ESPN thinks Giants’ future looks promising

The other day, we discussed the large number of young players the 2025 New York Giants have. Youth is great, but quality beats quantity. Aaron Schatz, writing for ESPN, has analyzed the rosters of every NFL team and ranked them by the amount of under-25 talent they have. Schatz founded the now-defunct Football Outsiders and created the widely used defense-adjusted value over average (DVOA) metric for evlauating teams and players. His intent is to try to understand which teams are best set up for long-term success, as opposed to how good they are now.

The good news for Giants fans is that in Schatz’s eyes, this year’s Giants team has both quantity and quality in its young players, ranking fourth in the NFL. His analysis combines a number of factors including starts and snaps by under-25 players; quality of play by the players (age-adjusted, i.e., anticipating more future growth from a 21-year-old player than one who is 24); Pro Bowl and All-Pro selections; value and length of contracts; positional importance; 2025 Draft value, especially Days 1 and 2; key starters and reserves; and injuries.

Let’s first look briefly at the three teams he ranks ahead of the Giants:

1. Houston Texans (same as 2024 ranking): No surprise here. Once the Texans committed highway robbery by unloading Deshaun Watson to Cleveland for six draft picks, including three consecutive years of first-rounders, the die was cast. To their credit they mostly drafted well. The current team includes “blue-chip” (Schatz’s term) players C.J. Stroud, Will Anderson Jr., Derek Stingley Jr., and Kamai Lassiter.
2. Seattle Seahawks
3. Washington Commanders

As for the Giants at No. 4 (up from No. 13 a year ago), Schatz lists four blue-chip players. Three will be no surprise: Malik Nabers, Abdul Carter, and Jaxson Dart. Schatz notes (with an exclamation point) that Nabers ranked sixth among all NFL wide receivers in ESPN’s receiver tracking metrics despite being a 21-year-old rookie. The ESPN metrics track three facets of receiving: getting open, catching the ball, and yards after catch. Nabers’ overall score is suppressed somewhat by his drops and fewer yards after catch than some of his peers. When you sort by getting open, though, Nabers is tied for first:

Courtesy of ESPN

The interesting thing is that Nabers last season expressed some frustration, especially after the first Philadelphia game, that he was getting open but not getting the ball. That wasn’t exactly true, as Ed Valentine noted. The ESPN tracking says that overall, though, Nabers got open as well as any wide receiver in the NFL.

Schatz cites the Giants’ first two draft picks, Abdul Carter and Jaxson Dart, as his next two under-25 blue chippers. That’s purely projection of course, since they haven’t played an NFL down yet. Carter is an interesting case in the evolution of fan sentiments. Many fans were hoping for Cam Ward, or at least Travis Hunter, with the Giants’ first pick. As it became clear that neither was likely to make it to No. 3, people accepted the idea that Carter was going to be the pick. I sensed that the excitement wasn’t there for the pick, though, with the quarterback situation still up in the air, even though Carter was the consensus best defensive player in the draft. Fast forward to training camp, with Carter seemingly creating a highlight clip every day making Giants’ offensive linemen look bad. Now fans are dreaming of the second coming of LT, Nabers is wide-eyed and chuckling telling Kay Adams about how impressive he’s been, and it’s become hard to imagine Carter not being an impact NFL player.

Dart is a bigger question mark. Any drafted quarterback is, but when you were seen as a second round value by the community, the odds aren’t in your favor. I find it interesting that Schatz listed Dart as one of the blue chip players, suggesting that he thinks highly enough of him to believe that he can be part of the “core” of young players that lead the Giants out of the mini-wilderness. Dart looked every bit the rookie in his first few practices, but he has seemed to do better reading the defense more recently. Time will tell whether he actually becomes a blue-chip player, but at least the arrow is pointing up at the moment.

That leaves Thibodeaux, one of the most interesting case studies of Giants fan reactions. Thibodeaux is roasted by many fans because he’s not Aidan Hutchinson. Chris Pflum, though, argues from film study that he is better than you think. Schatz sees him as part of the “strong core” of young under-25 Giants players. (Yes, Thibodeaux is in his fourth NFL season and he still isn’t 25.) He also points out the Giants’ young secondary, with Tyler Nubin, Deonte Banks, and Dru Phillips all under 25, as well as Cor’Dale Flott, and Dane Belton.

Among the under-25 offensive players Schatz mentions as having potential are Wan’Dale Robinson, Theo Johnson, Jalin Hyatt, and Daniel Bellinger. Oh, and Evan Neal…who seems to be looking pretty good so far in his transition to guard. Neal hasn’t turned 25 yet, either, though he will early in the regular season.

All of you of course already know about these players. The point is that many of us may not have realized just how many really young players the Giants have relative to other NFL teams, or we forget it sometimes in our frustration with the team’s record in recent years. Here’s an example – the Denver Broncos, Schatz’s No. 32-ranked team. The Broncos have zero under-25 talented players in Schatz’s analysis. How can that be? They just went to the playoffs with a rookie QB. Yes, but Bo Nix was in college forever and has already turned 25. Other young stars such as Patrick Surtain II entered the league before Joe Schoen was even the Giants’ GM and already have four years of NFL experience.

None of this means that the Giants will actually finally become a good team. Maybe yes, maybe no. Looking at Schatz’s top three: Houston, led by a surprisingly great rookie season by Stroud, got to the second round of the playoffs in 2023 before being outclassed by Baltimore. Stroud didn’t duplicate his rookie success in 2024 but the Texans still made it to the second round before the Chiefs ousted them. Seattle, a team that seems to be liked by many analysts every year, has hung around the .500 mark ever since Russell Wilson left, with only a Wild Card loss in 2022 to show for it. Washington came out of nowhere to make it to the NFC Championship Game, largely because of Daniels (who will be 25 before the season ends), and it will be interesting to see whether they can sustain their early success.

Does the Giants’ young talented core bode well for the future? Probably. Will we see evidence of that in 2025? We’d like to think so. As Yogi Berra said, though, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”