This isn’t a piece I planned on writing.
Well, that’s a bit of a lie. I’ve been thinking about the New York Giants run defense for a while now, but have been putting off writing about it since the 2024 season ended. But I certainly didn’t anticipate writing this piece when I woke up this morning.
But I came across some things recently that both crystalized the ideas that have been bouncing around my noggin and were a call to action to finally put pen to page (so to speak). We need to talk about the state of the Giants’ run defense, as well as possibly reconceptualize defending the run.
I’m going to start at the more immediate and practical standpoint of what run defense could look like for the Giants this year, then we’ll take a step back and look at a wider picture of league-wide run defense.
The X’s and O’s
When the Giants released their unofficial depth chart for the season, some fans were surprised — aghast even — that the defense appears to be a 3-3-5 nickel base defense.
The questions about run defense make sense from a “classic” point of view. Historically, the primary mode of run defense was to use big guys to take on blockers, stack and shed the blockers, and make the tackle.
That view isn’t, in and of itself, incorrect. Defenders putting themselves in position to make a tackle is the soul of defending the run. But that also isn’t incompatible or mutually exclusive with lighter personnel packages.
Modern offenses excel at weaponizing spacing and athletic mismatches to stress defenses in every way they can. We’ve seen defenders get smaller and faster to cover as much ground as possible and match up with hyper-athletic tight ends, running backs, and receivers.
Defenses at the college and NFL level have spent the last half-decade scrambling for ways to slow down modern offenses. There have been a proliferation of nickel packages, the adoption of “big nickel” three-safety packages, and the use of Cover-4 shells to take away explosive passing plays. The use of nickel packages and middle of field open coverage shells take defenders out of the box, leading to more opportunities for blockers to have numbers advantages.
Iowa State innovated the solution which became their “Air Raid Killer” defense, which was an “odd stack” front.
You can read much more about their schemes in my piece on that particular scheme from 2020, as well as Mark Schofield’s piece on how Bill Belichick incorporated Iowa State’s scheme into the New England Patriots’ defense.
Related
The general philosophy behind how the scheme defends the run is that it concerns itself with gaps and not blockers.
In DIME personell sets, the SAM linebacker is replaced with a defensive back who essentially plays a STAR hybrid role.
By using a TITE front, the defensive line accounts for the interior gaps, and forces runs to the outside where the outside linebackers and defensive backs can make the tackle. The athleticism of the nickel or dime defense allows the defenders to beat the blockers to their landmarks, either speeding to spots getting through gaps before blocks can be locked in.
This, of course, relies on the defenders making their tackles when they are in position to do so.
That was the biggest issue with the Giants’ run defense I noticed on tape in the preseason. The defense as a whole were pretty consistently in good position to make their tackles and limit runs to a couple yards. However, they were not consistently making their tackles, or not doing so cleanly.
Their tackling improved in the final game of the preseason, but it’s something that will still need to carry over into the regular season. A year ago, the Giants’ tackling was poor to start the year, though it did improve as the season wore on. And since we’re talking about last year, let’s take a moment to talk about the Giants’ run defense in the context of the NFL as a whole.
How do the Giants stack up?
The raw numbers for the Giants’ run defense were… not great.
The Giants gave up 2,316 yards on the ground (136.2 per game), 6th most in the NFL, while their 4.6 yards per carry allowed was tied for 7th most. That simply isn’t good enough for a defense as talented as the Giants appear to be in 2025 and those numbers have to go down.
The question then becomes “how?”
Well, maybe the better question is “why?”, because once we can define the problem, then we can look for possible solutions.
So let’s take things a step further and go a bit beyond the box score.
Player tracking data from NextGenStats has been a revolution in how we look at, and think about, the game of football. Being able to see where all players are in relation to each other on a moment-by-moment basis has enabled whole new levels of analysis. One of my favorites is ESPN’s “Win Rate” family of stats, and in this case I want to look at the Run Stop Win Rate.
They define a “Run Stop Win” as any of the following:
– Beating his blocker so he’s in better position to stop the runner.
– Disrupting the pocket or running lane by pushing his blocker backward.
– Containing the runner such that he must adjust his running lane.
– Recording a tackle within 3 yards of the line of scrimmage.
Based on those criteria, how would you guess the Giants’ defense ranked? 32nd? 30th? Surely they were in the bottom quartile, so 25th?
