Who have been the Giants’ best players by position over the past 20 years?

Pro Football Focus, the football analysis organization that NFL fans love to hate, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. In honor of that, Nathan Jahnke of PFF is creating an “All-PFF Team” for the past two decades for every NFL franchise. Each All-PFF team is based on – you guessed it – that team’s players’ PFF grades over their careers, so this is an opportunity for you to decide whether the single-game grades you react to so strongly week by week for specific players translate into injustices when looked at over the entirety of those players’ careers.

Any exercise of this sort is fraught with difficult decisions in how to analyze the data, even though the individual game subjective PFF grades are set in concrete for the purpose of the analysis. Here are a couple of the decisions they make:

• How do you even define a team? With varying offensive and defensive personnel groupings over a game, a season, and an era, there is no simple answer. PFF includes 12 positions on offense and defense to deal with this (special teams are not included), based on the prevalence of 11 personnel and nickel defense in recent years but with adjustments for specific teams. On offense they include three wide receivers, one of whom has to have had significant time lining up in the slot, two tight ends, but only one running back for the Giants (for teams that ran more 21 than 12 personnel they removed one TE and added a FB). On defense they included either a third interior lineman or a third linebacker depending on whether a 3-4 or 4-3 defense was more commonly used.
• How do you weigh the entirety of a player’s career vs. what he accomplished in his peak seasons? This is basically the argument that has kept Eli Manning out of the Hall of Fame so far. PFF decides to use the top 5 years of a player’s career with that one team and excludes any season with a grade below 60.0 so as not to unduly penalize one bad year.
• Postseason games are included, but not more than 16 total games for any one season.

OK, take a minute to put your all-time Giants team for the past 20 years together, and see how it matches the one determined by PFF grades. Here we go.

Offense

My own reactions to this list are:

• QB: There is no other possibility than Eli Manning. We’ll hope that if they do a 25th anniversary list, Jaxson Dart gives him a run for his money by that time.
• OL: It says a lot about the futility of the Giants’ blocking over the past two decades that 4 of the 5 slots go to starters on the Giants’ 2007 Super Bowl championship team. Only David Diehl, arguably the weakest blocker on that team, loses out, and to Andrew Thomas, clearly the Giants’ best OL of the past decade +.
• HB:...