Big Blue View
The once-proud New York Giants defense is in shambles, and it’s been that way for a few years now. The pass defense, or lack thereof, has been laid bare for all to see in the multitude of fourth quarter leads this team has blown. Against the Lions, though, the run defense said, “Hold my beer,” letting Jahmyr Gibbs run wild, including on the first play of overtime.
The run defense wasn’t the main culprit against the Patriots last Monday, grading just below average for the game (56.9) by Pro Football Focus. That however followed a string of games in which they graded the run D 29.3, 39.6, 40.6, 49.3, 42.1, and 35.6. For the season, the Giants are PFF’s lowest-graded run defense at 40.2. Aaron Schatz, formerly of the now-defunct Football Outsiders, continues to calculate his defense-adjusted value over average (DVOA) metric for FTN. He reports in an article for ESPN that after 12 games, the Giants’ DVOA for run defense was the second-worst of all time in his records going back to 1978.
How did we get to this point? I know your answers: It’s Shane Bowen’s fault. It’s Joe Schoen’s fault. Well, yes, but not solely. This has been a long time in coming. Let’s look at some numbers, both hard-core traditional stats and subjective grades, for the last decade of Giants teams:
Once upon a time, the Giants had one of the best rushing defenses in the NFL. No, not the 2007-2011 glory years. The 2007-2008 teams were stout against the run, but they drifted down to become middle of the pack or worse by the 2011 Super Bowl season. Those Giants teams made their mark on defense with their ferocious pass rush more than anything.
The best Giants run defenses were in the middle/late part of the 2010s. Those were not winning teams except for the 2016 playoff team, but for a number of years they had one of the NFL’s best run defenses. You can see that above both in traditional metrics like rushing yards per attempt and in subjective metrics such as PFF run defense grade. It’s also there to some extent in mixed objective-subjective metrics such as missed tackles (which requires an analyst to judge when a defender should have made a tackle or not) and in stops (an objective calculation but subjectively defined based on the percent of the first down distance a runner gets on first, second, and third downs).
Other than 2017, when there were injuries on the defense and dysfunction in the locker room, the Giants had a five-year stretch in which their defense against the run was one of the best in the NFL. You can see that in rushing yards per attempt as well as PFF run defense grade. It’s easy to understand why when you look at the top five players in tackles on rushing plays (the color coding represents the player’s PFF run defense grade, with blue = 90s, green = 70s-80s). Even in 2017...
