“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
New York Giants head coach John Harbaugh is a Winston Churchill admirer. In trying to make a point during his Monday call with New York media, Harbaugh was reaching to recall that Churchill quote as the coach was describing the positive attitude of quarterback Jameis Winston.
Here is the full quote from Harbaugh about Winston:
“It’s awesome. I mean, it’s how important is it for a person? I mean, it’s the
best thing to be around, and it’s genuine. I mean, he’s a very strong faith person. He’s a very strong Christian. He is a very good guy. He works extremely hard. He’s very motivated. He’s an unbelievable competitor. He’s tough as can be. He’s a fighter, and he just doesn’t let adversity get him down. He understands. It’s like (former NBA player) Michael Jordan or (16th President of the United States) Abraham Lincoln or all the different stories you’ve heard. It’s not how many times you get knocked down, it’s how many times you get back up. You need to be plus-one in the get up category. And that’s exactly what he does every single day of his life, I would say.
“And that’s why people like him are always successful. I mean, most successful people are optimists. Didn’t (former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston) Churchill say that he knew a lot of successful people in his life. He knew a lot of pessimists in his life. And none of the successful people were the pessimists. Are you aware of that quote? It’s along those lines.”
Why do I bring this up? Because Harbaugh, Winston and the Giants are trying each week to be the optimists in a difficult situation.
They have lost their quarterback, Jaxson Dart, for the season. Yet, they have gone 2-0-1 since. They have lost their defensive leader, Brian Burns, for the season. Yet, players like Abdul Carter, Arvell Reese, Jevon Holland and Tae Banks have stepped up to help the Giants go without a loss in their last three games.
Some want to belittle the NFC East, throwing around the ‘NFC Least’ moniker with the long-downtrodden Giants leading the division while the Philadelphia Eagles and Dallas Cowboys lose winnable games, and the Washington Commanders embarrass themselves.
The Giants, though, are trying to play the role of the optimistic opportunist in the midst of the NFC East chaos. The Giants have commissioned ‘1-0’ t-shirts you often see Harbaugh and the players wearing. The idea, of course, is to just focus on going 1-0 every week despite the chaos of the division, the players who aren’t and won’t be there to help, and even the daily disruption of the construction at the Giants’ facility that has players lockering, showering, and lifting in temporary quarters in a parking lot once reserved for staff and media.
In the middle of ‘crazy-town’
Even Sunday against the Commanders, the pessimist would say the Giants should have won the game. And, certainly there is an argument to be made for that. The optimist would say despite everything that happened in overtime they were down 14 points with eight minutes to play and did not lose. And they gained ground in the division despite the game ending in a tie.
“We just got to really just do the best we can. Because you just can’t predict what’s going to happen,” Harbaugh said. “And you’ve got to keep chasing all those things all the time, every week. You got to keep rolling through. You can’t practice them all in one week. So, you got to keep rolling through them as much as you can. Don’t get complacent. Look for new things. If you see something, if you see a hole in what you’re doing, try to plug it up before it comes up. But man, it’s a crazy league. My wife, she was visiting my daughter and so I was talking to her after the game. And she’s watching games on TV. And she says, the whole NFL is like crazy-town right now. It’s crazy-town. It’s like, there’s so much crazy going on in this league right now. That’s what makes it so exciting, I guess.
“And we were right in the middle of it. And we would like to do a lot of things better, we’d like to play. And we’re so proud of the good things and things we did well. And there’s so many things that we know we can do better. And we’re going to chase, we’re going to chase with everything we’ve got. Because we’ve got next week to try to be a better football team. And our guys are very, very optimistic. They’re very optimistic about that. Very optimistic that they can improve and get better and get ready for the next challenge.”
The Rodney Dangerfield of the NFL
This one goes along with the ‘NFC Least’ theme. The Giants are in sole possession first place in the NFC East five games into the season. The New Orleans Saints, the Giants’ Week 6 opponent, are 1-4. The game will be at MetLife Stadium, where the Giants are 3-0 this season.
Despite that, FanDuel Sportsbook has installed the Saints as 1.5-point favorites.
