Giants are No. 28; Can they be better than that?
It should come as no surprise that entering the 2025 NFL season the New York Giants annually troublesome offensive line is not getting much respect from Pro Football Focus.
In PFF’s annual preseason offensive line rankings, the Giants are 28th in the 32-team league. The only teams below the Giants are the New England Patriots, Seattle Seahawks, Cincinnati Bengals and Houston Texans.
PFF says:
The only thing keeping the Giants’ offensive line from sinking further down this list is left tackle Andrew Thomas, who ranked third among offensive tackles in 2022 with a 90.3 PFF overall grade and has posted 75.0-plus marks in each of the past four years. However, the former Georgia player logged fewer than 1,000 snaps over the past two seasons. If he cannot stay on the field in 2025, New York might end up with the worst offensive line in the league.
A ranking of 28th is fair, yet unfair.
It certainly seems fair to perennially be unconvinced that the Giants will field a competent offensive line. Yet ...
PFF had the Giants, with Thomas missing the last 10 games due to Lisfranc surgery, ranked No. 23 in its 2024 season-ending offensive line rankings. With Thomas, one of the league’s premier left tackles when healthy, expected to be ready when the season begins, how are the Giants five spots worse?
The line, with the possibility Evan Neal will take a starting guard spot away from Greg Van Roten, is expected to be the same one the Giants fielded at the beginning of 2024. That line was middle of the NFL pack until Thomas was injured.
Thomas’s PFF grades the last two season (75.4 in 2024 and 76.1 in 2023) have not approached the 90.3 he posted during his All-Pro 2022 season. Thomas, though, has played hurt through most of those two seasons.
Even the version of Thomas the Giants got the last two seasons makes the line better if he can stay on the field for the vast majority of games.
The Giants have also added free agent swing tackle James Hudson and selected Marcus Mbow in Round 5 of the 2025 NFL Draft. Those moves, theoretically, should better position the Giants to withstand inevitable injuries.
If reasonably healthy, there is no reason the Giants can’t surpass — maybe easily surpass — a preseason ranking of 28th.