The second best weekend of the NFL season is now over (the Divisional Round, when the chaff has already been separated from the wheat but there are still four games to watch, is the best). What lessons can the New York Giants take from the four teams who made it to the conference championship games, and from the two who made it to the Super Bowl?

Sure – find an elite quarterback. Everyone will agree on that. It’s been a long time now since the last Super Bowl champion did it without elite QB play. The Giants aren’t going far until they find one. You’re kidding yourself, though, if you think that’s enough. Ask the Rams, Packers, Texans, Chargers, and Ravens – they all have QBs Giants fans would die for and they didn’t even make it to Conference Championship weekend.

Ask the Washington Commanders and Buffalo Bills, who did make it but are now going home. They’re two different cases. I’m sure Washington fans and the Commanders organization are disappointed, but deep down they have to know that they came a long way in a single season. That’s not how it is in Buffalo, which has been knocking on the door since Josh Allen emerged as an elite QB in 2020 but can’t even make it to the Super Bowl, much less win it. They have some soul-searching to do.

Fill every hole on the roster

Good NFL offensive and defensive coordinators will find your weakness and pick on it. The Eagles looked at the Commanders’ defense and saw this:

Courtesy of Pro Football Focus

Adam Peters did a great job rebuilding Washington’s defensive line this year, with 4 new starters, but run defense is their soft spot. The Eagles have a great run-blocking offensive line, a great running back, and one of the best running QBs in the NFL. So Philadelphia ran the ball 36 times for 229 yards, and all seven of their TDs. Game over.

Here were the Giants’ run defense stats in 2023:

Courtesy of Pro Football Focus

Other than Dexter Lawrence, one of the best run defenders in the NFL, A’Shawn Robinson was the only capable interior run defender left after the Leonard Williams trade, and he left in the off-season. GM Joe Schoen made no attempt to replace him, relying on low-level free agents and late-round draft picks, and the 2024 results were predictable:

Courtesy of Pro Football Focus

It’s telling that after Lawrence was lost for the season, the four lowest run defense grades on the defensive line were all in the interior. Teams ran all over the Giants in many of their games this season.

The situation was similar of course at quarterback, where the Giants understandably went with Daniel Jones but did not sign credible backups to take over when he couldn’t take advantage of a better offensive line and a great rookie receiver. Even in the secondary, where Schoen has devoted significant draft resources, the Giants let Xavier McKinney (and Julian Love the previous year) walk but had no backup plan for the possibility that the draftees wouldn’t be ready to play at a high level.

Don’t be afraid of dead cap

Dead cap is money that must be counted against the salary cap after the player is no longer on the team. It can occur for three different reasons: (1) A team cuts a player before the end of his contract and before all the contract’s guaranteed money has been paid out; (2) A team trades a player and agrees to cover some of the player’s remaining costs to entice the other team to make the trade (this happened e.g. with the Leonard Williams trade to Seattle, who did not have enough cap space to make the trade otherwise); (3) A new contract is signed that includes a signing bonus whose costs are prorated not only over the life of the contract but one or more years beyond, called “voidable,” or just “void,” years.

Here are the top 10 teams in dead money going into the 2025 season:

Courtesy of Over The Cap

Fans, and Giants fans specifically, hate dead money. They see the Giants with the seventh-highest dead cap hit for 2025 ($27.3M) and see it as malpractice by Schoen, a waste of cap space that could be used instead to strengthen the roster. Looking closer, most of that dead cap is for Daniel Jones ($22.1M) and Darren Waller ($4.9M), two signings that didn’t work out. Now you’re even more angry. You shouldn’t be, though.

There’s an excellent article on dead cap written by the Philly Cover Corner that explains why dead cap is a good thing…as long as you handle it unemotionally. Dead cap is a good thing because you pay in future cheaper dollars for a player you can use now. We do this all the time in our personal lives without blinking an eye: Auto loans and home mortgage loans are two common examples. Dead cap is better than both of them, though, because your car or home loan includes interest payments while NFL dead cap does not. On average the NFL salary cap increases by about 10% per year, so it’s pretty easy to absorb dead money without much pain.

