Big Blue View
The New York Giants are a team of tradition. In yesterday’s opening week game against the Washington Commanders, the Giants honored their recent past as only they can:
The only two times the Giants won their opener in the past 14 years were the only two times they have been to the playoffs since their last Super Bowl. Of course the Giants lost their opener in 2007 and 2011, so maybe all is not yet lost…nah.
There weren’t many expectations for this year’s team making the playoffs, much less the Super Bowl, given their seemingly daunting schedule. What we did expect, though, was a tougher, maybe even dominant, defense and an emerging, dare we say competent, offense. We got neither yesterday. Let’s look at Pro Football Focus grades and snap counts to learn a little more about why this team laid its latest opening week egg.
PFF gave Russell Wilson a below-average 54.5 passing grade yesterday, with one big-time throw and one turnover-worthy play. More interesting is the pressure vs. no-pressure stats, for several reasons. QBs overwhelmingly play much worse under pressure than when kept clean (but not necessarily when blitzed, which leaves an open receiver if the QB makes the quick read). Yesterday Wilson only played a little better when kept clean, and his ADOT, which was small overall, was even smaller when kept clean than when pressured. We can see the pathetic ADOT in his passing chart:
When Wilson played the Commanders last year as a Steeler, he used most of the field, including four attempts beyond 20 yards, one of them the game winner to George Pickens. His overall stats were not much different from yesterday (14 of 28 for 195 yards), but with 3 TDs. Yesterday, though, Wilson only passed beyond 20 yards once, and a ton of his attempts were within 5 yards (past or behind) the line of scrimmage.
The other interesting thing is that Next Gen Stats had Wilson pressured on 22 of his dropbacks (48.9%), as opposed to PFF’s scoring of 17 (37.8%) pressured dropbacks. PFF uses an analyst to subjectively determine when a QB has been pressured. NGS uses a series of machine-learning models to identify pass rushers and the passer and a database of pressure probabilities to define a pressure as a dropback on which the pressure probability exceeded 75%. Take your pick. Maybe the 5 dropbacks NGS scored as pressured but PFF did not account for the fairly small difference...
