Do the Giants have enough defensive backs who can actually cover?

Here’s a quiz: Name the five best wide receivers in the NFL over the past three years (based on receiving only, not rushing or blocking).

Now name the five best pass-rushing edge defenders in the NFL (based on pass-rushing only).

Finally, name the five best cornerbacks in the NFL (based only on pass coverage, not on run support or tackling).

Please don’t read on until you’ve done all three, just to get into the spirit of things.

It’s a subjective exercise, but you might imagine that there would be substantial agreement about three or four of the five. Players who’ve only played one or two seasons are ruled out because this article is about season-to-season consistency, so forget about Malik Nabers for this purpose. Here is who Pro Football Focus gave the highest grades to in each of the past three seasons (for players who played enough snaps to be considered regular players). First, the wide receivers (ordered from 2024 to 2023 to 2022):

Courtesy of Pro Football Focus

I know, I know, anytime I use PFF grades some of you are going to complain. You may think JaMarr Chase, who ranked No. 11 in 2024, should be in the top 10. I do, too. He probably didn’t make it because he had 10 drops last season. That’s not the point I want to make, though. The point is that when you think of the best players at a position, the same names tend to come to mind every year, with some additions as rookies begin to make their mark and subtractions as older veterans age out. On this particular list, A.J. Brown, Amon-Ra St. Brown, and Justin Jefferson make the top 10 in all three years, while CeeDee Lamb, Tyreek Hill, Nico Collins, and Drake London make it twice. Your top five probably includes some or all of those names, and if you want to look at hard stats, generally these receivers break 1,000 yards every year or at least come close if they’re not injured.

Now let’s look at the same list for edge pass rushers:

Courtesy of Pro Football Focus

Myles Garrett, Micah Parsons, Trey Hendrickson, and Nick Bosa make the top 10 in all three years, while T.J. Watt, Josh Hines-Allen, Aidan Hutchinson, Za’Darius Smith, and Bryce Huff made it twice. Again, I’d bet your top five consists mostly of a subset of those names. Garrett, for example, has been in the top 10 in pass rush productivity (pressures per pass rush snap but with hits and hurries weighted half as much as sacks) in every one of the past four seasons.

Now, let’s get to the point of this article. Here are PFF’s top 10 cornerbacks over the past three years:

Courtesy of Pro Football Focus

Not a single cornerback made PFF’s top 10 list in all three seasons. Only a few – Pat Surtain II, Sauce Gardner, Charvarius Ward, and Christian Benford – even made it twice.

That’s the message: Good cornerbacks in the NFL are a scarce and variable commodity. Part of it, as we’ll show, is inconsistency from year to year, and part of it is premature aging relative to other positions.

Timo Riske of PFF did a study a few years ago about aging of NFL players at different positions. Not surprisingly, players in the “trenches” achieve a larger fraction of their career wins above replacement (WAR) after age 30 than do “speed” positions such as cornerback and safety:

Courtesy Timo Riske, PFF

Courtesy Timo Riske, PFF

The message is clear: Defensive backs have a more limited window of usefulness than linemen. This may partly explain why the best edge defenders over the past three seasons tend to be a lot of the same guys all the time. Garrett turns 30 this year and thus far shows no signs of slowing down, while Jalen Ramsey, about to turn 31, isn’t quite the dominant player he was several years ago. Of course this statement should apply to wide receivers, at least speed receivers, as well. Most of the top 10 elite receivers listed above in 2024 were younger players with good speed, with the occasional exception like Mike Evans.

As I alluded to earlier, though, the inconsistent greatness of defensive backs is not just a matter of the good ones losing a step sooner. Would you have loved to see Pat Surtain II in Giants blue? Here are his season-by-season breakdowns:

Courtesy of Pro Football Focus

In PFF’s eyes, his rookie and third seasons were decidedly poorer (relatively) than his second and fourth seasons.His rookie season is understandable – there’s often an adjustment period for NFL players. Surtain’s third season is the surprising one. He was targeted more, for whatever reason, had his highest yards per reception and highest YAC given up, gave up the longest reception of his career, had only one interception, and had the highest passer rating against of his career.

