Big Blue View
This isn’t a piece I planned on writing.
Well, that’s a bit of a lie. I’ve been thinking about the New York Giants run defense for a while now, but have been putting off writing about it since the 2024 season ended. But I certainly didn’t anticipate writing this piece when I woke up this morning.
But I came across some things recently that both crystalized the ideas that have been bouncing around my noggin and were a call to action to finally put pen to page (so to speak). We need to talk about the state of the Giants’ run defense, as well as possibly reconceptualize defending the run.
I’m going to start at the more immediate and practical standpoint of what run defense could look like for the Giants this year, then we’ll take a step back and look at a wider picture of league-wide run defense.
When the Giants released their unofficial depth chart for the season, some fans were surprised — aghast even — that the defense appears to be a 3-3-5 nickel base defense.
The questions about run defense make sense from a “classic” point of view. Historically, the primary mode of run defense was to use big guys to take on blockers, stack and shed the blockers, and make the tackle.
That view isn’t, in and of itself, incorrect. Defenders putting themselves in position to make a tackle is the soul of defending the run. But that also isn’t incompatible or mutually exclusive with lighter personnel packages.
Modern offenses excel at weaponizing spacing and athletic mismatches to stress defenses in every way they can. We’ve seen defenders get smaller and faster to cover as much ground as possible and match up with hyper-athletic tight ends, running backs, and receivers.
Defenses at the college and NFL level have spent the last half-decade scrambling for ways to slow down modern offenses. There have been a proliferation of nickel packages, the adoption of “big nickel” three-safety packages, and the use of Cover-4 shells to take away explosive passing plays. The use of nickel packages and middle of field open coverage shells take defenders out of the box, leading to more opportunities for blockers to have numbers advantages.
Iowa State innovated the solution which became their “Air Raid Killer” defense, which was an “odd stack” front.
You can read much more about their schemes in my piece on that particular scheme from 2020, as well as Mark Schofield’s piece on how Bill Belichick incorporated Iowa State’s scheme into the New England Patriots’ defense.
The general philosophy behind how the scheme defends the run is that it concerns itself with gaps and not blockers.
In DIME personell sets, the SAM linebacker is replaced with a defensive back who essentially plays a STAR hybrid role.
By using a TITE front, the defensive line accounts for the interior gaps, and forces runs to the outside where the outside linebackers and defensive backs can make the tackle....
