting win over the Chargers. Or maybe this is the start of something big, if not specifically this season, then for the long term future of the team.
I put this preface in because you might expect that the Giants’ Pro Football Focus grades for last night’s game would be the best of the season so far and better than anything they earned in the previous two seasons. Spoiler: They’re not. That’s because PFF grades as far as I can tell do not take into account how important the game is, how tough the opponent is, etc. They can’t to my knowledge grade the mental aspects of the game. They just ask: How well did each player physically do his job on each play? That gets added up in some way to produce a team grade in each aspect of the game. Here are the Giants’ team grades for every game this season:
The overall grade last night was a bit lower than in the Dallas game. You can see that’s because the Dallas game was a great one for Russell Wilson and the Giants’ receivers, who made explosive play after explosive play. The Giants did get their best running grade of the season last night, which tracks with what we all saw, and by far it was the best special teams performance of the year, which also tracks but which we rarely think about unless a player returns a punt or kickoff to the house. With that as prelude, let’s look at the individual grades and try to understand them, along with the data on who played and how much.
Offense
PFF grades
One point to make at the start: For the first time all season, no Giants offensive player scored below 50. Anything below 60 is considered below average, but not egregiously so. Just last week the Giants had three offensive players in the 40s and one in the 30s. That’s progress. Let’s look at some of the details. First, the quarterback:
Jaxson Dart was spectacular last night. He had a TD pass, a big-time throw and no turnover-worthy plays. He was pressured 40.6% of the time according to PFF (interestingly, Next Gen Stats says he was only pressured on 27.3% of dropbacks.) The important thing is that his grade under pressure was almost as good as as when kept clean, which was not the case in his first two starts. The TD was mainly because of the great move Wan’Dale Robinson made to elude Eagles safety Andrew Mukuba after the catch. But the pass itself never would have happened had not Dart sensed the pressure coming off the right end, scrambled forward briefly, then left, then back to the right to give himself time and space to get the pass off.
Dart’s time to throw was a tidy 2.22 s when kept clean, i.e., he was getting the ball out quick. When pressured, it was a seemingly awful 4.44 s…but with Dart, that seems to be a feature, not a bug. Dart has shown an amazing ability (more than I remember seeing at Ole Miss the few times I watched him) to keep a pass play alive while still looking downfield rather than just bailing. He only had 195 yards total, but fully half of them were under pressure, and his ADOT on pressured throws was 15.0, i.e., he was not dinking and dunking.
Here are the receiving grades:
This is an example of where I think PFF grades can be somewhat misleading. I have no issue with Theo Johnson getting a low grade, because his one big catch was offset by a drop on an earlier play (which PFF didn’t even call a drop) that ended a drive, and it is those drops (he had 5 last season) that are keeping him from being a bigger part of the offense. Wan’Dale Robinson got a 70.6 offense grade, though, which is above average but not spectacular. I agree that his TD play was a fairly routine catch, but his move to go back inside rather than letting himself go out of bounds after the catch, eluding the safety, and then weaving his way behind his blockers to get into the end zone for the TD, was great stuff. Likewise, Lil’Jordan Humphrey had 2 contested catches in 3 targets, and to me that warrants more than a 62.6 receiving grade. Finally, Jalin Hyatt was only given a 55.2 receiving grade, and I thought that (a) his first catch was a really nice one with some degree of difficulty, and (b) he seems not to have gotten credit for drawing an end zone DPI that became a TD later.
On to the rushing grades:
Dart’s rushing TD is emblematic of what’s he’s shown in the NFL in a very short time. Last year at Ole Miss he had 100 rushing attempts for 648 yards and 3 TDs in 13 games, all of them in his first three games. This season he already has 32 carries for 167 yards and 2 TDs in only three starts. Skattebo deservedly got a rushing grade of 80.7 last night; of his 98 yards (including 3 for TDs), 64 were after contact, 4 were explosive (10+ yards), and 4 of them included missed tackles forced.
