Last season the New York Giants played two competitive – but losing – games against the Washington Commanders. The Giants probably would have won the first one were it not for Graham Gano’s injury on the opening kickoff. The Commanders had the better of the play in their second meeting, although the Giants closed the gap at the end. On the basis of those two games alone you’d never have guessed that one team would finish 3-14 and the other 12-5 plus a trip to the NFC Championship Game.
Neither team’s
defense was anything to write home about last season, with the Giants giving up 415 points and the Commanders 391. The difference was (unsurprisingly, if you watched the Giants last year) on offense, where Washington scored 485 points to the Giants’ 273, second lowest in the NFL. That’s a large gap to close if the Giants are to have any chance of winning this Sunday.
The Commanders’ running game (third-highest yardage total in the league) exploited the Giants’ sixth-worst run defense twice, but especially in their first meeting. The big contrast, though, was in quarterback play. Jayden Daniels had a remarkable rookie season. Part of it was his running ability – his 891 rushing yards were second only to Lamar Jackson among NFL quarterbacks. He had a strong season passing as well, though. Not in raw numbers – his 3,568 passing yards were only 16th among NFL quarterbacks. His 25 TDs tied for 10th in the NFL, though, and he added six rushing TDs.
The Giants’ defense will have to deal with that in some way. Daniels was sacked 47 times last year, sixth most among NFL quarterbacks, so the hopefully fearsome Giants pass rush may play a role in the outcome. Still, sometimes you have to fight fire with fire rather than dousing the fire with a hose, and the Giants’ best hope for victory is for their slumbering 2024 offense to be awakened by Russell Wilson and go toe-to-toe with Washington’s.
Here are the somewhat remarkable statistics for the Giants’ and Commanders’ wide receivers. last season:
Malik Nabers had more receptions and yards, plus a higher PFF receiving grade, than the Commanders’ newly re-signed Terry McLaurin. McLaurin, though, scored 13 TDs, second only to Ja’Marr Chase among wide receivers. In that regard, McLaurin’s season was an outlier in his career:
McLaurin has been remarkably consistent in his career, but he never had more than 7 TDs in a season until 2024. It’s not that he played any better last season than in previous years. Here are ESPN Analytics tracking metrics for his career. ESPN uses NFL Next Gen Stats to track how well receivers get open, how well they catch passes thrown to them, and how many yards after catch they get. The results are reported as percentile rankings among all wide receivers with at least 30 targets. Here are McLaurin’s season-by -season percentile rankings:
Overall, McLaurin’s 2024 was only in the mid-range of NFL receivers (48th percentile). He was actually not open that often relative to other wide receivers (38th percentile), and in all three tracking categories his 2024 rankings were lower than in most of his previous seasons.
Yet he scored more TDs than any other receiver except Ja’Marr Chase. That’s because his quarterback was doing things like this on third-and-7 with the game on the line:
While Daniels was playing Santa Claus, Giants’ quarterbacks were the Grinch who stole Christmas, forcing Nabers to work overtime for his TDs:
Nabers was sixth among NFL wide receivers overall, and tied for first in getting open:
It’s amazing that he was only middle of the pack (42nd percentile) in YAC for the season considering plays like the two pictured above in which he did all the work to score. And that’s why there is some hope for Sunday with Russell Wilson at the helm for the Giants. Wilson did this with the game on the line against Washington last season:
An almost identical situation to the one in which Daniels hit McLaurin for the winning TD in Cincinnati last season. McLaurin’s 13.9 yard ADOT was much higher than Nabers’ 9.9. Compare that to Nabers’ final season at LSU, when his ADOT was 12.2. We know who was throwing him the ball that year.
Interestingly, according to PFF, Wilson and Daniels had exactly the same number of “big-time throws” (20) last season, although Wilson got his in 391 dropbacks vs. Daniels’ 605.
