Big Blue View
Whoever the head coach and general manager of the New York Giants are next season, they won’t be able to replace all 53 players. That’s about the only reason I can think of to look at Pro Football Focus grades and snap counts for a game as dispiriting as the New York Giants’ 16-13 loss to the Minnesota Vikings. To be honest, the defense had one of its better games of the season. The same can’t be said for the offense, at least for the passing game. Let’s take a look.
First let’s look at the entire offense:
There were actually some good performances on the offense yesterday. Unfortunately few of them were by the skill players, who can be found mostly at the bottom of the chart. The one thing to point out is nine penalties by the offense, which is awful.
Let’s move on to the passing game, such as it was:
Jaxson Dart usually handles the blitz well; in fact 8 of his 13 TD passes this season have come when blitzed even though he’s only been blitzed on about one-third of his dropbacks. Not yesterday, though. Brian Flores dialed up blitzes on 57.9% of Dart’s dropbacks, and Dart completed only four passes in seven attempts for 8 yards. Were there not “hot reads” for Dart to go to? Was he just unable to find them? Whatever the reason, this was Dart’s worst game as a Giant.
One way to counter the blitz is to use play action or RPOs. The Giants have used play action on 25% of Dart’s dropbacks this season. Not yesterday, though. Mike Kafka called for play action only three times. He shares responsibility for Dart’s poor game. Dart didn’t even throw a pass until 1:44 was left in the second quarter.
How about the pass protection?
Dart was sacked five times and had two more potential sacks negated by unnecessary roughness penalties for helet-to-helmet hits. Only one was charged to his blockers. Dart was charged with one sack allowed by PFF, which means the other three came from unblocked rushers. The one sack charged to a blocker was Theo Johnson’s fault, part of his miserable overall game. Most of the offensive linemen played all right when asked to pass block, especially John Michael Schmitz before his injury, Jermaine Eluemunor, and Marcus Mbow. Mbow did give up 2 hurries after replacing Andrew Thomas, who gave up a hurry in four snaps before injuring a hamstring and leaving the game.
Now the run blocking:
The Giants actually had one of their best run blocking efforts of the season. Thomas, Jermaine Eluemunor, Austin Schlottman, and JMS all blocked well, and Aaron Stinnie, Mbow, and Greg Van Roten were all average or close to it.
Now, the receiving:
There wasn’t much of it to grade as Mike Kafka kept Jaxson Dart in bubble wrap most of the game, but the Giants’ two best receivers yesterday were running backs, which pretty well...