I get that the combined record of New Orleans’ opponents is 17-8 (.680 winning percentage), while Giants’ opponents are 6-18-1 (.260 winning percentage).
Yes, the Saints are likely better than their record and may still make a run at a title in the less-than-spectacular NFC South. Still, the Giants being the home underdog in this situation feels disrespectful.
Running the ball
The Giants are built to be a running team. They are 29th in the NFL in their usage of ‘11’ personnel, a more wide open offensive set with one running back, one tight end, and three wide receivers. They are first in the league in their usage of ‘22’ personnel, which is two running backs, two tight ends, one wide receiver. Patrick Ricard has played 116 snaps, more than any other fullback in the league.
The Giants want to play power football with Ricard, blocking tight end Chris Manhertz, and straight-ahead pile-pushing backs Cam Skattebo and Najee Harris.
Unfortunately, the complement to all of that — Jaxson Dart’s ability to create chunk plays in the quarterback run game — is gone for the remainder of the season.
The Giants tried on Sunday against the Commanders to reinsert the threat of that quarterback run game by using J.J. McCarthy for a few plays. It didn’t work, but Harbaugh won’t give up on it after just one try.
The Giants know they have to do something. The numbers are not pretty:
- They still do not have a 20-yard run from a running back this season — Skattebo’s overtime 19-yarder in Week 5 is their longest.
- Only eight teams have fewer than the Giants’ 10 runs of at least 10 yards.
- The Giants’ EPA per rush is -0.15, 26th in the league.
- The Giants average 3.7 yards per running play, 24th overall.
- Their rushing success tate of 38.8% is 21st.
- The Giants have -65 rushing yards over expected, meaning NextGen Stats believes their rushers have left at least 65 yards on the table. That’s 29th.
- The Giants are 26th in the league in yards before contact (0.86).
- Defenses are nullifying the Giants’ run game without stacking the box with extra defenders. The Giants have faced a stacked box just 19% of the time, 24th in the NFL.
“We definitely need more explosives in the run game,” Harbaugh said on Monday. “That’s definitely something that we’ll be chasing and looking for. Every play has got its own story that is told. We look back at it and study it. I think everybody in the offense will tell you this play, that play, whatever. There’s always something that can be done better. A lot of times it’s the difference in the play. It’s really our execution mostly, usually. Sometimes you’re overwhelmed with numbers or something like that. But there’s definitely been plays where we can get more yards on.
“We’ve got all the players we need to win all the games, to win every single game. All the players we need to win every single game. But we’re always looking too, to get better. The first way to get better is that the players, you have get better. That’s really what you focus on. Focus on your guys improving every single day at what we do. We’ll get better at the run game because we’re going to run the ball and we’re going to practice running the ball.
This is what Harbaugh told Big Blue View about the run game before the Week 5 contest against Washington:
“We’re just not good enough yet. Defenses are playing us pretty well. As we get better, we’ll probably have more longer runs. Also, if we make them pay a little more with play action, I think that’ll loosen them up a little bit, probably. But we just got to keep getting better. I think the guys are working hard at it. We’re playing very hard. We’re trying to play very physically. So, all the elements are there. We just have to get better, keep getting better.”
They did not accomplish getting better against the Commanders. How can they do that going forward? This week, specifically?
The view here is that the Giants need to become less predictable. BBV’s Chris Pflum looked at the predictability of the run game and offered some potential fixes earlier in the week.
Here are some thoughts of my own:
- More snaps and touches for Tyrone Tracy. He is the most versatile back the Giants have, and the back most likely to make someone miss in the open field.
- Spreading the field more with fewer heavy sets. Or, at least breaking some tendencies they have shown based on formation. It is fairly easy to read the intent of the Giants’ offense based upon who is in the game.
The Giants may have stumbled upon part of the solution during their second half and overtime Sunday against Washington, when they leaned into more tempo and were less run-heavy. Jameis Winston dropped back 60 times against Washington, throwing 54 passes. That’s too many, but being a bit less 1940s ‘3 yards and a cloud of dust’ reliant is likely a good idea.