Here are McLaurin’s route statistics last season, from Reception Perception:
McLaurin lined up wide on 944 of his 1126 snaps, and 822 of those 944 on the offense’s left side, last season, per PFF. He preferentially ran intermediate and deep routes and was very successful doing so, as indicated by all the green in the figure on the right. The very strong left side preference was a feature of Kliff Kingsbury’s offense. That’s an interesting aspect of Sunday’s game. Paulson Adebo, the Giants’ new CB1, played 596 of 712 snaps in 2024 on the defense’s left side – the opposite side from where McLaurin usually lines up.
Adebo did have three games last season in which he lined up roughly equally often on both sides, so it will be interesting to see whether Shane Bowen has Adebo follow McLaurin most of the time or not. If not, then it will be another battle between McLaurin and Deonte Banks. Banks played McLaurin fairly well in their first matchup last season, holding him to 2 catches in 4 targets for 20 yards, but in the second game, McLaurin beat Banks for 2 TDs. The first was a short quick hit over the middle in which Banks had to move through a pick that slightly affected him; that was a tough play to stop. The second was another short pass in which Banks reacted slowly to McLaurin’s move to get open and then showed his “signature” failure to get his hand up to contest the catch:
Of course we don’t even know as of this writing whether Banks is CB2 or whether Cor’Dale Flott (who did not cover McLaurin on any targets in last year’s games) has won that job.
McLaurin had more trouble (in a relative sense) getting open against zone defense (28th percentile among WRs) than against man defense last season, which may work to the Giants’ advantage given Shane Bowen’s tendency to play more zone than Wink Martindale did. Banks has a reputation as a better man corner than a zone corner, but last year his PFF coverage grade was a terrible 33.4 when in man (4 TDs, 136.7 passer rating in 32 targets) and a better 62.0 in zone (1 TD, 108.3 passer rating in 35 targets).
I don’t want to suggest that Wilson-to-Nabers vs. Daniels-to-McLaurin is the only key to victory on Sunday. The Commanders added Deebo Samuel during the off-season to be WR2. Samuel gave the Giants’ defenders fits when they played in San Francisco in 2023, mostly because they couldn’t tackle him. Samuel is not the receiver he once was, though. Here are his tracking metrics:
Deebo’s thing was never getting open and catching the ball – it was always the damage he did (to defenders’ bodies as well as the scoreboard) once he caught the ball. That aspect of Samuel is still there – his 74th percentile YAC is still up there though lower than young Deebo’s was. His getting open and catching the ball have declined, though.
Deebo has distinct preferences as a wide receiver, especially at this point in his career. He runs shallow routes more than most wide receivers, and has more success with them than most receivers:
Samuel lined up 28% of the time in the slot last season with San Francisco. He only played 4 pre-season snaps this year. all of them in the slot. It will be interesting to see how much Kingsbury utilizes him in the slot, and when he does, whether Giant’s slot cornerback Andru Phillips, a ferocious tackler but a player who concedes about 30 pounds to Samuel, does against him. Just the opposite of McLaurin, Samuel’s success rate against zone (76%) is much higher than against man (40%).
For the Giants, we shouldn’t forget about Darius Slayton:
There was a time long ago, when Daniel Jones was a rookie (2019) and wasn’t afraid to throw downfield to his fellow rookie, that Slayton was in the 61st percentile of NFL receivers. Then Joe Judge and Jason Garrett put Jones in bubble wrap and Slayton declined in 2020 and especially 2021 (half of which Slayton spent with Mike Glennon and Jake Fromm throwing to him after Jones’ neck injury). He made a comeback in 2022 in the Brian Daboll-Mike Kafka offense, and even in 2023, when Tyrod Taylor wasn’t afraid to throw deep to him. Last year, though, he was a forgotten man in the offense with the Giants’ quarterback carousel. Look at how his TDs have declined:
Slayton went from 8 TDs as a rookie to only 13 over his next five seasons combined. Clue: It had little to do with him. Slayton nonetheless has a career 13.5 ADOT. Memo to Russell Wilson: Crank up the moon balls on Sunday.
