The New York Giants have been widely dismissed this year.
The 2025 season is already being chalked up as another lost one for the Giants. Pundits across the NFL media landscape are talking about this year in terms of marking time until Jaxson Dart starts and whether or not Brian Daboll can save his job.
That, in and of itself, is an improvement over how they were being discussed to start 2025. At first, there was confusion as to how John Mara could justify keeping Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll. And then the selection of Dart was viewed as a desperate over-drafting of a quarterback who was the product of a gimmicky college offense.
It’s largely taken as a given that the Giants will be bad. Even fielding a Top 5 defense won’t be enough to make them relevant, let alone save them against a Murderer’s Row of a schedule.
For instance, Austin Mock of The Athletic is projecting the Giants to have the second-worst record in the NFC, leading only the New Orleans Saints. Mock’s model projects the Giants to win 5.6 games, with just a 4.6 percent chance of even making the playoffs.
Mock says about the Giants:
“Lastly, the Giants round out the division. Though we likely won’t see him to start the season, Jaxson Dart is the future at quarterback, and while throwing to star receiver Malik Nabers should make his life easier, I don’t have high hopes for this offense, no matter who is playing QB. However, I do think the defense, especially the line, could make offenses dread facing the Giants this season. Dexter Lawrence, Brian Burns and first-round pick Abdul Carter is about as good as it gets rushing the passer.”
Things don’t really get better for the Giants if we look at the NFC and AFC holistically. Of the AFC teams, only the Browns come in below the Giants with 5.4 projected wins.
That’s one fewer win than the Panthers, two fewer than the Bears, Colts, and Raiders, and three fewer than the Steelers.
But are the models accurate?
One of the, if not the, biggest reasons why offensive output is more consistent from year to year and predictive of future performance is the quarterback position. Quarterback production is usually pretty stable from year to year, and there usually isn’t as much turnover at the position as there is at other positions. Frankly, if teams have a quarterback that they think they can win with (or win because of), they’re loathe to move on from them.
It makes sense to have low expectations for the Giants’ offense in 2025 when they’ll (probably) return 10 of 11 starters from last year’s offense. But it’s that one position with a new starter that could be throwing the models for a loop.
I can’t comment on Mock’s models without knowing how they’re built. For all I know he did build in a way to relatively accurately project Russell Wilson into the Giants’ offense and then run the models based off of that.
But more broadly speaking, the sentiment seems to be that since the Giants’ offense was bad the last two years, it will be bad again. The logic, as it goes, is that the offensive line was bad, the passing game was anemic and inefficient, and they couldn’t score points.
And that is a pretty accurate assessment of the Giants over the last two years. But it does also leave out some fairly important context.
The Giants’ offensive line was thrown into a blender by injuries in each of the last two years, with back-ups starting at multiple positions and starters often out of position. It’s almost impossible to field even average play under those conditions and treating that as the baseline expectation simply has to introduce a measure of bias.
Likewise, the Giants were inefficient and anemic because much of their passing offense took place within five yards of the line of scrimmage. Those passes generally don’t lead to scoring opportunities, and they typically allow defenses to play downhill, swarming to the football and limiting yards after contact.
All that said, there were outliers in 2023 and 2024, exceptions to the rule that should raise some eyebrows. Most notable are the Giants’ second half comeback win over the Arizona Cardinals in 2023 and their 45-point outburst against the Indianapolis Colts last year. There were also plays that didn’t get made during the season when the Giants had vertical attacks schemed up, but opportunities weren’t taken. Daboll’s obvious frustration in those moments is a pretty clear clue that they wanted to be more aggressive than they were on a down-to-down basis.
This is what makes the Giants unpredictable in 2025. Yes, most of their offensive personnel is unchanged, but the seismic shift at the quarterback position could change everything.
We’ve seen them be more aggressive and explosive throughout the preseason, at times making a point of attacking deep. And considering teams often use preseason games to work on specific elements, the occasional emphasis on explosiveness at the expense of more methodical gains could be significant.
The Giants play two divisional opponents to start the season. They should be extremely familiar with the Giants, but even they can’t be sure of what they’ll get. A healthy offensive line and a philosophic shift on offense could well catch the Commanders and Cowboys off guard.
There usually isn’t much difference between the top and the bottom in the NFL, not like there is in college, which is why we can see “worst to first” leaps every year. That’s why teams are constantly searching for every possible advantage to leverage over their opponents. And we’ve already seen the Giants’ coaching staff use the element of surprise to great effect back in 2022.
If the Giants’ offense can be merely competent, the fact that there’s limited tape on the starters with Russell Wilson at quarterback could be a significant advantage. After all, the offensive line was league-average before injuries took their toll, Malik Nabers is a burgeoning star, and the rest of the skill position players aren’t wanting for talent.
An unpredictable offense is a dangerous one, and a defense that can swarm is dangerous in and of itself. The combination of factors could make the Giants’ defense even more dangerous than it appears on paper.
Final thoughts
I’m not going to move off of my prediction of a 6-11 season for the Giants, at least not yet.
Yes, vibes are strong after a dominant preseason, and there’s some evidence that the Giants could be significantly better than expected.
I do believe that their ceiling is significantly higher than they’re getting credit, and they have the potential to surprise a lot of people this year. I also stand by my prediction that the Giants will be the team that nobody wants to play by the end of the year. In that way I do believe they could be like the 2022 Detroit Lions
They’ll probably be unpredictable to start the year, and that gives them an advantage until teams start to compile enough tape to learn their tendencies.
But even so, I also don’t think that the games they win will be the result of lucky breaks or smoke and mirrors. I think the Giants are close to reaching a critical mass of talent in its prime that they can be consistently competitive because of the guys on the field.
The question I keep coming back to as we’ve watched and analyzed the Giants’ moves in free agency in the draft, how they’ve developed over the summer, is “why not the Giants?”
And it’s a question that never seems to get answered in any kind of detail.
I’ve analyzed far too much football and seen too much of the Giants over the years to count my chickens before I even know if they’re chicken eggs. But at the same time, nobody has had a solid read on the Giants since the 2024 season ended.
- Wholesale changes were expected in the coaching staff — that didn’t happen.
- They were expected to splurge on big-name and aging free agents to save their jobs — that didn’t happen.
- Nobody had a clue what the Giants’ strategy was for the draft and insiders league-wide got panicked looks when asked directly.
- They were expected to be milquetoast and incompetent in the preseason. Instead they were dominant.
So I’m not going to say that the Giants will be good, any more than I can say that they will be bad. But I do think it’s a reasonable expectation for them to be an X-factor. People who make a living out of speaking authoritatively don’t like to say “I don’t know,” but I think it’s important to admit when you don’t know something. And I don’t think anyone has a good handle on what the Giants will be this year.
Yes, they have a daunting schedule, but it’s also possible that their opponents will eventually look at looming games against the Giants and feel more than a little trepidation.
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