We can also look at Sauce Gardner:

Courtesy of Pro Football Focus

Gardner had two outstanding seasons to begin his pro career, but last year there was a clear dropoff. Part of it was due a hamstring injury in Week 13 that caused him to miss a couple of games late in the season and play part-time in two others. Even early, though, he had a game in which he gave up five receptions in six targets for 97 yards and a TD to the Titans, not a feared passing team. He had career season highs in yards, yards per catch, YAC, and passer rating, and he had 10 penalties, twice that in his two previous seasons. It’s relative, of course. He was still above average among cornerbacks, he just wasn’t elite last year.

Giants fans saw this type of thing play out when Dave Gettleman signed James Bradberry:

Courtesy of Pro Football Focus

Bradberry had an OK but undistinguished four years with Carolina. Then he was spectacular in 2020, his first year as a Giant under Patrick Graham. In his second year, under the same defensive coordinator, Bradberry clearly regressed in yards, yards per reception, TDs, and passer rating against. Bradberry was then released in 2022 and signed with Philadephia, where he once again played great, with fewer yards, yards per reception, YAC, TDs, and an outstanding 51.8 passer rating against. Then in 2023 he played very poorly, giving up 10 TDs and a 114.2 passer rating, and he was released by the Eagles in March.

The low repeatability of defensive back success is a scary prospect for the Giants, who will see A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, Terry McLaurin, Deebo Samuel, CeeDee Lamb, and George Pickens twice each this year. Much of the attention in New York will be focused on Paulson Adebo, one of the Giants’ major free agent signings. Adebo’s career, like the other cornerbacks discussed above, has been somewhat checkered in PFF’s eyes:

Courtesy of Pro Football Focus

From a PFF coverage grade standpoint, Adebo has had only one good season, 2023. The hard stats do not seem to jibe with that, however. In 2024 (admittedly an abbreviated season due to injury), Adebo had a career low in yards per catch, and his catch percentage and NFL passer rating allowed have been much better in his last two seasons than his first two.

I’ve been focusing on cornerbacks, but the discussion applies equally well to safeties. The overall stats for safeties can be summed up like this: Not a single safety in the top 10 in coverage in 2024 made the top 10 in 2022. (Several, though, like Kyle Hamilton and ex-Giants Xavier McKinney and Jabrill Peppers, have made it the past two seasons.)

Here are the season-by-season stats for the Giants’ other major free agent signing, safety Jevon Holland:

Courtesy of Pro Football Focus

From a PFF grade standpoint, Holland has been up-and-down, up-and-down from year to year, like Surtain. Unlike the others, though, several of Holland’s hard stats have trended systematically downward (i.e., in the direction of poorer play) since his rookie year: YAC from 86 to 123 to 120 to 180; INTs from 2 to 3 to 1 to 0; NFL passer rating against from 88.6 to 98.3 to 108.9 to 111.3.

Why are defensive backs so inconsistent from year to year compared to other positions? No one knows for sure, but what is known is that there is a statistically significant tendency for pass coverage to be more unpredictable from year to year than pass rush is. In 2019, Eric Eager (now VP of Analytics for the Carolina Panthers) and George Chahrouri did a study of how pass rushers and defensive backs’ performance correlated from one season to the next. Their findings were:

At the player level, pass rushers with more than 400 snaps in consecutive seasons have pass-rush grades that correlate at a rate of roughly 0.62 (r-squared 0.38) for both per-snap and the aggregate level. On the other hand, coverage players with 400 snaps in consecutive seasons have coverage grades that correlate at a rate of roughly 0.34 (0.12) for both per-snap and the aggregate level. Thus, when it comes to buying into a player like an edge defender versus a cornerback, we’re (on average) a lot more likely to know that an edge is good or bad based on his previous work (as measured by PFF grades) than a cornerback.