“It [the tempo] was good, no question. We’ve been talking about some of the tempo stuff. We’ve been working on that. It’s been part of our system from Day 1, really. It’s something we built in from the beginning,” Harbaugh said on Monday. “And it was good to get to it. We’ve been talking about getting to it.
“We got to it maybe because we had to. Maybe you’re right. Maybe game flow forced us to do it, but it was a good thing in that sense. So yeah, it opened up the offense. It was good to see, and it probably needs to be part of what we’re doing going forward.”
We will see if the Giants, continuing to evolve on offense with Winston at the controls rather than Dart, begin to operate a bit differently this Sunday. Results to date indicate that, as important as running the ball well is, the Giants are going to have to loosen things up a bit in order to get that done.
‘Feast or famine’ run defense
The Giants’ defense has not been horible against the run. Except for the reality that when the run defense has broken down it has REALLY broken down.
The Giants have given up six runs of 20 yards or more this season. Only three teams have surrendered more. And, granted, two of those runs were Sunday by Washington Commanders’ quarterback Jayden Daniels. But, they count. And both went for long touchdowns.
As a result of those long runs, the often solid run defense is still allowing an unacceptable 5.2 yards per carry, 31st in the NFL.
“I think we’ve had too many chunk plays overall. We’ve played kind of feast or famine run defense,” Harbaugh said on Monday. “We’ve had a lot of really good plays, a lot of really good plays in that game where we stuffed the run, which we’re very capable of doing. And then there’s a couple of line of scrimmage runs that get out on us that we’re not happy about that can be played so much better. Whether we don’t adjust to a motion the right way, we don’t get over in our gaps, we don’t quite come in through the angles. I think sometimes our tackling in the back end is really good. And sometimes it’s not good, especially if it’s spacey.”
Daniels ran for scores of 38 and 26 yards for Washington on Sunday. While no other quarterback in the NFL is as dangerous running the ball, Harbaugh was not happy with how the Giants defended those plays.
“Those were plays that should not have gotten out,” Harbaugh said. “We did not play those right with our rush lanes. We know that, everybody knows it. And it hadn’t been a problem the last couple weeks, really. It was a problem the first week, and we got to make it not a problem next week.”
Tyler Shough of the Saints has mobility, but not nearly in the way Daniels does.
The other problem for the Giants is finding defensive tackle depth behind D.J. Reader and Shelby Harris. Both veterans have played well. You can’t live with a two-man defensive line rotation, though, and beyond those two the Giants have struggled.
Chauncey Golston is on IR. Second-year man Darius Alexander is playing more, but his run defense remains inconsistent. C.J. Okoye was displaced on a 33-yard touchdown run by Jacory Croskey-Merritt on Sunday, and is only playing about 15 snaps per game.
Rookie Bobby Jamison-Travis has been inactive for all five games. The Giants have veterans Josh Tupou, P.J. Mustipher, C.J. Ravenall, and Dawuane Smoot on their practice squad.
Could any of those players help the rotation?
Offensive line injuries
Right tackle Jermaine Eluemunor might not play against the Saints after suffering a calf injury in Week 5, Harbaugh listed Eluemunor, Colton Hood (concussion), and Tyler Nubin (neck) as “day-to-day.”
Eluemunor had to be helped off the field Sunday against the Commanders. He had an MRI Monday. Let’s see how much he practices this week.
Marcus Mbow will start at right tackle with rookie J.C. Davis as the swing tackle if Eluemunor can’t play.
The other injury concern is left tackle Andrew Thomas. He has been fighting through a Week 2 groin injury that has limited his ability to practice. He has not missed any game time, but it’s not hard to see that he isn’t at his best.
“I think he’s doing a really good job of just playing through whatever he’s got. I mean, guys have things this time of year. He’s doing a great job. He’s so tough. Got the Purple Heart (a weekly award the Giants give out for displaying toughness) last week,” Harbaugh said. “He’s playing at a high level. I mean, it may be laboring for him, but still the result is better than almost every player in the league at that position.”
