ESPN thinks Giants’ future looks promising

Giants rank fourth in under-25 talent

The other day, we discussed the large number of young players the 2025 New York Giants have. Youth is great, but quality beats quantity. Aaron Schatz, writing for ESPN, has analyzed the rosters of every NFL team and ranked them by the amount of under-25 talent they have. Schatz founded the now-defunct Football Outsiders and created the widely used defense-adjusted value over average (DVOA) metric for evlauating teams and players. His intent is to try to understand which teams are best set up for long-term success, as opposed to how good they are now.

The good news for Giants fans is that in Schatz’s eyes, this year’s Giants team has both quantity and quality in its young players, ranking fourth in the NFL. His analysis combines a number of factors including starts and snaps by under-25 players; quality of play by the players (age-adjusted, i.e., anticipating more future growth from a 21-year-old player than one who is 24); Pro Bowl and All-Pro selections; value and length of contracts; positional importance; 2025 Draft value, especially Days 1 and 2; key starters and reserves; and injuries.

Let’s first look briefly at the three teams he ranks ahead of the Giants:

1. Houston Texans (same as 2024 ranking): No surprise here. Once the Texans committed highway robbery by unloading Deshaun Watson to Cleveland for six draft picks, including three consecutive years of first-rounders, the die was cast. To their credit they mostly drafted well. The current team includes “blue-chip” (Schatz’s term) players C.J. Stroud, Will Anderson Jr., Derek Stingley Jr., and Kamai Lassiter.
2. Seattle Seahawks (up from No. 10 in 2024): The Seahawks hit on Devon Witherspoon, Byron Murphy II, and Jaxon Smith-Njigba (whose sophomore season was much better than his rookie season), as well as Kenneth Walker III, Zach Charbonnet, and Charles Cross.
3. Washington Commanders (up from No. 18 in 2024): This ranking is largely due to Jayden Daniels’ outstanding rookie season, though Schatz mentions a few other players such as Brandon Coleman, Mike Sainristil, and Jer’Zhan Newton.

As for the Giants at No. 4 (up from No. 13 a year ago), Schatz lists four blue-chip players. Three will be no surprise: Malik Nabers, Abdul Carter, and Jaxson Dart. Schatz notes (with an exclamation point) that Nabers ranked sixth among all NFL wide receivers in ESPN’s receiver tracking metrics despite being a 21-year-old rookie. The ESPN metrics track three facets of receiving: getting open, catching the ball, and yards after catch. Nabers’ overall score is suppressed somewhat by his drops and fewer yards after catch than some of his peers. When you sort by getting open, though, Nabers is tied for first:

The interesting thing is that Nabers last season expressed some frustration, especially after the first Philadelphia game, that he was getting open but not getting the ball. That wasn’t exactly true, as Ed Valentine noted. The ESPN tracking says that overall, though, Nabers got open as well as any wide receiver in...