In selecting Abdul Carter on Thursday—a fortuitous occurrence, given that one quarterback-desperate team was atop the draft and a team desperate for a superstar to help people forget about a quarterback traded out of the No. 2 pick—the New York Giants did not come close to solving every last problem that plagues their roster.
But the Giants did secure themselves something the franchise has not had in nearly a decade, which is one hell of a start.
An identity is kind of like a great pair of running shoes. It means something only if the host body performs. However, at the very least, it’s better to show up at the starting line in supersneakers. Anything is better than those rubber bands and bread bags.
The Giants quietly finished the season fifth in the NFL in sack rate (8.21%). This was especially impressive given that the team spent much of the year trailing. Kayvon Thibodeaux, despite being a constant source of angst for Giants fans, was a top-15 edge rusher a year ago in terms of pass rush win rate and the Giants finished 13th in the statistic. Couple that with the presence of Dexter Lawrence, who may be the best interior defender in the NFL not named Chris Jones or Cam Heyward, and the basis of a good defense was always sitting under our nose. We just couldn’t see it through the haze that a Drew Lock–led offense can induce.
Much will be written tonight about how the selection of Carter takes the Giants back to two bygone eras. Two separate iterations of great pass rushes featuring Michael Strahan, Justin Tuck, Mathias Kiwanuka, Osi Umenyiora and Jason Pierre-Paul. Less will be written about the fact that most of the imagination for those great defenses—and the triple-safety back end that also stymied opponents—came from Steve Spagnuolo, arguably the greatest big-game defensive coordinator in modern NFL history.
The Giants need a quarterback. The Giants need two-thirds of an offensive line. The Giants need a true No. 2 wide receiver and parts of a secondary. And we can debate the order in which all this should come and whether the Giants should have been more aggressive (again) in moving up for a quarterback they’d actually draft in the first round. This draft, in particular for the Giants, reminds me of the year the Cincinnati Bengals took Ja’Marr Chase over Penei Sewell despite Cincinnati’s offensive line being in something of a crisis. Chase made a receiving unit that included Tyler Boyd and Tee Higgins into an offense good enough to reach the Super Bowl.
Brian Burns, Thibodeaux and Carter together may not yield an immediate deep playoff run, but the troika is good enough to completely ruin games, which is significant in a division in which one quarterback (Jalen Hurts) still tends to struggle when pinned into obvious passing downs and another (Jayden Daniels) is entering just his second season. Most of Daniels’s worst games last year (and worst is a relative term given that he had almost no game in which we would consider bad) came against teams with talented pass-rushing tandems.
This is the only sensible equalizer for a Giants team that will be hammered with a brutal schedule in 2025. The team shares a division with the Super Bowl champions, of course, but also faces home games against the Minnesota Vikings, Green Bay Packers, Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs. Throw in road games against the Detroit Lions, Denver Broncos and much-improved Chicago Bears. The silver lining could be San Francisco’s instability at offensive line, the Vikings starting a first-year quarterback, the Packers’ quarterback tending to drift into more trouble when faced with pressure and Kansas City’s own struggle to piece together a stable front five.
Because of Carter, because of the Giants’ decision to double down on an identity, the team at least now stands a chance. That is far more than we would have said an hour before Carter’s pick and far more than we would have said if the Giants were going with an underwhelming No. 2 quarterback in a down class.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Abdul Carter Gives the Giants an Identity.