NFL First Thoughts: New York Giants
Is regression inevitable after breakthrough debut season under Brian Daboll?
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ESPN’s Bill Barnwell had an article in early June talking about teams that overachieved in 2022, and specifically focused on the Giants.
A handful of things stood out from the article:
Offensive coordinators who make the leap from OC to head coach and then make the playoffs in their first year, who are then lauded as a genius offensive mind, very few of them are able to replicate that first-season jump. There’s been three guys in the last decade and a half—Matt LeFleur, Sean McVay, Nick Sirianni—who made the playoffs in their first year of taking over and then were able to do it again. So when we think about Brian Daboll, he went from highly respected Bills OC in 2021, got his head-coaching job with the Giants last year, made the playoffs. If he made the playoffs again, he’d be the fourth name on that list dating back to 2005. So it’s very rare company.
There’s a number of different stats that don’t bode well for the Giants in 2023. Last year in the fourth quarter, they added 2.2 wins. That was the second-best mark in the league. In the first three quarters of games last year, the Giants lost 1.2 wins, one of the worst marks in the league. So they were bad in the first three quarters, but really good in the fourth, relative to expectation.
The Giants did really well in close games. They were 8-4-1 in games decided by a touchdown or less. Teams that tend to do well in one-score games have a hard time doing well again the next season. There’s a lot of luck in deciding those games.
Daniel Jones had the lowest interception rate of any QB last year. Not only uncharacteristic for him, but it’s also something that’s hard for quarterbacks to sustain year after year, particularly those who aren’t among the elite.
The Giants finished 10th in DVOA last year. In 2021, they finished 32nd. Jumping from 32nd to 10th is a huge leap and is something that’s incredibly difficult to sustain. All of this was done by the Giants despite having a defense that ranked 29th in DVOA and 28th in EPA/play.
So in summary, the Giants got a ton of luck late in games, where they exceeded expectations despite underperforming in the first three quarters, got a ton of breaks in one-score games, didn’t give the ball away, made a huge offensive improvement, their defense was poor all season long, and they made the playoffs anyway. The assumption is that this success can’t be replicated.
But if you look at the win total market, the Giants were 7.5 before last year, and they’re 7.5 this year. The betting market is hyper aware of all the things noted above. Unlike 10 years ago, when win totals automatically got bumped up in response to an outlier season, that isn’t the case here. The Giants are priced basically the same.
Last year, before the season began, nobody could say anything wrong about Daboll or offensive coordinator Mike Kafka. They were expected to bring competence to the offense and fix many of the flaws, and then they did exactly that. The pessimists pointed to the roster flaws, not the coaching, as reasons why the Giants would struggle.
The coaching was great from the first week and got better as the season progressed. Decision making, play calling, development, everything Daboll and Kafka did received widespread praise. Now, here we are in the offseason, after everything went right and nobody could say anything bad about them, and now nobody seems to have anything good to say. “Daboll overachieved. Jones will take a step backwards. All these things will have to go back in the opposite direction.”
While that’s true to an extent—the Giants certainly don’t have a great roster by any stretch—there’s room for them to be better than the market expects.