Schoen made a $22.1M gamble that Jones could build on his 2022 season. It didn’t work. That’s football. As the article referred to above points out, Howie Roseman gambled on James Bradberry after the Giants released him. That worked out well for most of one season, until the last two minutes of the Super Bowl. It’s been a disaster since. The key is not to keep a player you no longer want just because of the dead cap. Schoen made the wrong decision on Jones, but he structured the contract appropriately and made the right move in releasing him and eating the dead cap rather than keeping him just because he still has a cap commitment. Jones’ dead cap hit doesn’t even make the NFL top 10:

Courtesy of ESPN

Denver survived almost $50M in dead cap from the Russell Wilson contract to make the playoffs this year. Philadelphia survived the ill-fated Carson Wentz deal and its $33.8M dead cap hit once they decided to make the move to Jalen Hurts. You don’t keep a player you don’t want just because of the contract. The key is finding a good replacement, and that is ultimately how Schoen will be judged.

The Eagles have all kinds of dead cap looming in the next few years, because Roseman routinely includes void years in his contracts, to the tune of $356M last year:

As of this time last year the Giants no longer had any money in contract void years. It shows on the field. The Giants are talent-deficient at a number of positions. The Eagles? They have a plus player at almost every position, and it doesn’t take them long to change things when they decide that a player they obtained isn’t what they hoped for. Bradberry is still under contract, but that didn’t stop Roseman from drafting Quinyon Mitchell in Round 1 in 2024. Roseman took IDL Jordan Davis with the No. 13 pick in 2022. Davis is a good player but he’s given them little in the pass rush (six sacks in three years) and plays at best half the defensive snaps. No problem – Roseman came back the very next year and took Jalen Carter at No. 9.

Off-field issues vs. on-field success

Schoen preaches the “smart, tough, dependable” gospel whenever he gets the chance. The English translation of that phrase is that his big board has many fewer players on it than there are NFL-caliber players in any draft, because of various concerns other than pure football talent.

We’ll never know how this has played out specifically in who Schoen drafts or signs to a free agent contract and who he bypasses. If we want to guess, though, Round 2 of the 2022 NFL Draft might be the smoking gun. The Giants were desperately in need of a wide receiver, and seven were already off the board. Schoen traded down twice for extra picks and then took Wan’Dale Robinson at No. 43, passing on George Pickens, who went at No. 52.

Robinson has been a good receiver for the Giants, though he has been pigeonholed into a limited role working almost exclusively within 10 yards of the line of scrimmage. Pickens, true to his college tape, has been the much more explosive and valuable receiver. No one is surprised by this: Pickens was No. 38 on the consensus big board in 2022 while Robinson was only No. 93. Pickens, though, had various behavioral “red flags” in college, and he has been a headache for the Steelers as well despite his obvious talent.

The two Super Bowl teams this year seem not to mind off-field issues as long as a player produces on the field. The Chiefs may be the league leaders in this category, having taken advantage of Tyreek Hill’s domestic abuse guilty plea to grab him in Round 5 of the draft, and having acquired a slew of other key players whose off-field behavior has been troubling, including Kareem Hunt, Frank Clark, and most recently Rashee Rice, who is facing felony charges over a street racing hit-and-run incident. The Eagles had Jalen Carter drop to them at No. 9 because of his own off-field troubles, including a street racing fatal crash, reported poor practice habits and attitude, and a “knockout punch” he delivered to Georgia teammate Quay Walker during practice.

Schoen let Xavier McKinney walk in free agency last off-season. It’s not surprising given the almost $17M average annual value contract he signed with Green Bay, making him the highest paid safety in the league. Schoen was never going to pay that much. Of course if you take the “dead cap is a feature, not a bug” view of NFL contracts, you don’t mind a few extra $M…if the player is worth it. McKinney, though, may have worn out his welcome with his ill-advised ATV accident during the bye week in 2022, in violation of his contract, and his apparent calling out of Wink Martindale during the Giants’ mid-season losing streak in 2023. Did those episodes influence Schoen’s decision to move on? Would the Giants be better now if he hadn’t?

