The New York Giants very nearly came up with a win for the ages against the Dallas Cowboys.
Russell Wilson turned back the clock to 2017 with one of the finest performances of his career. He completed 73 percent of his passes for 450 yards and 3 touchdowns, averaging 11.0 yards per attempt. It was almost the same as his Week 8 win over the Texans, when he threw 452 yards and 4 touchdowns, averaging 11.0 yards per attempt, but only completing 63.4 percent of his passes.
The Giants scored 37 points and had nearly as many explosive plays on this one game than they’ve had in while seasons over the last several years.
And yet, it wasn’t quite enough.
It wasn’t quite enough because all Dallas needed was 20 yards to be in Brandon Aubrey’s range to tie the game and send it to overtime.
There has already been plenty of argument over the Giants defense in the final 20 seconds of the game. There will be plenty more to come, unless the defense takes a step forward in the coming weeks. But to put the situation in a bit of perspective, being within three or fewer points is even more favorable for Dallas than college overtime rules. For those who don’t know, college teams the ball at their opponents’ 25-yard line — 5 yards further from scoring than the Cowboys are on their own 35 after a touchback.
The view here is that the answer isn’t what defense to play, but rather forcing the Cowboys to score a touchdown. In other words, they needed to be up by at least four points after the Nabers touchdown, not three.
And on that front, we have to talk about the Giants issues in the red zone.
It isn’t that the Giants can’t move the ball, they’ve been able to do that reasonably well so far. They’ve had 7 trips to the red zone over the first two weeks of the season, running 29 plays inside of their opponents’ 20-yard lines. Unfortunately, those 7 trips have only resulted in 18 points: four field goals, a touchdown, and two turnovers on downs.
It felt as though the Giants should have gone into the locker room with a 28-10 lead at halftime against the Cowboys instead of a paltry 13-10 lead.
Unfortunately, a series of failures and breakdowns hampered the Giants on almost every play when they were in scoring position.
The most obvious culprit has been the Giants’ blocking. Wilson was under pressure on 50 percent of his pass attempts inside of the 20-yard line, though that improved slightly from Week 1 to Week 2.
To be fair to the Giants’ blocking, those were two of the more (or most, even) egregious failures. Not every protection failure was that bad, or was on the right side of the line. However, they did often muddy Russell Wilson’s reads over the middle, force him to accelerate his process, or force him to roll out and resort to half-field reads or go out of structure.
Of equal issue was the fact that the Giants receiving weapons just weren’t getting open — or at least not quickly.
Part of the issue seems to be play design, and part is target selection. Only four of Wilson’s 17 passes in the red zone targeted tight ends, three to Theo Johnson and one to Daniel Bellinger. His most frequent target was, unsurprisingly, Malik Nabers, while Wan’Dale Robinson saw two targets and Darius Slayton saw one.
The Giants pretty clearly planned to lean on their receivers, and lean into the skill sets of Nabers and Robinson in particular. Both receivers are skilled route runners and offer excellent short-area quickness. It’s an understandable decision, considering they’re the team’s two best pass catchers and things just happen fast in the red zone. There’s seldom time for long-developing plays, even if Wilson had at least 2.5 seconds to throw on most of his passes.
That said, the Giants frequently put their receivers in isolation against defenders in the first two weeks.
In the second play above (against the Cowboys), you can see that while Nabers does establish a bit of a rub for Cam Skattebo out of the backfield for the check-down, none of the end zone targets have schemed separation. Based on Wilson’s eyes, Theo Johnson appears to be the primary read on the play, but he gets double-teamed. Robinson (slot left) does a great job of manipulating his route to create separation obver the middle and would have had the first down, and a chance at a touchdown, but Wilson doesn’t get the time to work back to him.
It’s an interesting decision, because the Giants have frequently used condensed formations.
One of the more counter-intuitive aspects of personnel packages, alignments, and spacing is that going heavy lends itself to passing, while going light tends to help the running game.
As an example, the San Francisco 49ers have used the 21-personnel formation (two backs, one tight end) better than just about anyone over the last five years or so. They’ve also pretty consistently run one of the NFL’s most condensed formations, and were averaging less than 20-yards wide in 2023. But rather than line up and run, they used the heavy personnel to force defenses into base (or heavier) packages, and then passed. The condensed formations concentrated defenders in the middle of the field, which in turn lends itself to creating traffic and open receivers.
Giants left guard Jon Runyan alluded to this after Week 1, but seemed to hint that the Giants were running out of condensed formations and not throwing.
The Giants only had one red zone carry in the first game, but were significantly more willing to do run against the Cowboys. Unfortunately, they still had a tendency to run into the teeth of the defense. Of the Giants’ seven non-QB runs in the red zone, only one went outside of the tackles.
On the flip side, they also didn’t take advantage of the potential for defensive traffic in the passing game. Too often their receivers were running into concentrated groups of defenders, instead scraping defenders off on each other.
Final thoughts
Are the Giants doomed in the red zone? Should they just run Graham Gano out on first down as soon as they cross the 20-yard line?
I don’t think so.
The fact that the Giants are being limited by a variety of different failures suggests that there isn’t one singular problem, but rather a series of small ones. The protection hasn’t been great, but there have been plenty of instances where it’s held up long enough but receivers didn’t get open. On the flip side, there have been instances where the play design worked, but the protection broke down or the ball was dropped.
The overall feel after watching every one of the Giants’ red zone plays is that they’re close. Maybe not close to being an unstoppable juggernaut inside the 20s, but close to being able to finish drives with relative regularity.
Something that is lost in the conversation around how many coaches and starters are returning from last year is that they’ve only had two games with Russell Wilson. He is still building a rapport and chemistry with the other 10 players on offense. Likewise, the players around Wilson need to adapt to the fact that the Giants are operating on a different offensive philosophy than in previous years. They aren’t running offense purely on RPOs and West Coast quick game concepts anymore.
To a certain extent, it makes sense that the Giants would find traction in their downfield offense first. Not only is Russell Wilson still one of the best vertical passers in the NFL, but there’s much more margin for error between the 20’s. The offense has far more ways in which it can attack the defense and can weaponize space in ways it just can’t in the red zone.
Conversely, the game speeds up tremendously the closer teams get to the goal line. The defense doesn’t have to cover nearly as much ground and there’s that much less room with which to work for the offense. So it follows that the margin for error evaporates as well.
So what can the Giants do?
I would argue that they should lean into weaponizing spacing as much as they can. Whether that’s leaning into using light sets with 10-personnel (four receiver) sets with broad formations to lighten the tackle box as much as possible for running plays — perhaps using Robinson as a running back in a “two-back” set. Conversely, they could use 13-personnel and use Daniel Bellinger and Theo Johnson as size mismatches as receiving weapons, or use their size to create traffic for a running back or receiver. Likewise, play-action would be a boon in that situation as well. The Giants only used play-action on 5 of their red zone plays. Combining play-action with heavy personnel sets can help freeze the the defense and create space behind the linebackers for tight ends to exploit.
If the Giants’ vertical offense can continue to be effective, expanding “scoring position” to the 30 or 40-yard line is a potent weapon of their own. If they can figure out how to finish drives when those deep passes don’t quite score, they’re offense could be legitimately scary.
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