And now the pass blocking:
Jon Runyan has been having a bad season, with pass block grades of 28.8, 41.4, and 29.5 in three of his past four starts. Last night he surrendered 4 pressures, but the rest of the OL was great, only giving up 6 pressures combined, no sacks, and only 1 QB hit. John Michael Schmitz was having his third consecutive good pass blocking game (72.5, no pressures) before he got hurt. Austine Schlottman took over and had a clean 14 snaps, grading 80.5. Jermaine Eluemunor gave up a QB hit but graded 76.7 overall. Andrew Thomas had his “worst” game of the season, giving up his first 2 pressures and grading “only” 69.0. Greg Van Roten had a below average 50.8 with 2 pressures. Overall, a pretty good showing by the OL. The tight ends pass blocked fairly well too.
Finally, run blocking, sorted by number of run-blocking snaps:
I’ll forgive Jalin Hyatt for not being a good run blocker. Among the players who actually run block for a living, all of them did reasonably well, especially Runyan (74.1), JMS (84.7), and his replacement, Schlottman (76.0).
Snap counts
- Four of the five offensive linemen played every snap, with Schlottman replacing JMS at center after his injury.
- Dart played all but two snaps when he went off to be examined for a concussion, with Russell Wilson taking the other two.
- Granted that it was Tyrone Tracy’s first game back after his injury, but Skattebo has become the featured back in his absence, and it will be interesting to see if things stay that way given Skattebo’s success. Devin Singletary got his now-usual cup of coffee.
- Theo Johnson played almost every snap. Daniel Bellinger played a bit more than half and Chris Manhertz 22%, for an average of 1.7 TEs per snap.
- Wan’Dale Robinson played almost every snap, and Lil’Jordan Humphrey more than 3/4 of snaps. Jalin Hyatt has now seen the field for about 40% of snaps for three consecutive weeks.
Defense
You would think that holding a team with Jalen Hurts, Saquon Barkley, A.J. Brown, Devonta Smith, and Dallas Goedert to 17 points would warrant some really good defensive grades from PFF. You would be wrong. Somebody besides Dane Belton (93.9), who admittedly had a key forced fumble, must have played well, but it doesn’t really show up in the PFF grades. Let’s look at the individual components. First, the pass rush:
Sixteen total pressures isn’t going to set the world on fire, but it’s worth something. Brian Burns had only two pressures but converted both into sacks; that only got him a 64.0. Darius Muasau (73.7) got the other sack. Kayvon Thibodeaux had 4 pressures, Dexter Lawrence 3, and Abdul Carter 2, but that got them only grades in the 50s. Go figure.
The run defense grades look more reasonable:
Kayvon Thibodeuax, whose all-around game has been impressive this season, had 4 tackles, all of them stops. Three other Giants graded very good: Rakeem Nunez-Roches (78.6), Tyler Nubin (76.2, and no missed tackles), and Roy Robertson-Harris (73.9). Everyone else was in the average to slightly below average range, except for Cor’Dale Flott, who missed one tackle without making one (45.7), Abdul Carter, who did the same (39.1), and Bobby Okereke, who made two tackles but missed one (31.3).
Finally, the pass coverage:
This was a mixed bag. PFF was impressed with Dane Belton (92.9), who had a pass breakup and only gave up 18 receiving yards on two completions. They also like Cor’Dale Flott (72.7), who had the game-changing second half interception and only surrendered two short completions in four targets. The other defensive backs and the linebackers mostly got grades in or near the average range, with the exception of Tyler Nubin (47.7), who gave up 4 completions in 4 targets for 67 yards.
Snap counts
- The big lineup change was the end of the CB2 rotation experiment. Flott played almost every snap, with Deonte Banks being benched except for three snaps. Adebo played the entire game, while Dru Phillips played most of it. Holland played every snap, Nubin almost every snap and Belton a bit more than a quarter of the defensive snaps.
- Bobby Okereke played every snap as usual, while Darius Muasau played about 60%. The rest of the snaps in the box were shared among Nubin, Flott, Phillips, Burns, Belton, Carter, and Holland.
- Dexter Lawrence, Thibodeaux, Burns, and Carter all played 70-80% of the game. On the inside, Darius Alexander saw considerably less action than in recent games (16% of snaps), as did D.J. Davidson, who went out with an injury. Mostly it was Robertson-Harris and Nunez-Roches manning the interior.