Given the choice, bank on elite traits

Fans bemoan the Giants’ failure to get a quarterback in the 2024 draft. You can’t complain, though, about the player they did get, now-Pro Bowler Malik Nabers. Prior to the draft, there was considerable discussion about whether Nabers, Marvin Harrison Jr., or Rome Odunze was WR1. All three turned out to have good rookie years, so the discussion is to some extent moot…but Nabers clearly had the best rookie campaign of the three, despite being hamstrung by the Giants’ QB deficiencies. It’s not just that, though. Nabers has elite speed, elite change of direction, and elite skill at the catch point.

This is meaningful, because if you are going to win it all, you need to have players who make big plays at the most important times. The Eagles have a boatload of players like that, including one who used to be a Giant but left because of a contract impasse. The Chiefs have Mahomes and Kelce, of course, plus several on defense including Chris Jones and Trent McDuffie.

Washington has Jayden Daniels and Terry McLaurin, but really no one else who can take over a game, and that’s why they’re home now. Buffalo of course has Josh Allen, possibly the best player in the NFL, and then…what? James Cook, maybe. Plenty of good, even very good, players – but no game-changers. When the game was up for grabs, Allen was the only one capable of the heroics needed to get past a team like Kansas City.

Consider Buffalo’s 2024 draft. They had the No. 28 pick…and they unfathomably traded it to Kansas City, of all teams, to allow the Chiefs to grab Xavier Worthy, the fastest receiver ever at the 2024 Combine. Buffalo wound up with the No. 32 pick and then traded that too, finally taking Keon Coleman at No. 33 (and passing up Ladd McConkey, who also had a great rookie year). Coleman is a nice receiver with potential to be very good, but he’s unlikely to be a game-changer. Given Allen’s arm, couldn’t Worthy have helped him stretch the field in a way his existing receivers can’t? If you look at Buffalo’s roster, the Bills have a ton of good players, but few elite players beyond Allen. That’s why they get to the hump but can’t get over it.

Making the Giants great again

At 3-14, it seems that the Giants are far away from another ring. In one way, though, Schoen is right when he says, “We’re not far off.” They lost nine games last season by 10 points or less, all but one of them by one score. They lost that many because they don’t have that core of transcendent players who come up big in the biggest moments. Lawrence, Nabers – that’s about it. Maybe Brian Burns. Perhaps Dru Phillips can grow into such a player.

In 2022 they had a few such players. Barkley made a linebacker miss on the winning 2-point conversion in Tennessee, and he carried Dalvin Tomlinson into the end zone for the winning score in the Giants’ playoff victory in Minnesota. Julian Love intercepted Lamar Jackson and Kayvon Thibodeaux stripped Jackson to carry the Giants to their most improbable victory that season. McKinney batted Aaron Rodgers’ fourth-down pass in the red zone to seal the Giants’ win over the Packers in London, and he stopped T.J. Hockenson after a 3-yard gain on fourth-and-8 to seal the Giants’ Wild Card win in Minnesota. Plays like that were lacking in 2024.

They need to plug the obvious holes at quarterback, defensive line, and cornerback, but more importantly they need to find a couple of difference-making players at those positions, players who show up at the key moments. But they need to be flexible about how they navigate the salary cap if they are going to get enough of those players to compete for a title. The next time Schoen has a Barkley or McKinney-type situation, he needs to get it done and not worry about $20M of dead cap in 2027. He may need to relax the smart, tough, dependable thing…within reason. Drawing from a smaller pool of players puts him at a disadvantage relative to some other GMs. He’s not going to outsmart Howie Roseman, who will stop at nothing to get the players the Eagles need. Adam Peters, who was willing to take on $18.6M of void year costs to build the Washington defense and offensive line, appears to be cut from the same cloth. Right now, it seems that Schoen is bringing a knife to a gunfight. That won’t end well.