Big Blue View
I thought the New York Giants’ victory over the Chargers a couple of Sundays ago was pretty uplifting after their dispiriting start to the 2025 season. Nothing beats a victory over a division rival who has dominated the Giants for a decade or more, though. Even more, nothing beats a game when your team is just running out the last five minutes of the game clock on the way to that victory. I think the last time that happened was the final game of 2023, by coincidence the last time the Giants beat the Philadelphia Eagles before last night. I’d argue that this was the Giants’ best game since the Tommy DeVito last minute win over Green Bay in 2023, which was meaningful only in that it helped ruin the Giants’ chances of getting Jayden Daniels or Drake Maye. We don’t know yet how meaningful last night’s win was. Maybe the Giants will stink the place up next week in Denver, just like they did last week in the Superdome after their uplifting win over the Chargers. Or maybe this is the start of something big, if not specifically this season, then for the long term future of the team.
I put this preface in because you might expect that the Giants’ Pro Football Focus grades for last night’s game would be the best of the season so far and better than anything they earned in the previous two seasons. Spoiler: They’re not. That’s because PFF grades as far as I can tell do not take into account how important the game is, how tough the opponent is, etc. They can’t to my knowledge grade the mental aspects of the game. They just ask: How well did each player physically do his job on each play? That gets added up in some way to produce a team grade in each aspect of the game. Here are the Giants’ team grades for every game this season:
The overall grade last night was a bit lower than in the Dallas game. You can see that’s because the Dallas game was a great one for Russell Wilson and the Giants’ receivers, who made explosive play after explosive play. The Giants did get their best running grade of the season last night, which tracks with what we all saw, and by far it was the best special teams performance of the year, which also tracks but which we rarely think about unless a player returns a punt or kickoff to the house. With that as prelude, let’s look at the individual grades and try to understand them, along with the data on who played and how much.
One point to make at the start: For the first time all season, no Giants offensive player scored below 50. Anything below 60 is considered below average, but not egregiously so. Just last week the Giants had three offensive players in the 40s and one in the 30s. That’s progress. Let’s look...