And this is a problem, because they found that:

PFF coverage grades both explain and predict defensive success better than pass rush, but they come at the expense of year-to-year stability at both the player and team level. Next year’s Aaron Donald is likely to be Aaron Donald, but if a team is going to have a ton of success as a result of strong play by their defense, they will likely need to have next year’s Stephon Gilmore on their team (who is probably not going to be Stephon Gilmore himself).

So the good news is that next season’s (i.e., 2025’s) Dexter Lawrence is likely to be…Dexter Lawrence. Same for Brian Burns and Kayvon Thibodeaux, and if that correlation persists from college to the NFL, maybe Abdul Carter as well.

The bad news is that we have no idea which Paulson Adebo and Jevon Holland we’re going to get in 2025. For that matter, we have no idea whether the Dru Phillips we saw in 2024 will be able to build on that or regress in 2025. And that’s bad news because the success of the Giants’ coverage may decide the success of the defense overall.

Eager and Chahrouri speculate that the low repeatability of coverage success from year to year may be a function of the fact that it’s more a one-on-one battle than most other positions. It depends, then, on who your opponent is in a given week and how your defense tries to stop the receivers: Does your CB1 travel with the opponent’s WR1 or stay on the same side? How much zone (and what kind) and how much man, and how does that vary from game to game and situation to situation? How much base defense, how much nickel, how much dime?

Kevin Wilson (YardsAfterContract on X) suggested several years ago that the response of teams to this unpredictability of DB performance should be to generally avoid DBs in Round 1 of the draft but to go heavy on them in Rounds 2-4, along with signing free agents whenever possible. The goal should be to have 5-6 players who can cover on the team at any time. This gives a defensive coordinator a Plan B if Plan A doesn’t work in a given game/season and allows the coordinator to use dime defense more often, a logical response to the preponderance of 11 offensive personnel in today’s NFL, as suggested by Diante Lee a few years back.

Let’s look at (who else?) Howie Roseman of the Eagles to see how he approaches his team’s defensive backfield. In 2023 he used Round 3 and 4 picks on DBs, Sydney Brown and Kelee Ringo, neither of whom has done much yet but who are penciled in as starters this year. He came back in 2024 and used Round 1 and 2 picks on cornerback Quinyon Mitchell and S Cooper DeJean, both of whom had great rookie seasons. The other starting safety on the depth chart is Reed Blankenship, a 2022 UDFA. This year he took a safety, Andrew Mukuba, in Round 2 and a cornerback, Mac McWilliams, in Round 5. Roseman has also traded for or signed as free agents a number of high-profile DBs, including Bradberry, Darius Slay, and C.J. Gardner-Johnson. The idea is to flood the zone with candidates and see who sticks. That’s how you beat the unpredictability of the position.

Joe Schoen hasn’t necessarily done a bad job with the Giants’ defensive backfield, but not as many of them have worked out. In four years he has taken two DBs in 2022 (Cor’Dale Flott in Round 3 and Dane Belton in Round 4), 3 in 2023 (Deonte Banks in Round 1, Tre Hawkins III in Round 6, and Gervarrius Owens in Round 7), 2 in 2024 (Tyler Nubin in Round 2 and Dru Phillips in Round 3) and one in 2025 (Korie Black in Round 7). Adebo and Holland are his first high-profile free agent DB signings. In previous years he had lower level free agent signings including Adoree’ Jackson, Jason Pinnock, and Nick McCloud, all of whom are now gone.

Are there five to six guys who can cover in the present group? Let’s assume that Adebo, Holland, Phillips, and Nubin can. That leaves them one to two players short. Perhaps Hawkins, who flashed in his first extensive playing time vs. the Saints last season before being injured, can be that player. Maybe Banks can return to his early rookie form, when he was very competitive against good receivers such as Terry McLaurin. Flott and Belton are fine, maybe even improving, but by this point we shouldn’t expect elite. Will that be enough against the parade of elite WRs the Giants will see just in the NFC East, never mind the rest of their schedule? If so, then the anticipated strong Giants pass rush may wreak havoc with opposing quarterbacks. If not, the defense may be no better than middle of the pack.