10th. The Giants’ defense as a whole had the 10th best Run Stop Win Rate last year. They were right between the Los Angeles Rams (11) and New York Jets (9), and were only one point behind the Philadelphia Eagles (3rd).
That’s pretty much in line with the efficiency numbers. Per Pro Football Reference, the Giants’ defense provided -7.19 expected points added (EPA), which ranks 17th in the NFL. It also which puts them just behind the Los Angeles Chargers who had -5.14 EPA. Both numbers were slightly better than the league average of -10.5 EPA.
So why were the results so dramatically different?
The first part, as I talked about above and have written about before, is that the Giants’ didn’t consistently finish.
The Giants actually did a good job of “winning” their run defense snaps and putting themselves in position to suffocate opposing running games. However, they allowed far too many leaky yards. Poor tackle attemps leading to broken or missed tackles kept the average high and the yards piling up. But as I mentioned, that DID improve over the course of the year, and the defenders did a better job of disrupting runs then making tackles when Shane Bowen pivoted to calling a more aggressive, penetrating defense with Elijah Chatman and Elijah Garcia as his starters once Dexter Lawrence went down.
For the other part of the equation I want to look at the Detroit Lions.
The Lions had the fifth-best run defense in the NFL last year, allowing just 1,672 yards (98.4 per game) last year. Obviously you’d expect a team with Super Bowl aspirations to give up 40 fewer yards per game than the lowly Giants.
What you might not expect is that the Lions allowed 4.5 yards per carry and had an EPA of -19.57, significantly worse than the Giants’ efficiency numbers.
The Pittsburgh Steelers, another great defense, allowed 1,672 yards (98.7 per game) on the ground and an EPA of -3.68, which is only a bit more efficient than the Giants were.
“Hol’ up,” you might say, “that math ain’t mathin’.”
Well, the missing bit of context is that the Giants faced a significant rate issue.
Of the top 10 run defenses in the NFL in yards per game, seven of them were in the Top 10 of scoring offense: Lions, Ravens, Buccaneers, Eagles, Packers, Vikings, and Broncos.
The LA Chargers (117.5 rushing yards per game allowed) were just outside the top 10 in scoring at 11th.
And of the top 10 in run defense, 9 were in the top 10 of fewest rushing attempts against and seven of them were in the top 10 of most passing attempts against.
In other words, the teams with the NFL’s most prolific offenses saw the least rushing attempts.
The Giants averaged 1.45 points per drive last year, less than half the 3.04 averaged by the Lions, and 0.62 points per drive below the NFL average of 2.07 per drive. That, coincidentally, would slot in just behind the Atlanta Falcons who saw the NFL’s 16th most rushing attempts against (458) and gave up the 15th most rushing yards (120.6 per game).
Oh, and the Falcons gave up 4.5 yards per carry last year.
The Giants, meanwhile (averaging that pathetic 1.45 points per drive) saw 503 rushing attempts against, which was tied for the sixth-most in the NFL.
Final thoughts
So what does all this mean for the Giants’ run defense? To go back to my original question, just how bad are they?
The answer is “not great, but not as bad as they seem at first blush.”
The advanced stats suggest that the Giants’ defenders were often winning their assignments and in position to make plays — they just didn’t finish. That’s not good and absolutely needs to improve. But given that the Giants were frequently relying on young players (like Tyler Nubin and Dru Phillips), injured players (like Bobby Okereke and Brian Burns), or depth players (like Darius Muasau or Elijah Garcia), there is absolutely room for significant improvement.
The Giants’ raw numbers were bad, but they weren’t terrible on average; their average efficiency was above average, while their win rate was legitimately good. Their biggest problems were that they saw SO MANY rushing attempts that the yardage just piled up. And over time, all those rushing attempts were opportunities for an opposing professional to make a play.
They need to figure out how to force offenses to run less, and the answer seems to be for their own offense to score points. It isn’t a coincidence that the best offensive teams face more pass attempts and fewer run attempts. The Giants’ defense, with their anemic offense, saw the same number of pass attempts as run attempts — 503.
The Giants’ yards per carry allowed absolutely needs to improve, and improving their tackling should accomplish that. But even at last year’s rates, they would have had a league-average run defense if they saw a league-average number of rushing attempts.
Run defense is a team effort. It takes 11 players on defense working as a unit to function in the moment, but it also demands that the offense do its job and score points to force the other team to pass in order to keep pace.
We’ll see soon enough if they have either end of that equation solved.
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